I have my hands back again–the left one is no longer so swollen as to look like a sausage, though a little edema lingers around the bruising. The gouges are healing, and there’s only a little pain. All in all, recovery is proceeding as well as can be expected.
The copyedits, however, are not proceeding well. I should be able to get more than fifty blasted pages a day done, dammit and tarnation. The trouble lies in the fact that everyone else in the room (everyone other than Yours Truly and a single blessed beta reader, that is) appears to fucking hate these books, and swimming against that tide is difficult work. It might’ve been better to self-publish them.
Ah well. Live and learn, heavy accent on the latter. I’m sure a great deal of what I’m feeling is the annoyance from having to stop while not one but two zero drafts are on the cusp of completion–scribus interruptus, as it were. I want something finished instead of having to deal with pettifogging and the insertion of commas everywhere. I happen to think readers can deal with complex sentences and clauses, and do not, need, commas, everywhere a breath, might be taken, in a sentence. There’s been a definite effect on writing in other areas from Twitter character limits over the years.
Of course, my constant refrain has always been, “Readers are smart, they’ll get what I’m saying.” I think readers are hungry for longer, more durable, chewier sentences and stories. I have to believe in these books; I’m all they’ve got.
Anyway, these CEs are working against double irritation–triple, if one counts the bloody back fence still not being fixed and various other frustrations. I had things all set to finish two zeroes this week and then move into the copyedits after some other things on the publisher’s side had been cleared up. It didn’t work out that way, which is nobody’s fault (not even the Romans’) but as usual, it’s the writer who pays the price in sleep, not to mention stomach lining. The stress nausea is back with a vengeance, so that’s fun.
Vanishing into the bog and only coming out every six months to drop another manuscript sounds ever so satisfying. But by this time next week I should be back on track. The main thing I want to do is finish the Rook’s Rose (season two of Hell’s Acre) zero, since that’s the most time-critical thing. Once that’s done a whole chunk of my time is freed up for working ahead on the next-planned serial, which I can barely wait for. You guys are going to be so excited, I can’t even.
That’s all the hinting I can do for today. Brekkie has to be gulped, Boxnoggin exercised, a run inflicted on my weary corpse, and it’s back to slogging through CEs. I hate the thought that I’m going to be spending another few years in stomach-ulcer-land trying to get these babies written and shepherded through the process under such conditions, but it can’t be helped and in any case it’s a valuable lesson. Just what it’s teaching me I don’t know quite yet, unless it’s the depths of my own endurance.
Like I needed any more evidence of that, ha! But the universe seems to have a vastly inflated idea of my capabilities. The only thing I can do is live up to it in whatever fashion possible. Onward to Thursday, devil take the hindmost, all torpedoes loaded, dead ahead full speed, and all that.
See you around!