Well, it turns out I’m not as good at this as I had hoped. My ambitious plans to write here regularly have quickly fallen apart. After getting my second shot, I felt terrible for several days, and then began showing symptoms of a cold – in July! One C-19 test later and yup, it was nothing but a common cold = cough, sore throat, exhausted, and all thoughts of doing this in my spare time quickly disappeared. I was happy to be able to login for work most days, and so my attempts at editing fell by the wayside.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t think about it… I actually had it on my mind constantly: thinking about everything I should be doing, which sections I ought to be revising, and where I might have been too wordy in my text kept me awake at night when I couldn’t turn my mind off (despite the rest of my body screaming for sleep!). I would eventually fall asleep with the best-laid plans of what I would do in the morning before starting work, and then, every morning for the past two weeks, I would wake up late – ignoring my alarm – and got out of bed with barely have enough time to grab a coffee before checking in for work (thank God for being able to work from home! – If I had to be up in time to actually get ready and drive myself to the office, I would be a complete write-off!). Kind of sucks to have to keep a day job to pay the bills while trying to be creative in only the brief, sparest moments that come to you late in the day…
Nevertheless, whether I actually got on my laptop or not, I think I did benefit a lot from the “thinking” part of the process – churning over everything in my head. I came up with a lot of good ideas for shaping what comes next, while also having a few good insights into what I could live with paring down a little in the original story. And “just what parts did I decide to edit out?” you didn’t ask. Well, going over things again and again in my head, I start to see parts of the story that gave background to some of the characters but didn’t really do much to advance the plot. Great for my ego, telling you about these great characters, but not really the sort of exciting stuff that keeps people turning pages. With that in mind, and little more energy this morning, I am ready to start working out the ‘delete’ key on my keyboard…
