Feeling Flooded! #amwriting #amediting #amtweeting #am...

Have you ever felt totally overwhelmed? This Sunday my pastor called it being flooded. I liked the metaphor—the sensation of being underwater and out of breath. My life has thrown me an intense mix of changes these past few months. I won’t bore you with the details…okay, changed my mind, I will bore you with them. My oldest is headed to college and I know this will change our family dynamics forever. My dearly beloved spouse is in a transition period (translate this as looking for another job), and I foresee some very rough patches ahead because if he doesn’t find a job he’s going to get…never mind. My day job is evolving into potentially more hours (meaning less writing time). And last but not least, someone very close to me is changing from caregiver to the one being cared for. If you’ve been in this place, you know what I mean. Enough said.

All of this has been hard on my writing, sapping my concentration and my energy. As it should. My writing would be nothing without my life, and my life would be nothing without my writing. I have to maintain both to be a sane person. Even before the stable elements of my existence began morphing around me, I was feeling a bit flooded. With three releases in three months, my writing life was a swirl of writing, editing, tweeting, blogging, networking…

I needed to slow the pace. Catch my breath. Take a sip of iced tea. Consume a pot of coffee. Read a good book or five. Watch five straight episodes back to back of Castle. Something. Maybe you’ve noticed my blogging activity has decreased. Maybe you haven’t, I don’t know. Does the average blogger really know how many people actively follow a blog? (A few reassuring comments at this point wouldn’t hurt my feelings!)

So I slowed down this summer and spent some time with my children. After all, the oldest is headed for college, right? Now with fall fast approaching, I’m once again in the mood to write something fresh, yet the fifteen rough drafts on my hard drive beg to be polished into something submittable. (Is submittable a word?) Has the opportunity to submit something Christmas-y for 2012 already passed me by? The unfinished idea beckons me from a half-finished manuscript. That four book series demands to be transformed into novellas instead of full-length novels.

Meanwhile, I feel the driving need to increase my Internet presence. Yikes. What’s a techno-savvy writer of the new millennia supposed to do? What happened to the days of banging out one letter at a time on an old manual sling the return lever typewriter and then submitting the whole bundle to an agent via snail mail? Are you familiar with the kind of typewriter I mean? The kind where you tucked the paper into the roller and wound it to just the right spot before typing. Then you yanked it out after the first line because the type meandered sideways due to the paper being in the roller crooked. My old model (from years ago when I was just a writing toddler) was orange with a black racing stripe. Vroom! Vroom! Sexy, right? The kind of machine with an ink ribbon. Anybody out there remember carbon paper? Well, thank God nobody uses that mess any more.

So…I’m ready to once again create fictional worlds filled with fictional characters caught in intolerably wonderful conflicts. Using a Mac, of course.  I think I’m ready to flood my writing life again. Get ready. Get set. Go.

#amediting - Wake Me Up and Pour Me a Cup of Coffee

I have a confession to make. Editing puts me to sleep. Seriously. Sometimes I’m in the middle of self-editing my manuscript—my baby—when boom! My head hits the keyboard. It’s embarrassing, but you know, I’ve read the story sooo many times is it any wonder my mind is wandering?

One day the nodding off scared me. My mind hyperventilated—started popping out questions about my writing prowess. Like…Why am I falling asleep? What if my book is THAT boring? What’s wrong with the plot? Is it not fast-paced enough? Are the plot devices trite and overused? Are the characters unrealistic?

When my heart rate finally slowed, I realized the plot didn’t bore me. No! My muse and I created the story with loving care, blood, sweat, and tears. Okay, maybe no blood, but there were a few tears. It had to be editing. Yeah, I’ll blame it on editing.

Writing a fresh story is fun. The characters practically create themselves. The conflict forms out of their personalities and their choices. The dialogue flows as I hear in my head what someone would say and how they would say it. The plot thickens at just the right time. I love writing.

I don’t love self-editing. I work with a wonderful editor, but my goal is to have my manuscript as shiny as possible before I submit it to my publisher. I want my editor to buff and polish, not do major surgery on the heart of the book.

Here are a few things I’ve learned about self-editing. No worries, this isn’t going to get technical with a dry list of the Unbendable Unbreakable Rules For Aspiring Writers.

No matter how many times I’ve edited a manuscript, I can always find something else to “fix”.

I’ve obsessed over passive voice, verb tense, POV head hops, filtering, showing vs. telling, and the bane of my existence, comma placement. But no matter how many times I’ve gone over my story, I can always find an omitted word. And homonyms? Argh. Similarly spelled or similar sounding words will do me in. Their and they’re. Here and hear. Even now and know. Did you know the spelling and grammar check on Word won’t alert me when I use the word “his” instead of “he”? Or “form” instead of “from”? Or when I’ve used the word “look” five thousand times? (That seems to be my favorite word.) The first draft is a very rough draft. Every time I learn a new concept, the added knowledge requires another review of my manuscripts.

Self-editing is a structured, and therefore, a highly redundant process.

I find it overwhelming to tackle the abundance of concepts I should remember when I’m editing a manuscript, so I have to have a plan. I’ve started going through my stories in several passes. In the first pass, I check for grammar and punctuation. I let the manuscript “rest” for a while and then in the second pass, I check for consistency and plot continuity. In the third pass, I look for redundancy, filtering, head pops, and telling. On my next but not necessarily my last pass, I read the story aloud to someone, checking for flow, credibility, and glaring inconsistencies.

This creates a lot of repetition. By the time I work through it this often, I know my story so well I can quote it in my sleep.

Edits should never be attempted at the time of day when I’m most susceptible to falling asleep.

No, it isn’t midnight. I don’t know what it is about editing in the afternoon that makes my eyelids droop and my mouth stretch into a wide yawn. The same thing will happen if I try to read in the afternoon, so it’s not just my stories. Thank goodness.

My most productive time of day is…well, right now. It’s 10:44 pm CDT and I’m churning out this blog post without a single yawn or drooping eyelid. Editing at three in the afternoon? I should know better. The middle of a Saturday or Sunday afternoon is usually when I beg my wonderful hubby to brew me a fresh pot of coffee so I can try to stay awake. I’ve learned to give it up and watch another episode of Law and Order on Netflix. At just about nineish, either my editing conscience will kick in or my muse will jump up and down in front of my face and I’ll grab my Mac and tear up the keyboard.

I should always start the process with a fresh attitude and a fresh pot of coffee.

Tackling the tremendously time-consuming job of editing a 55k+ manuscript is something that should never be approached when I’m in a foul mood. I give myself down time between editorial passes so I can refresh my attitude. A strong pot of fresh coffee always helps my sensibilities and I can tackle the job with renewed enthusiasm.

When I discover a new concept in generally accepted writing style, I shouldn’t knee-jerk and start editing every unsubmitted manuscript on my hard drive.

When I first discovered the concept of POV and head hopping, I dusted off all fifteen of my unpublished manuscripts and went to work. It was painful, because after that I discovered the concept of showing vs. telling and the process started again. Then I heard the term filtering for the first time…

Well, you get the idea. Now I work one manuscript at a time. After all, I can only submit one at a time. Right? Two at the most. If both stories were contracted at the same time, then there would be all those edits at the same time and then…

I truly believe the editing phase of a WIP is where most writers give up. I don’t love editing and I don’t love falling asleep in the midst of it. Self-editing is a necessary process and one a writer should embrace with determination and persistence. As a writer I want my finished product to be the best it can be, but I can’t do what I need to do effectively if I’m half-asleep. So…If I start dozing, somebody wake me up and pour me a cup of coffee.