To a layman, editing usually means reading something over and catching a few typos. But for more serious writers, be they fiction, educational, technical or non-fiction, know that sometimes editing means taking the whole thing apart, moving things around, hacking parts out entirely and totally rebuilding whole parts.

You can find yourself looking at a part that just doesn’t work and, like a mad scientist, cracking your knuckles and claiming, “We can rebuild it!” as lightning cracks in the background. But taking out your editing scalpel is itself an act of blind faith. Will you really improve your creation with your tinkering or will you end up with a horrifying mess of a creature, something that people run screaming from like old Square-Head Bolts-in-Neck? Sometimes you hack the whole story apart only to realize you’ve made it worse.

In my current work in progress, there is a scene that doesn’t seem much at first glance. It’s a relatively calm passage compared to the rest of the action but it has a very important role of setting up everything to follow. In this scene, my main character gets 3 pieces of bad news. Would it be better, I realized while editing, if she got each piece of bad news separately instead? It would make each set-back more powerful and dramatic. So I’d make the events of that one scene play out over several scenes instead.

I liked this idea, even though it would mean a lot of rewriting work. Never one to shy away from the editing by weed hacker method, I started hacking the whole section apart and then rewrote it completely. It’s better in a ton of ways. Tighter. More dramatic. There’s just one problem.

I left out something huge and important. Like, very plot necessary. It’s like I took apart the skeleton to see how the bones looked as a different animal and, when I stepped back, I tripped over the bones I had left over and ended up flat on my butt. Crud, this skull has to go somewhere, doesn’t it?

So I have to rewrite what I rewrote to figure out how to fit the important bits back in. But I only ended up in this situation because I forgot to follow my own golden rules for editing and rewriting. Let me share them with you so you don’t end up in the same boat as I did.

Hillary’s Tips for Rewriting and Rearranging
Take notes. Before taking apart what you have, carefully analyze what’s already on the page. Don’t just think about this, physically take notes on each of the following:

• What is good about it? What parts do you want to recycle and work into the new version?
• What doesn’t work? What parts can you change or leave out in the new version?
• What function does each part of the original play in the story as a whole? What elements of the original are vital to the book? How will the new version fill these same needs?

Take this list of elements and write it out as a checklist. Then when you write the new version, you can refer back to your list and make sure the new section does what it needs to in the story as a whole. It’s easy to forget the big picture when you start to rewrite so this makes sure to keep you on track.

Talk it out. Find a friend, beta reader, family member, anyone who is willing to sit and listen to you for a while (preferably someone who didn’t know the first version). Physically talk the new version of the story out. Not only does this force you (the writer) to notice any issues with the new version, it gives you an outside perspective to ask the obvious questions you may have overlooked. (Wait, didn’t that guy she’s kissing die three chapters ago?) While you can try to just dive in and write this out, physically talking it out first can help you catch most of the big issues before you take the time to put pen to paper.

Keep the original draft somewhere. I have a whole folder in Google Docs that is just the original versions of things I cut or rewrote and I am always mining that for both rewrites and other stories. If you find the new version doesn’t work, you can refer back to the original to see what elements you overlooked or may still need. No matter how horrible you think the original is, any satisfaction you get from deleting it will be gone if you realize later there was something out of it you needed. You may never look at that draft again but Murphy’s Law promises that if you don’t keep it, you’ll need it again later.

Be flexible. This may seem obvious. After all, you just decided to take apart a whole section of your book and rearrange it. But I like to think of editing as one of those Magic Eye 3D pictures. If you are willing to really step back and look at the whole thing, sometimes everything rearranges itself in front of your eyes to something totally unlike the original. Once you start rearranging, if you realize your beloved opening should really come later in the book or if you realize that maybe your MC should lose his job *before* his girlfriend dumps, be open to it. I’m not saying you should hack everything up for the sake of hacking it up, but if the bones of your story are good, they shouldn’t suffer for a little rearranging. (Writing is *nothing* like archeology. ) Index cards are your friend. But just because events in your story have “always” happened in a certain order, doesn’t mean you should play around with a different sequence of events. Even if the original way is better, you’ll have a better idea of why that is and a greater understanding of your story together.

What other editing and rewriting tips have worked for you? Please share them with us below.

You may also enjoy these related posts. . .

• Writing Status
• NaNoWriMo Update: 75% and back to the same book…sort of
• NaNoWriMo Status: sick, tired but past 21k, people!

Heck yeah! Now, when you really think about this in theory, 100k words is only like 2 NaNoWriMos and since we are close to 8 months into the year and I could have in theory done 50k every month, it makes me feel like a slacker. But in practice, I’ve been writing a ton more this year than ever before and I am only under 300 words from on pace with my goals for the year and that is the point of this exercise so yay me!

Someday, if all I do is write I’ll aim for that 50k a month, OK? But since I have a more than full time job right now, I’m happy with this.  Baby steps.

But here’s what I’m thinking… It’s not much higher than my current goal so I think I should aim for 200k for the year. What do you guys think?

Hopefully I’ll hit a higher word count by the end of tonight, we’ll see how the day plays out. Lots of being blind-sighted by drama the last few weeks, its messing with my work schedule. But for now, a dinner break with my cutey.

You may also enjoy these related posts. . .

• No related posts.

I’m almost at 100,000 words. Fun! Looking forward to that.

Potato isn’t shooting my novel. He’s shooting something else. My novel was a high point of the evening.

So today was really annoying and stressful. Remember that exciting news I promised you? Well it fell through pretty hardcore today. Disappointed but I guess it’s for the best that I never official announced it, right? The few friends who I told about it can opt to have the story recapped to them via a series of expletive laden IM conversations that I had with my brother on the subject which is actually not a bad way to have information conveyed as we are both pretty funny. I actually think I jinxed it all because I actually finally told a few people about it this past week which was probably my undoing. I should have just kept quiet about it and maybe it all would have been fine.

Moving on. So to take my mind off the drama, my husband promised to make me pie. Not just any pie: blueberry crumb, my total favorite. The only stipulation was that I had to earn this pie by working on my novel. So I dutifully trotted upstairs and started to write/edit with the promise of reward pie.

I’m still on freaking Chapter 7 which I have been editing for seemingly ages. Though, on the plus side, Chapter 7 has been hacked in half into 7 & 8. It is still terrible, but at least I got all the way to the end this time though I did spend a total of 2 hours on what amounted to 3 paragraphs. Very depressing. But I know what’s wrong with it now so I think I’ll be able to finally have it cleaned up after the next pass through.

I promised my husband I’d go to bed by midnight. I got all the way to the end of what was originally just Chapter 7. I finished my writing by midnight. I was a very good wife.

Then of course there was The Drama which kept me up for the next 3.5 hours. I’m trying to be zen, you guys, and it’s not FREAKING WORKING!!!!!

Zen. Breathe. Zen. OK, we are good again, y’all.

So as for the year as a whole? I’m a sad little 73 words ahead of where I should be today. So, um, yay? But I’m not behind and I got some good work done so I’m calling it a win.

*Forces herself to lower the gun from the monitor and step away from the computer.*

You may also enjoy these related posts. . .

• No related posts.

When I started my very first book, it was in a white Get Along Gang notebook. I have no remembrance of the Get Along Gang. I never watched a single episode of the show, to my knowledge. Since I hadn’t known who the Get Along Gang was (I was going to abbreviate that as GAG but… um, no), I never used the notebook as a kid so when I decided to start my first novel as a teen the notebook was entirely new, clean and empty and I claimed it for my fiction.

The draft of my book that is in that notebook is, of course, awful. I think most of the scenes in there don’t even happen in the current draft of the book. But that notebook, crammed full of parts (even discarded parts) of my book holds a very special place in my heart. The notebook is also rather beat up, having been dragged from beach to forest and jammed in everything from backpack to later briefcase over the course of many, many years.

The cover is still largely intact:

(The scan makes it look better than it does in real life, the cover is totally faded.)

Even after I filled the notebook, I still carried it around, editing what was in it, rereading it when I needed to get back into the story. Finally, about a year after I graduated college, I realized that carrying the only draft of my book around was a bad idea (What if I lost it?) so I started to leave it safely at home and write in other notebooks. At the time, I was bringing it back and forth to NYC with me on my commute and was pretty paranoid about losing it on the bus. So it stayed home.

But something happened. I couldn’t work on my book anymore. For the next two years, instead of writing a little more of it every single day like I’d done since I was a teenager, I was totally stalled out. I still opened the notebook and tried to work on it. I even started other projects because I thought maybe it was just that story. But the writing momentum I’d had for most of my life was totally gone.

Nothing was different except the notebook I was writing in. A strange thought came to me: What if the Get Along Gang notebook was like that feather for Dumbo? Sure, he could fly without it, but it was easier for him to make that leap if he was holding it. Because I’d been writing in that notebook and that one only for so long, my brain had gotten stuck to where I couldn’t write without it. It was as much a part of the process as putting pen to paper.

The mere sight of the Get Along Gang cast, makes me want to write. I have resolutely NOT watched the TV show, afraid that if I knew what the show was actually about, it would change the associations I currently have with the image. (I just looked it up in Wikipedia and, ironically, the show was criticized for emphasizing “group harmony over individualism” so it’s for the best I’ve never watched it. I would probably hate it.)

I knew this was bad. I couldn’t carry around a ratty notebook for the rest of my writing career because I couldn’t write without a totem. That was just silly. But, all the same, I couldn’t get started again. I needed to meet my insanity halfway.

A little while before we were married, my husband and I were at a town-wide garage sale. Something caught my eye. It was a mug. A Get Along Gag mug. That matches the notebook I have in colors, like they are from the same set. It was $3 which is a ridiculous price for a used mug but I bought it anyway.

I got home, washed it out, and placed it on my desk. Well aware of the symbolism, I took all of the pens on my desk out of what I’d been using to store them and put them into my new pen mug. It was a psychological exercise, but it worked. It was easier to pick up a pen out of the Get Along Gang mug and write with it. My brain accepted that as a substitute for the notebook.

It says, “One for all and all for fun!” (Mugs are hard to get a sense of in a photo)

Even when I work at my computer, it sits right there with me, my little writing totem, the feather that I clutch until the day I learn to fly on my own. From that day forward, I was able to work on my book again, able to work on anything really.

This past year, I got a bigger monitor and rearranged my desk. The Get Along Gang mug is now behind my Page-a-Day calendar, mostly obscured. I wondered, as I realized this, if that means I’ve finally cured myself of my need for the totem or if it’s just the fact that I know it is there and I no longer need to see it for it to work.

If you snuck into my office tomorrow and replaced that mug with another one, would I still be able to write? Probably. I’d like to think I’m a good enough writer that I don’t need to rely on mental tricks anymore to get my butt in the chair.

But don’t take so it, OK? I like my mug. Besides, I paid 3 whole dollars for that thing.

Do you have any weird writing habits or totems you need to get yourself ready to write?

You may also enjoy these related posts. . .

• No related posts.

I am a bad, bad writer.

How bad? The last time I touched my work in progress was May 16th.

That’s 47 days! Holy cow is that unacceptable.

I have to confess, I genuinely had no idea it had been that long or I would have forced myself to work on it sooner. One of my big promises to myself this year was never to go more than 2 weeks without touching a WIP and I just totally FAIL-ed out on that one.

So the fact that I have no concept of the passage of time is sort of an issue but let’s not dwell on that.

Today I forced myself to work on the WIP. Not because I wanted to. But instead because it was the first day when, after a long day of work, I had a little steam left and didn’t not want to which is about as close as I figured I would get to wanting to write.

I decided to read the entire thing from the beginning, just to give myself a feel for it again. So I read through everything, editing as I went. Much to my dismay, I really hated the first chapter which is easily the one I have spent the most time on so that was a bit depressing but then, as I read on, I started to like the story again so I was feeling hopeful.

Then I got up to the chapter I was editing in May when I last worked on it and… I hated it. I mean, I expected it to be bad because I totally changed it so it was basically a first draft in the middle of a second draft but ugh. The suck was strong.

Normally, I read something of mine that is awful and it fills me with energy. First I get all angry and yell about how its crap and I’m crap and the worst writer ever, etc etc, a necessary part of the writing process for me that troubles my husband. Then the anger turns into energy and I attack that puppy with a vengeance and hack the hell out of it until its good or at least better. (Upon rereading, my metaphor sounds violent to puppies. I apologize to the puppies. I love puppies. I am pro-puppies.)

I didn’t get that reaction this time. I think its because I let this go for so long I lost that enthusiasm for it, that fire that makes me want to hack it up or get really angry about it. All I could muster was a sad little meh of emotion for this cruddy chapter. But considering I first got the idea for this book almost exactly a year ago and have been non-stop gung-ho about it, feeling meh about it was a bit sad.

Now, I am tired. So I suppose we can excuse at least part of this feeling to that state.

But this all brings to mind an important point that for some reason I have to keep relearning because I’m dumb. The reason they tell you to write every day is the same reason they want you to exercise every day. You can’t run 20 miles after not having exercised for a year and expect you’ll be able to do that without dying. You need to stay warmed up and keep working the muscles all you’ll lose them.

Every time I do NaNoWriMo I realize how much easier writing is when I do it every day. I can work on my story at any time, in any place, no matter the distractions for the simple reason that I’m working on it all the time so there is no “getting back into it” needed. And every time I neglect my story for a while I realize how much harder I make it for myself to get started again. I have to re-read, fumble through, every word is painful and slow because I’m not in the mindset anymore.

If only I could retain these lessons and not do this to myself, that would be great.

So, on paper, I accomplished nothing tonight. All I did was re-read my story and correct a few sentences here and there. But, though discouraging, I think tonight was a necessary step. My brain has at least taken a tiny, tentative step back into my narrative and if I force myself to work on the book regularly, I should be back in the swing of things in no time.

I have already sternly informed this wayward chapter that I’ve got his number (which is 7) so I will take a little snooze break and then hack the heck out of him tomorrow, mercilessly. Will it be slower going than it would be under normal terms? Probably. But I need to suck it up and break that pony or I’ll never get to ride again.

The metaphors get weaker the later it gets, have you noticed?

My point is, even if you, like me, need to continually relearn the lesson that you should write often and not ignore your writing for long periods of time, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Sure it will be slow, painful work at the start but once you get back into a regular schedule, the writing will come easily again in time.

(I hope.)

You may also enjoy these related posts. . .

• No related posts.

(The following happened a long while ago. I’m only just writing about it now because I wanted to let enough time elapse that the offender wouldn’t recognize themselves in this post on the off chance they find it.)

An acquaintance of mine just had a horrible death in the family, a close and only sibling. It was one of those, out of the blue, taken way too soon kind of things that there are really no words for because you just feel so badly for everyone involved.

A day or two after it happened, she posted a message on Facebook, something to the effect of, “This is so hard, I don’t know how I’m going to get through this.” A perfectly valid thing to say under the circumstances.

Amongst the friends that wrote their perfectly acceptable replies of consolation and support, there was one of her friends that wrote the following:

I’m so sorry! I know when my dog died it was really hard at first but I got through it. But I’m a really strong person so it may be a lot harder for you. But hopefully it will be OK.

I think we can all agree that the person was trying to say the right thing and was genuinely attempting to console her friend. I also think that we can all agree she failed, pretty hardcore.

While attempting to console said friend, she instead managed to do all of the following:

• Belittle the death of her friend’s family member by comparing it to the death of a pet
• Out herself as a self-absorbed person who makes everything all about her
• Imply that her friend is weak and that she is the stronger person
• Imply some doubt that it will be OK
• Convince every single person who read that comment that she is a huge jerk

When I read this, I couldn’t believe it, it seems like something you’d make up for a character to say but I assure you it was real and I saw it with my own eyes.

If you are sitting in-person with a friend and they start to say something utterly ridiculous, you’d turn to them and say, “Will you listen to yourself?” When I see things like this, I find myself wondering if that’s the problem, that people don’t “listen” to themselves online or re-read what they write with the eyes of an outsider before they post it.

If you want to make an ass of yourself online, I suppose that is your prerogative but, in a case like this, what she said was insensitive and hurtful to someone who was already in a very bad place. If she’d have thought about how it sounded to her friend, she probably wouldn’t have posted it.

I am a huge culprit of speaking before I think, especially when I’m trying to be funny. But while you can’t un-say something you said aloud, before you post something online you can certainly take a few seconds to read that Twitter message, Facebook reply or blog post with the eye of an outsider. I think we could stop a lot of fights and hurt feeling before they start if we consider that our words may not read to others as they do to us.

Just think before you post, that’s all I and the rest of the world ask.

You may also enjoy these related posts. . .

• No related posts.

Guys… I’m really ticked.

Yesterday, we got a letter in the mail. It was hand addressed. The front was addressed to my husband (Mr. HusbandsFirstName HusbandsLastName) and the return address was a male name so I put it on the counter for him without another thought. Hours later, he comes home and opens it.

Inside the envelope was a super girlie invite to a wedding shower. I mean ribbons, glitter, the whole nine yards. The actually invite is not addressed to anyone but we recognize the name its being given for, its a member of Steve’s family. So we spend the next 15 minutes trying to puzzle this out.

Is it a guys only shower? Maybe its co-ed but they are only having immediate family and that’s why they invited only my husband? Why was the return address a guy? Is it a bachelor party and the girlie stuff is just a gag (we know someone who did this once)? If its a girl’s only shower, why did they invite only my husband? Am I supposed to go too if my name isn’t on the invite?

So after a long while of going back and forth at this, I’m staring at the envelope and I wonder aloud if its supposed to say “Mrs.” There is a sort of little squiggle after the “r” in Mr. that perhaps someone with terrible handwriting might think was an “s.” My husband consents, after a bit of staring, that he can sort of see that and says, “Mystery solved!”

But as my husband exits the room, content with the answer I came up with, I’m stuck with the fact that this invite that I was operating under the assumption was for my husband, is for me. But not, you know, addressed to me at all.

My name is Hillary DePiano. This is not that complicated. OK, the second “L” throws some people off and the whole capitalizing the “D” is a bit unusual but I would have happily accepted a 1 L-ed, lower case D version of my name. Hell, I would have accepted any version of my name. My name is not the same as my husband’s name. You can’t just write my husband’s name on something and assume that also refers to me.

The thing that was most telling, I thought, was the fact that the invite wasn’t addressed to me either. OK, maybe they were trying some weird etiquette thing on the outside of the envelope and the whole Mr./Mrs. thing was a result of sloppy handwriting. I can play along with that. But it’s not like the inside said “Dear Hillary.” They left it blank which says pretty clearly that they really have no idea what my name is.

As you are starting to realize, no doubt, this hugely offended me. You want me to come to your wedding shower, you make it clear in the invite that you want me to bring you a gift but you know neither my first nor last name?!?! Your envelope adressment had all the class of writing “Fido’s Owner” on it. You were at my wedding and I’ve been with my husband for 8 years over the course of which I’m met you many times. You feel you know me well enough to ask me to a party and ask me for a present but, in all this time, never cared enough to know me more than “that chick Steve married”?

Now, I understand that some musty old etiquette books use the whole Mr. & Mrs. John Dow system of addressing and while I think that is incredibly offensive and the equivalent of writing Mr. John Dow and his property who is no longer worthy of having an identity of its own, I get that some people feel like its better to go with the old etiquette so as to not offend the grandparents et al and I don’t blame them for it (if anything, I blame the stupid etiquette books). I find that a super creepy leftover of an era when women were property but I get that some people just see that as a fancy thing you do on envelopes so I lay no blame there.

I don’t have a problem with the Mr. & Mrs. Doe format either, that’s just efficient. Now, of course. I don’t have the same last name as my husband so when people do the whole Mr. and Mrs. MyHusbandsLastname for us, it’s stupid. But if its a friend I haven’t talked to in many years or someone who would have no occasion to know I didn’t change my name, I don’t bother to say anything nor does it bother me, they don’t know any better and I appreciate the effort of writing to me in the first place. I’ll answer to just about anything if its a friend calling.

(Now when a certain person knows quite well I have a different last name and still repeatedly addresses everything to my husband’s last name even after many “reminders” because they just passive aggressively are, I suppose, hoping they’ll annoy me into changing it to what they want, well that drives me f-ing nuts as you can imagine. Three guesses as to who does that. )

I’ve gotten side-tracked, haven’t I? Anyway, my point is that, when addressing both of us, while it annoys me, I am accepting of the Mr. & Mrs. HusbandsFirstName HusbandsLastName format when writing to both of us. But when the letter is address to me and only me?

They got none of three right. Not a Mr. Don’t have the same first name as my husband. Don’t have the same last name as my husband. 0 for 3.

And don’t try to tell me they were trying to be formal. There was nothing format about either the invite or the chicken scratch sloppy address. Even if it was a formal invite, my formal, nay, legal name is Hillary DePiano and they sure as heck didn’t use that. I love when people try to justify being rude by saying they are being formal. Making up a name for me that is anything other than my legal name isn’t formal, it’s stupid.

I am most offended on the human to human “you want me to come and give you a present but you didn’t care enough to learn my name in the first place or call someone else in the family to find it out if you forgot” element than anything else. I’m not asking for everyone to know every detail of my life but I have seen these people many times, the latest was less than a month ago. They couldn’t retain my name since then? Not even my first name? I would be measurably less offended if the inside of the invite had at least been addressed to “Hillary.”

OK, whew, I’m done ranting. But boy, did that piss me off.

You may also enjoy these related posts. . .

• No related posts.

I was sitting here lamenting how much work I’ve had to do lately and how overworked and just plain fried I am when I remembered the STFU Policy and decided instead to channel all that frustration and rage into something useful.

Viola!

I channeled my distress into 1,060 new words! Sure, they are bitter, self-pitying, over-tired words but they are new words, damn it and therefor more productive than whining. And I wrote them between 1 AM and 2 AM when I was really tired which I think makes them even more valuable words.

Now, I wrote these words and felt quite pleased with myself at first. While I am still pleased with these first new words after the Many Weeks of Too Much Work and Holy Crap the Stress, when I added these words to my spreadsheet, I got an unpleasant surprise.

I’m only 1,414 words ahead of where I should be. Remember when I stock piled all those words to get really far ahead between Script Frenzy and other self-challenges? Well, I squandered my entire lead! If I don’t write more than 2,000 words tomorrow, I’m going to be behind! Even if I do write 2K tomorrow, I’m going to be sweating to keep up instead of getting to go at a relaxed pace because of a huge lead.

This is not the end of the world, I can easily still make my challenge. But it did kill my buzz a bit when I felt good for writing only to discover it was a mere drop in the proverbial bucket.

I normally start work at 7 on Mondays but that is so not happening tomorrow which is good for my sleep count but bad because it means a shorter work day (unless I stay up late). I also have just finished a very long To Do list for myself of things that have fallen through the cracks since I’ve been in Busy Helltown (which is also my stripper name) so I’ll have to do those first thing tomorrow. But hook or crook, I’m going to find time to write those 2,000 words and get back on track!

But for now, I think that potato has the right idea…

You may also enjoy these related posts. . .

• No related posts.

I got rid of the little auto-posting of articles from my other blogs. No one had any comments on it either way but when my feed broke on two of my other websites it made that freak out so, until such time as there is a reliable weekly RSS digest post, I’m going to do them manually. We’ll see how long that lasts.

It is a mad, busy time over here as we approach the end of the proper retail season (well, until it kicks back into gear in the fall) so lots of work. Going to try to take an evening off tonight and go and see Prince of Persia for free movie night so we’ll see if that happens. I want to see that movie greatly but last Tuesday they had exactly one showing of it that wasn’t sold out and that was almost sold out so it may not be meant to be. If it is sold out, we are watching Alice in Wonderland: Tim Burton edition instead.

I think I may be getting sick as I have a stuffy nose/sore throat combo thing going on which is cramping my style. Also cramping my style is what I like to call “You work to much-itis” which is when too many hours on the computer give me pain in my wrists, elbows, neck and shoulders all at once making me a bit miserable. I get this frequently when I try to do too much like I’ve been doing lately but usually it comes at the end of a big barrage of work and then I can rest it. This has come in the middle of a barrage of work which is, frankly, rude of it. I’m in pain and kinda unhappy.

God, am I a whiner or what?

Which brings me to my next point: STFU

I always read this as Stuf because my brain wants everything to be a word but it’s hip kids text lingo for Shut the F- Up. Hip kids don’t seem to understand that you aren’t supposed to include little words like “the” in acronyms but I’m not going to be the one to tell them because they’ll be all “POS. OMG LMAO! STFU!!”

I actually know what all of that means, aren’t you proud? Especially considering how much I hate text messaging.

I am instituting the STFU Policy. I don’t know what the policy will entail exactly but it needs to encompass all of the following:

• I need to stop stressing. I don’t know how I’m going to do this because nothing stresses me more than when someone tells me I’m stressing and to stop or when I realize I am stressing but I seriously need to stop for health and sanity. I need to tell stress to STFU.
• I need to stop whining. (Well, expect when it’s in a professional capacity.) I don’t really whine to other people in person, I’m conscious of that and make a big effort to not do it, but I do throw little self-pity parties in my brain and on this blog. Right now is an excellent example. I can’t breath through my nose, my throat hurts, my joints are aching and I still have hours and hours of work ahead of me and I really feel like someone should be having some kind of parade in honor of me and my misery. But seriously, Hillary, STFU.
• I need to shut the f- up and work. Sometimes I spend a long time agonizing over which element of work I should do first, which is more important, etc and I need to just STFU and get started. The issue here is that I very often commit to doing A only to discover that B should have been done first. So maybe the solution is I just need to take less time deciding which to do first and not eliminate that process entirely. But I need to spend less time talking about the work to be done and STFU and do it!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, my tea water has finished boiling, my newest dose of Advril is in my hand and I need to STFU and work.

You may also enjoy these related posts. . .

• No related posts.

I am good at taking other people’s gibberish and making it sound really good.

I know this is a blessing, otherwise I’d be one of those people writing gibberish in the first place and wishing I could make it sound good. But it’s a strange and sometimes annoying superpower. I have the power to make other people sound smart. It is a useful skill, one rather in demand.

But it makes for a lot of ghost writing. For instance, every time anyone in my family needs a resume, they dump a pile of rambling notes on me that I have to make into something useful. I used to have a job where I would do this for clients, taking their notes about their awful product and making those products sound like the best thing ever. I’m the sap that people asked for “help” with a paper because they knew if they made me sit there long enough, I’d re-write it for them.

As you are probably picking up on, I hate doing this.

It’s odd, because it’s something I am good at and you’d think I’d enjoy the praise. Bad writing and lack of clarity offend me on some level and I do feel pretty awesome when I reread the new and improved text. I’m a master of the hack and smooth, esp when someone else wrote the first draft. But I hate doing it, I dread it when something like this falls into my lap. And fall into my lap it does, again and again, between work and real life obligations. As soon as people know you have a superpower, they want you to use it to save them as often as possible.

I resent the family/friend favor kind of project more than a paid project, obviously, because with a paid freelance type project I know if I suck it up and do it, money awaits. And if it is something that I sought out myself, ie, I offered to read a friend’s novel, my cousin’s essay for school, etc, that is different. I can’t explain the distinction other than to say, I like to feel like it’s my choice to take on the project and when I feel trapped into it, I just want to run screaming.

But, at the same time, I can’t say, “No.” Firstly, it seems like a compliment every time they ask. Secondly, if my relative is selling themselves short with a terrible resume or a client is cheating themselves out of marketing with a terrible press release, no matter how much I dread doing it, I can’t just leave it in its original bad state. I need to fix it because…? I guess because I can.

I’ve lately been trying to be able to figure out why I hate/dread doing this so much when afterwards I always feel good about myself and when the financial rewards can be great. When I used to do this freelance, I made good coin doing it and walked away from all that nice money because I hated doing it so much. That is some powerful hate, when you can’t even suck up a few hours of doing something you don’t want to for a ton of money. But I walked away and when I think of going back I get a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach.

It’s a little like this:

But I think my aversion to this boils down to one thing: I resent having to use my talents for other people (no matter how much they are paying me or not), when I don’t get much time to use my talents for myself and my projects.

Tonight I was working on just such a project. And while I’d been putting this project off for a long time, when I finally did it, it wasn’t that bad, took very little time and will benefit me in the long run even though no one will ever know I had anything to do with it. But the whole time I was working on it, all I could do was focus on the fact that, there I was, on a Friday night, writing and editing my little heart out on something that doesn’t matter a fig to me while my poor writing, that I actually care about, lay ignored.

And I know what I should do, I should ignore the paying work and the favors once in a while to focus on the writing I do for me but in the real world, that is much easier said than done. So it ends up feeling like everyone else’s rewriting project is more important than mine which I find very discouraging. What if talent is a finite thing and I’m using up all my skills on other people’s things?

It’s not that want people to know that I’m doing the writing while someone else’s name is on it. I just don’t want to be in that position in the first place. It’s not so much that I object to being a ghost as I resent to not getting to live my own writing.

I don’t have a solution to this. I try to just focus on being thankful for my talent and thinking of all the ghost work as practice for my own stuff. But some days I just want to throw the original cruddy writing back into the writer’s face and say, “You fix up your own damn writing! Why should I waste my time editing your crap when I could be editing my own crap which is higher quality to start with?” This is an arrogant sentiment at its heart I suppose but there it is all the same.

So, I guess what I am saying is that, despite the fact that I have been writing near constantly for many days and I wrote for many hours today, there is no change whatsoever in my writing progress for the year. I can’t help but feel like that is messed up.

You may also enjoy these related posts. . .

• No related posts.