Editing 😟

Do you know the hardest part of editing?

It is not seeing all the marks on the pages; over 600 pages for one of my books filled with corrections, suggestions, alternatives and possibilities. I plow through those, reading everything turning the marks on and off, seRch my vocabulary and rephrase without difficulty.

It is not setting aside my ego and admitting that nothing is perfect, it can always be improved. Taking a second look at a scene I sweated and swore over is not a bad thing, neither is cutting it if it doesn’t move the story forward in some significant way.

It is not killing off a character, although that makes my cry and feel bad, sometimes for weeks if it was someone I really liked. It is not changing someone’s name, because otherwise they just get too tangled when too many characters have similar names.

It is not falling into the pit of punctuation and misplacing a comma for the third time. Nor is it making changes, only to change them back on the next round.

No, the hardest part of editing is not falling into the story, forgetting what I am doing and reading.