Editing is hard

A few things:

Editing is hard.  (In this case, I mean editing/cutting/rewriting one's own work in response to notes, both specific and general, from an editor.)  Not because editing is inherently difficult or because I dislike doing it or because don't think my work requires it.  No.  Actually, I think the challenges I am facing right now with Bone and Bread are trifoliate*:

• Once your words have taken a particular form that has been stable for, I don't know, years and years, and you've read them a hundred times, they just start to sound right that way...and it certainly doesn't mean that they're better that way or that they shouldn't be changed...it only makes it hard to imagine how. 

• Editing tends to involve moving around from problem to problem, which is a different kind of process from writing, where you are generally moving forward or through or at least thinking about a whole scene a little more slowly or singularly....and slow thinking tends to produce answers to problems.  It is harder to solve something immediately when you've only just arrived on the page ready to tackle it.

• Maybe it's due to this jumping from note to note and getting stumped on a problem and not knowing whether to linger until it's fixed or press forward unto the end, but this kind of editing makes it much harder for me to achieve momentum and focus.  

So that's why it's hard.  But it does feel better to complain!

As penance for whining, here is a picture of a dog dressed up as two dogs carrying a present:

So clever and cute!

The unpacking continues, even though it both should (it would be great to get everything in order!) and shouldn't (I should really be spending every minute editing).  Most of the boxes are gone, although disorder persists in  the closets.  I also found time the other night to paint my nails with a colour that is still one of my go-to shades after picking it up last year:  Chinchilly by Essie.  Essie describes it as a "sleek granite gray" (yes, they spell it that way), but I find it has some warm, light mauvey-brown tones in it, too. 

Chinchilly nails on one of our new cushions.

ALSO...and forgive the non sequitur...children really do give one hope for the world.  It turns out that this is one of those clichés that also happens to be profoundly true.  People in general give me hope, but I'm always caught off guard by courage and openness and grace when they are displayed by someone very young. 

*because it is my blog and because it is midnight and because most of my time is spent making judicious word choices, I am letting this word stand, since it has charmed me by appearing out of nowhere.  Trifoliate will have have its day in the sun!  Trust me, though, that my novel is not full of this kind of word, nor, I hope, many similar discursions...then my editing would be difficult indeed

art and life

We all know that life imitates art in ways that are sometimes downright eerie, or it’s probably more accurate to say that some people who have a great deal of insight into life and human character can imagine with uncanny prescience just how a situation might play out, given all the factors at stake.  My insightful friend Alice Zorn shares a pretty amazing story about this sort of thing over at her blog.

You should also check out Alice’s excellent short story in the latest issue of Prairie Fire, which has placed first (!) in their annual fiction contest.  This fact is even more impressive given that one of her stories has actually placed first in this contest before.  (A story you can read in her wonderful collection -- if for some reason you don’t already happen to have a half-shelf full of back issues of Prairie Fire.  Although you might as well subscribe to Prairie Fire, while you’re at it.)

juggling

I am still trying to strike a balance between writing about my life and my writing life, since they are so inevitably (hopelessly? thankfully?) intertwined.  Even when the writing is not happening, there is a corresponding anxiety about it not happening…that I’m not meant to be emailing prospective graduate students at my day job, or watching television (possibly true), or going for a walk at lunch time instead of squeezing in an hour of reading or writing (this one is truly a toss-up…healthy body/healthy mind and all that).  It’s a constant inner dialogue, and since so much of my time is spent trying to arrange or rearrange things in my own life to facilitate more writing, I can only conclude that this space is going to include some words about things that may not, on the surface, appear to be about writing.   

That’s a long disclaimer. 

If all this has a slightly panicked flavour, it’s because I’m doing a little more juggling than usual these days.  I’m supposed to be editing, but every day when I come home from work, the towering piles of boxes are beckoning me to do just one more.  Even leaving aside all the oh-so-necessary items* lurking inside them that I need access to, I don’t want to compromise our living space for any longer than I have to.  Of course, every opened box means finding space for the items inside --- no small challenge in our apartment.  And besides the novel, I have three other deadlines for Sunday and Monday (freelancing things, plus an essay I really want to submit to an anthology that promises to be exciting and excellent), which means buckling down, no Osheaga, no more unpacking even, for the next few days.   

Okay?  (Okay.)

I do, however, intend to fit at least one of these cones into my weekend, courtesy of Kem Coba, the magnificent ice cream place next door to my old apartment:

A trio of yumminess

*many of these items are of dubious necessity

Hold Fast

I remember reading Hold Fast one evening when I’d accompanied my mother to university.  She was doing her master’s in Education, and since I was a child who infinitely preferred hanging out in a library to staying home with a babysitter (whom we probably couldn’t have afforded, anyway), she took me along as usual.

That particular evening, she’d taken me to the Education library, which was a less interesting place from my perspective (there was something spookier and therefore intriguing about Morrisset, the larger arts and science library), but which had a few aisles of quality children’s literature.  I browsed the shelves just as I would in a regular library and stumbled upon Kevin Major’s classic, which held me spellbound until my mother’s class was over.  Since it was a library book and not one of my own, it's one of the few books I loved as a child that I have not since reread (as opposed to many others I’ve reread half a dozen times or more).  Until I read a little about it as an adult, I couldn’t have told you it was set in Newfoundland, though it may have subliminally helped set in motion my love of that place…I’ve hitchhiked along the same highway since, and visited Gros Morne, the (truly spectacular) national park that Michael and his cousin Curtis are trying to reach after they run away.  At the time, I was a major devotee of L.M. Montgomery and all of her books about orphans and their extended families, and Hold Fast was a story about an orphan that seemed so brutal, harsh, and realistic in comparison – it felt like a very adult book to be reading at nine, and maybe that's why it was so memorable for me. 

The occasion for this reminiscence is that they are making a movie of Hold Fast (with the wonderful Molly Parker).  I hope the filmmakers can do it justice!  

Speaking of Lucy Maud, the first volume of her complete journals have just been published.  I once took her selected journals out of the library (though this was probably also around the age of nine or ten) and found them spectacularly boring, despite my best efforts.  But I'm intrigued by these more complete editions, although no doubt I'd find even the selected journals more interesting now than I did back then.  

something new

There has been such a flurry of activity in my little corner of the world that I can only conclude that some of the persistence has paid off.

There was packing (and now unpacking), moving, and of course this:

 

Then there was travelling and reading and relaxing, and now, now there is the editing.  I started working on the manuscript again this weekend, and I was encouraged by the fact that there was no cringing or recoiling from what I found on the page.  (Sometimes I find that when I work in great, deadline-induced bursts it is followed by some sort of amnesia…I am usually half-surprised to find just what it is I’ve written.)  Of course, I may start to feel differently as I move deeper into the novel, but just now I am encouraged, relieved, and excited to do the work. 

persisting

The cast came off.  The draft got sent.  (And the notes came back!)

My wrist aches from the physio, but I’m trying to see that as a good sign, that progress is being made.  It’s getting stronger.  It bends a little more than it did before.  Same with my left thumb.  It’s funny that the cast heals the fractures, and the physio is really to heal the damage done by the immobilization of the cast. 

I am doing a lot of things.  Working.  Freelancing.  Editing.  Sewing.  Packing.  Moving.  Persisting.  Some days I feel a little worn thin. 

Some things I am doing these days:

Drinking a glass of water when I feel bad.  This works well for burgeoning headaches, phantom hunger pains, sneezathon allergy attacks, and the increasingly frequent stress-induced chest tightness. 

Making fewer lists.  I write down the things I’m afraid of forgetting, but I think encountering a full-fledged list of everything I hope to accomplish this summer would make me take to my bed…or perhaps weep hysterically at the deluded ambition of it all.  So for now – one thing at a time.     

Becoming a Maneki Neko

My recent silence here has not, sadly, been due to throwing myself wholeheartedly into editing my novel. Far from it. A few hours after my last post, I threw myself bone-breakingly down onto the snow- and -ice-covered sidewalk. And broke my wrist.

OUCH.

Anyway, since revisiting the pain increases the throbbing in my wrist, I will skip most of the details! But the upshot is that I now have an extension of a few weeks on my editing deadline -- a lucky thing since one-handed typing is not my forte and even starts to hurt my good hand after awhile. But this wasn't meant to be a catalogue of my woes (which, let's face it, in the grand scheme of things, are not so overwhelming). Actually, I wanted to share the one thing about my broken wrist that makes me laugh -- I feel like a Maneki Neko.




You know those Japanese lucky cats? If the left hand is up, it is supposedly beckoning customers. (The right hand up is for prosperity...though, presumably, so is the left....)










Due to the nature of my fracture, my arm has been casted with my left hand bent forward and to the left. And since I'm supposed to keep it elevated, I often prop it up in this position when I don't have it immobilized on a towering pile of cushions.

Come in, dear customer!

I'm feeling a little better on a day-to-day basis. With any luck, I'll be back to writing soon. At any rate, my new phobia of another sidewalk slip helps with the all-too-necessary writerly condition of being a shut-in.

Come in, inspiration!