I’ve been mired in fixing the ending of a book for a while now. This makes me feel like I’m accomplishing nothing, because it’s a whole lot of brainstorm/write/cut/write/rinse/repeat. Not my favorite.
Today I was bemoaning that I haven’t accomplished anything in months. MONTHS I tell you.
Then I thought to myself: is the true? Or have I just been sucked into the Vortex of Time Dilation aka Revision?
So I counted.
In the last seven months I have:
1) Heavily rewritten EVERYTHING’S FINE.
2) Gone through four editorial passes (developmental 1, developmental 2, copy edit, galley) on EVERYTHING’S FINE
3) Formatted, published, and marketed EVERYTHING’S FINE
4) Heavily rewritten another contemporary novel (aka, cut every word and rewrote them all)
5) Endured critiques as my (brilliant!) writing group deconstructed that novel
6) Heavily revised that contemporary novel based on that feedback
7) Sent that novel to my agent
8 ) Entered into a collaboration with a writer friend and collaboratively outlined a complete novel
9) Collaboratively written 7k+ of said novel
10) Learned new things about beat mechanics and fixed all the beats in EVERYTHING’S FINE
11) Done two arduous passes to fix all the beats in one of my YA science fiction novels
12) (Almost) Rewrote the last 15k of said novel, from scratch. Twice.
Um. That’s a little bit of work. Take that Revision Time Dilation! I am too accomplishing things!
Day to day, man. So little gets done at any given time. I feel like I accomplish nothing. Sometimes I need to step back and look at the big picture.
I guess showing up to work every day really does pay off.