Editing and Editing and Editing ...

I actually lied up there again (I have trust issues. There was a whole thing with a cowboy and a public pool bathroom as a child -- we shouldn't get into it): I said I was writing the book right now. But that's not true. I already finished it. Months ago.

What I'm doing now is editing, and that process is a dozen times longer than the actual writing.

For those of you who can just bang out a draft in one go, clap your hands, whirl on your heel and exit the room, burning it behind you so that others might not defile it with their lesser genius -- most of us writers also have to double as self-editors.

Editing is just like writing, except hateful, and in reverse. Instead of birthing words and ideas out of nothing, you're murdering them in cold blood, culling them like sickly sheep weakening the flock. And since you're the one that brought them into the world in the first place, you feel a certain attachment to every single thing you mercilessly cut. Every time you delete a paragraph, you remember the three hours when you had to stop halfway through that sentence to research the sex lives of Romantic-era poets and what molecular alterations would turn human skin into a high explosive (yes, those were both real, actual things I had to do for the new book). But that can't matter when you're in editing mode; something works, or it doesn't, and it has to go.

After a while, it does get easier though. But only because you will rediscover, with every single sentence, what an incredibly talentless asshole you really are. Every stilted phrase, obvious typo or terrible analogy will have you grimacing and swearing tiny vendettas at the horrible hack who wrote all this garbage you now have to fix.