Diary of Being a Writer; Week 218

I finished the latest edits. Now we wait for the next ones.

We just had a long weekend, so we sent my step kids to their grandparents and I had the time and space to finish my edit. It was hard to know when to stop. In the end, I stopped after listening to a horrendous computer generated voice reading the whole thing. A grueling experience, but so helpful for hearing mistakes that, if read, would be glossed over. That voice makes the errors stand out like flashes of neon on a dark night. Then I removed 45 of the 85 instances of the word fuck. Mostly replaced with other swear words, but I just felt there were a couple of, okay 45 times, it didn’t need to be fuck. This seemed like a good place to stop.

Last week I got into a weird place with the editing where I started changing too much, like word here and there for no good reason. It started changing the voice of the book and it just got weird. Thankfully, I saw what I was doing and stopped myself.

So anyway, after all that, I had to attach it to an email and send it back to my agent. I felt nauseous as I wrote my breezy little note saying “here you go all done”, meanwhile thinking; ‘Oh, my god what if I have stuffed it up? What if this edit has made things worse, not better? What if she hates it now?’ Heart racing, I finally pressed send.