ksmith | And so it begins

Lunch: sweet-sour cabbage soup and a salad. The soup's a little heavy on the "sweet", but it's not bad. The right kind of soup for a cloudy, chilly day.

Actually, it is a chili day, but the cafeteria didn't have any.

Still awaiting my official J5 revision letter. For the past week or so, my frontbrain has been bemoaning fate and looking up online masters programs and trying to figure out what to do with my copious amounts of free time since the writing thing is obviously a Big Fat Waste O' Time. Meanwhile, my backbrain pondered the email exchange I had with editor prior to WFC. Could editor be right, even in part? Could I see her point of view?

It's a tricky bit, deciding which battles you fight. Some writers believe that every word they write, every aspect of plot and character, every punctuation mark and space, is sacred, uneraseable, never to be removed or altered for love or delivery and acceptance money. I tend to think that this attitude is a mistake. Some of us are better at self-editing than others, but damned few, if any, of us fail to benefit from an editorial "are you sure?" Yes, I have heard editorial horror stories, and sometimes the marriage goes sour and the viewpoints no longer mesh and that is a bad situation. But sometimes...

...I wonder, am I giving in too easily? Am I sacrificing the world through my eyes and co-opting the view through another's, a view that will soon move on to other worlds and leave me impaired and lost in my own? Am I making changes just because someone asks me to, because I am so unsure of my vision that I will accept as valid any criticism, any comment that I do not see what I think I see? Am I gutless? Do I have any clue? Do I not yet know, after eight years and five books and now a few stories, what the hell I am doing? Am I a writer, or a transcriber?

Well. After pondering comments received, and thanks to a short email exchange with a beta reader, I think I know how to approach this rewrite. It will be extensive and I will howl at the night sky at least three times as one vital turn of plot or another hits a freshly-built brick wall. But in the end, I may still have the story I want to tell, and it may be better, and readers may like it more than they otherwise would have. And I will be left to wonder whether I will ever be a self-sufficient writer, one who knows as they are writing what works and what doesn't. One who can always trust the voice in the back of the head that says "yes." One who knows when to say "no."

UPDATE: And of course, the official revision letter arrived as soon as I posted. Now I have that to work with.