Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Procrastination and doubt. I have written about doubt before, in a series I think. It was quite a long time ago. I thought I had compartmentalized my doubt: not exactly put it away, but perhaps contained it. I felt confident I had developed the tools and the knowledge and the self-belief to keep doubt at bay.

I think I was right. Today doubt tried its very best to prove me wrong.

As some of you may know, I am most of the way through the editing process of my latest book, The Gardener and The Goddess (Or The Slaves and The Djinn, but TGATG is now winning, for non-doubt related reasons). I am currently proofreading the book. The last mountain to climb.

I started last week. I read the early chapters carefully and was very encouraged. I thought it rocked, in fact, perhaps over indulgently. I should have done more, progressed further, but I allowed myself to stop. I’ve read this book from start to finish I don’t know how many times by now, but it isn’t small. I stalled at this iteration of read-through, perhaps because it is supposed to be the last.

I should have read more this weekend. I declined to do so. I wonder now if subconsciously I knew what I would find.

I read today. A short chapter, perhaps five double spaced pages. Not long. Things that had made sense to me before, that had been unquestioned, seemed awkward now. I let them go, but a niggling doubt remained.

I read on into the next chapter. The roof fell in. It started with realizing something I introduced 150 pages later would be better introduced there. Then I spotted multiple location horrors (that’s the way they seemed at the time – they were minor inconsistencies), and it made me realize an early fix I’d made, which had nothing to do with location issues, was a mess. I moved the introduction forward and improved the scene, but I died inside. I corrected the early fix, but hated myself, because it was supposed to be done. How could I not have seen this already? How could I not have been aware of my location problems, one of which reflected not just forward, but back, into the chapters I had supposedly finished with forever? How could I not have realized my previous minor fix sucked? (I had, which was why I could not let it go – a good instinct turned to bad intention here, but I did not appreciate that until later.)

The black demon of doubt had me. What was the point of this story? Why did I bother writing it? If the basics of continuity are broken, why bother worrying about anything else? The text I read seemed a lifeless corpse. I no longer understood why anyone would read it. Would ever want to. The demon didn’t even laugh, it just stated facts: You suck. Stop now.

I did stop. Today was not the day to continue. If I continued I was going to start butchering my prose out of doubt. Rewriting passages out of context, out of fear.  I did in fact start doing that, then made myself stop. Stopping is sometimes the best thing you can do.

Sometimes it isn’t procrastination.

It’s preservation.

Location errors, which are continuity fixes, are not the end of the world. I should not have been surprised by these, I rewrote the early chapters and expanded the introduction to the physical space of the story very late, but today, when focused on reading each sentence correctly, I forgot that. Catching those misalignments is not a problem, it is the point.  Yes, I’d done a copy edit because I thought I’d already caught the continuity errors. I hadn’t, my beta readers hadn’t. I’m betting they didn’t read the book out loud. Sometimes the voice catches what the reading mind forgives. Use the voice, my friends, and do not be discouraged by what it finds. Plus: I’d made changes based on beta reader advice! Fixing paragraphs and story points here and there will leave unexpected wrinkles. I thought I had integrated them. Today I discovered, in the most minor of ways, that I had not been flawless. Doubt used that to attack.

Editing, finishing, is hard. You keep on trying to make what you made better. Be prepared for your improvements, which make absolute sense, to sometimes be contradicted by the random bones of the oldest text that still poke through. I thought I had assimilated all of this earlier. In my mind I had. In the text I hadn’t.

Being a writer sucks. But I won’t stop being one, because I can overcome my doubt, and in the clear light of day fix errors generated by multiple layers of revision.  That isn’t a disaster – it’s a consequence of working hard on something you love.

This book is still a strange and beautiful thing, pulsing with life. I’m going to finish it.

But not this week.

Sometimes, my friends, you have to step back and acknowledge that today is not your day.  Seize another one, if and when you can.