A Brief Intermission

I'm interupting my normally scheduled program to bring you a short piece of fiction I wrote today at work:

He had been there for as long as I could remember.  And I could remember a long time.  When he had first arrived the trees had been alive with talk of him.  There was not one who did not speak of the human who had invaded our home.  Some spoke with joy at the idea of one so foreign that they could study at their will.  Others with scorn that a human would dare come into our territory.

Those words had died over the years.  They had faded as the years had passed and the others had grown accustomed to his presence.  They had faded as those of my kind had disappeared along with the trees they had once called home.  And now I was the last, lonely in the diminishing forest.  Now it was just him and I.  There was none left to talk.

I, though, was as a ghost to him.  He could not see me.  Could not feel me.  Could not touch me.  He knew not that I was so close.  He was oblivious to the fact that we were the only ones left.

So now I watch him.  As the years dragged by.  Years that once seemed as a blink of an eye.  And he did not change.  I wondered on this, my mind convincing me that he could not, then, be human.  That the others were wrong when they spoke of his human stench.  He must be as we were.

I tested this, one day.  I called out to him, stepping out from behind my tree, eager to see the surprise that would surely streak across his face as he took in my presence.  But he did not so much as look in my direction.  I should have known.  He had not once in all those years seen us.  But I had hoped, and so I was disappointed.

Now I do not leave my tree.  Instead I watch from a distance.  Waiting for the day when I will vanish as the others did.  When he will finally be alone in these woods that once teemed with Nymphs and Fairies.  Fae that were once cherished, then banished to the backs of human’s minds, until we could no longer even be seen.  Until we died off, unnoticed by the humans who have forgotten us.  But until then, I will watch.

That is all.

Editing

Editing.   There it is.  The most feared word in the writer community.  You may think this to be an understatement, but rest assured, it is not.

Here's something you may not know about writers.  We expect greatness on our first shot.  We lie to ourselves and say we don't.  We say we can edit this when we're done.  Move on.  Don't dwell!  This is our motivation, you see.  It's what gets us through the writing.  It keeps us moving forward so that the manuscript we're working on doesn't end up half finished and filed away in some dusty folder at the back of our computers.

So, when we finish that manuscript and print it out, all shiny and new, we expect to read it thinking that this is going to be the next best selling novel.  This was worth all those months (or years, depending on the writer) of our characters demanding our attention at all hours of the day (and night).  It was worth the arguments we had while others stared at us in worry.  It was worth the roadblocks and the surprises.  It was worth our time.

Here's something you probably already know about writers.  We are, by far, our own worst critics.

When we finally print off that first draft, all shiny and new, and start to read it, what goes through our mind is not 'this is fantastic!  I'm sending this out right now!' No.  What goes through our mind is 'Oh my...what was I thinking?  This can't be right!  This can't possibly be the novel I've written!'

This is where the fear of editing comes in.  Rather than facing the story that we now consider terrible and hardly worth anyone's time, we don't even want to look at it.  We want to pretend that we never wrote the bloody thing to begin with.  (Yep.  More lying.  What do you expect?  We're writers!)  We want to file it in the previously mentioned dusty folder and never think of it again!  Never own up to the fact that we wrote that terrible first draft!  Pretend like we don't know what our friends are talking about when they ask about the character that just the week before we were talking excitedly about (Or complaining about.  One or the other)!

And then, finally, as a last resort, we tell ourselves we'll look at it later.  We shove it in a drawer and start the process all over again (being careful to reassure ourselves that the writing portion of the process could not possibly be as bad as we remembered it).

Unfortunately that manuscript, the one that we very much find ourselves wishing we could forget ever existed, must one day see the light of day.  Especially when you know that you need to edit it in order to send out the ever dreaded query letter (stay tuned for more rants on that fun process).

So today I pick up my red pen and begin the editing process on the book that I finished writing in April.  I do not look forward to this project, but I do it knowing that it could one day be the next best selling book, with a little bit of work.  At least...that's what I tell myself.