TRUE Agony

As Amylynn has shared, we are revising It’s Clearly Love, again.  It’s excruciatingly painful for all of us.  We made Ed print all 450+ pages at my house and then we took it to Kinkos so that “evil mean copy girl” could give us a hard time about asking her to do her job – copy something.  After we ate lunch, we went back to pick up the two copies and she looked fine, I don’t believe she’ll suffer any lasting ill effects from copying 900 pages but, we will, she charged us $75.00 dollars!!! 

After I got my copy home, I started reading/editing.  I haven’t read ICL for months.  The three of us really thought it was done and we thought the first three chapters were so good that they would cause an agent or editor to want to buy the book.  Well, not so much.  I’ve mentioned before my true admiration for Amylynn for finishing not just this one book but several more short stories and the continued work on yet another novel size manuscript.  I re-mention this because Amylynn is right, I’ve ruthlessly attacked it.  We were true novices all around when she wrote it, she writes one thousand times better now and we edit one thousand times better as well.  It needs to be done and we are going to do it.  In fact, it is the only writing project I will be working on until it is complete. 

Here’s where the TRUE agony comes in, I started a new job last week.  For various reasons, I have had to drive about one and half hours away for training.  Oviously, I don’t know any of the people who work in this office.   Amylynn is not joking about her feelings towards this rewrite.  So, I’m sitting in a conference room, on my cell phone, trying to talk Amylynn off the ledge and back into her cube when I notice that several people are avidly listening to my conversation.  They all listened to me discuss some woman’s sprained ankle, her damaged engagement ring and her losing her virginity to her childhood crush.  I decided to step outside.  If you’re reading this anywhere but where we live, you won’t really understand why that is significant – I went outside in the midday sun, the temperature was 113.  My new co-workers decided it was time for a cigarette break and most of them don’t smoke . . .

Amylynn is worried that this revision won’t be her work alone.  As writers, you all know how important it is that our work reflects us, our voice, our style.  Some editors are too intrusive, they don’t just fix bad sentence structure and punctuation, they change the “you” in the writing.  The three of us are always super careful to never do this.  But, talking through the plot, the hook, the conflicts, that is sometimes a group effort and,  in my opinion, doesn’t take the “you” out of the story at all. 

So hang in there Amylynn – I’m with you ’til the end, even if it means my new co-workers think I hang around with loose, clumsy women and my make-up melts off from the sun at high noon in a parking lot hours from my home.