Last month, I finished a draft of a project I'm really excited about. (I can hopefully tell you more about that soon!)
I did a few revisions, edited, and sent it off to my trusted beta readers.
Now, I wait.
There's a lot of waiting in the writing process.
In fact, of all the facets of writing: from drafting, to revising, to editing, to querying, THE WAITING might be the most challenging thing of all for me.
(Querying is its own kind of hard. But along with the inevitable rejection, it, too, involves a lot of waiting.)
I made the mistake of opening the manuscript to make a few changes that one of my beta readers suggested,
and then I couldn't leave it alone.
The draw of a piece of my writing to me is like bee to a bursting0in-blooms rhododendron. Even when I say it's finished.
The amount of edits I made to the manuscript I'm currently querying—a project I've worked on for years—are unable to be quantified by our current mathematical systems.
At this point I have to wonder if I will ever be satisfied that a piece of my writing is finished.
It seems like no matter how much time passes, every time I open it, I tinker with something or another. Maybe it's simply a word. A dialogue tag. Or maybe an entire section needs just a little tweaking.
Is a book ever done? Like DONE-done?
Asking for me.
Any advice would be welcome. Or, failing that, you could distract me with something shiny.
