Thursday, November 12, 2009

Day 12: Editing

I know, I know. I'm not supposed to edit until January.

But I had to let the Internal Editor out just for a little while to make some sense out of it all. After combining the two drafts, my word count went way up, but all the redundancy was making it confusing.

She took care of it. My word count has dropped significantly, but at least it's coherent now. I'm pretty confident I can get the count back up provided the time to do it today. The creative juices are flowing.

I've spent quite a bit of time this month pondering the role of the I.E. in my writing, and all the other I.E.s in the other parts of my life. I could go on for quite a bit about it, and it probably wouldn't matter because no one reads this anyway, but again, a detailed analysis should probably wait.

Maybe it's just a mid-life crisis. Turning 40 and all. I don't know.

I'm also approaching my first belt test. Taking the writing seriously this month. Tweaking my approach to homeschooling and to parenting. I'm stretching beyond my perceived limits in all kinds of new ways and it feels really good.

But it's not always comfortable.

Today's lesson deserves some consideration, though. As much as I'd like to throw all the I.E.s out and just say whatever I'm thinking and do whatever I want to do, the I.E.s who stop me from doing that do serve a purpose and I do need them sometimes in order to prevent my life from becoming as chaotic as my novel.

Determining how much of a role I want to give them, and how much power they will have over me is the current challenge. There's a fine line between allowing I.E.s to hold you back from any kind of growth or change and allowing them to help, like a careful pruning, the growth to proceed in the optimal direction.

My Deep Thought for the day.

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