So, I’m doing this again. You know that thing I said I wouldn’t do. That thing that if I had to do again, I would scratch my own eyes out and gladly bleed out on the table, just so I wouldn’t be able to do that thing again. For the last time before someone else sees it, I am going through my manuscript and giving it one final whooping (I mean revision).
It has been about five months since I last touched it, desperate to find the right person to help me move this manuscript into what it needs to become, and that time seems to have served me well – or maybe it was just the writing conference I attended last month that afforded me to wear a new pair of blinders. So, I am able to snip, cut, and even eliminate entire parts that just didn’t matter to the story no matter how much I liked them. I expanded, took away some explanations so that readers can draw their own conclusions and for the first time was able to look at my manuscript from a distance. I still couldn’t see it as if it were someone else’s and could be 100% objective and ‘oh it needs this, get rid of that’ but I also didn’t see it as this appendage, painfully attached to my body. It was still mine, but it wasn’t just mine anymore, and I think that is how I inevitably need to feel about it.
