Over-Editors Anonymous

 

  Hello. My name is D’Ann and I can’t stop editing.

Last week, my finger was poised to hit send. My new novel “Grandi Needs Killing,” was finished. Edited. Complete. Edited again. Done. Edited and re-edited, ad nauseum. I had four requests to send my full manuscript for consideration.

Time to send my eaglet flying into the world of publishing, to make its way or crash. Time to really work on my new novel.” Time to tell Grandi good-bye and move on. So far the furthest I’d moved was a loose plotline for a new novel, a title I dislike, and five pages I should probably scrap.

And  yet…

I never reviewed the chapter breaks in “Grandi Needs Killing.” Were they ideally placed to insure readers would be compelled to keep reading?  I would just take a quick peek.  Spend  fifteen minutes, an hour, tops. Then I could send “Grandi” out and be done with her while I wrote “Murder at Whiskey Oaks Plantation.” (Meh. Mediocre title. I can do better.)

I seated myself at my laptop, ready to quickly modify a few chapter breaks, then move on to “Murder at Whiskey Oaks Plantation.” (Awful title! Perhaps, “Death on Whiskey Mountain?” Should I stop and research names?) I shook off the digression. Grandi needed a final, fifteen minute facelift.

Two days later, my quick peek had morphed into another line by line re-edit. Wasn’t that a rather weak verb here? Certainly I could find a more evocative way for my heroine to express angst. And, wait surely I hadn’t written “there” when it should clearly be “their?” Readers will think I’m an uneducated ninny! And how did the misspelling of kaleidoscope, a mistake of infinite magnitude, escape detection in the first 39 edits?

My first novel “Dancing  From the Shadows,” had significant printing problems. Three months after its release, a second edition was needed. I was only supposed to go through the manuscript and mark the printing problems. I lost sleep doing a line by line edit of a book that was already published.

I’ve increased my speed though. It only took two years to write and edit “Grandi Needs Killing,” as opposed to the three and a half years required to complete “Dancing From the Shadows.”

I’m getting better. I’m NOT editing too much. I can give up editing whenever I want.

Who am I trying to fool? At a book signing, I will probably hand the reader a slip of paper and say “I’m afraid I used too many adverbs in the third paragraph, page 198. If you’ll replace that paragraph with this one, the prose will be stronger.”

I need an intervention! Anyone want to help me form “Over-Editors Anonymous?