These Are Nonsense Words

Life has been a weird thing lately. I’ve also been managing to somehow maintain this website at an even more irresponsible clip than I did the Ganje sites of old, so that’s something I’m not terribly happy about. I’d glare at myself if I could, but I haven’t quite got the ocular athleticism that would make such things possible. Instead I’ll just glare at this screen and hope you, the dear reader, don’t take it too personally.

The editing of the second book in my trilogy just wrapped up (for now and even though I’ll revisit it an unfathomable amount of times while I edit book three in the coming months) and it makes me happy that I’ve managed that. It wasn’t as titanic a feat as conquering book one which, while it was 50,000 words shorter, was also quite uneven, but it was still as frustrating as those things tend to be. If you’ve never edited a creative work of any good length, I’d describe it as such: “This thing this person said on page 170 might not make complete sense given his character development”, only to look back into the annals of book one to find out that it does. And then, after you’ve cleared that up, you decide that none of it works for you anyways so you have to change everything anyway.

Now just imagine doing that over and over again for months at a time because you’re a writer with a bad memory and fractious attention spans. It’s a troubling thing and I can’t wait to finish the edit of book three just so I can start over at book one and do it all again. Am I joking? I really wish I was. But if I want someone to pay me scads of money for this stuff, I figure the least I can do is make it look like I have slightly professional aspirations.

One thing is for sure, as I read these things again I find myself feeling incredibly bad for the six test readers who have been subjected to the rough first drafts of the story. While reviews have been strong and the emotional heft has seemed to resonate, I can’t get past the horror of having to read the word “niece” misspelled an astonishing number of times (72 to be exact). They’re the real heroes and I’m pretty positive it will one day come to light that they’ve just been humoring me this entire time.

That’s what being an author really is: Wondering if you’re just a crazy person that people don’t want to upset.

That’s not me, of course. I’m not crazy. Then again, every time I say that I’m brought back to an old Far Side cartoon where two cows are standing out in a pasture. One cow turns to the other and says “Have you heard about that Mad Cow Disease going around?”. The other cow looks up and says confidently “Yeah! Thank god we’re penguins.”

I wonder if I’m a penguin. If I am, then the next time someone implores me to take a leap of faith, rest assured I’ll be treating that suggestion with the scorn it deserves.