Monday Muse: Uh…what?

Hey guys! It’s Monday Muse time!

I’ll be real with you; my brain is mush. I just got home from spending the entire day with A, editing our manuscript. Basically, all the work we put into editing separately, we went and did again, only together. So…yeah.

We worked on it for just under eight hours (taking a break for lunch) and got…nine chapters done. Nine. Out of the twenty-three we were supposed to get done before meeting today, we managed to get through nine.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t as hard as we thought it was going to be. Basically, there were things we agreed should go and things only one of us thought should go, but the other agreed. There were only a few things one or the other of us fought for, and we generally kept it.

All told, we cut over 8000 words. And there are 37 chapters left to edit. I think we did well, don’t you? We really earned those whiskey sours, which we figured we needed after the tenth time one of us said, “Son of a bitch!” upon realizing we’d only gotten nine chapters done.

Something we discovered in working on this together: our skills are really complementary. A, being an actress, has a facility with natural dialogue that I do not possess (it probably doesn’t help that I often speak like a professor amongst my friends), and I am better with recognizing prose that needs editing. Stuff like getting rid of adverbs or combining two adjectives into their best possible form. Or recognizing when the voice is oddly distant for third person limited. Together, I think we’re going to find the best possible form of this novel. The form that, hopefully, the world will see.

Anyway…I’m sorry this isn’t much of a muse. I wasn’t kidding when I said my brain was mush. For a while there, I forgot how to word. But, really…it’s worth it because, in the end, editing is just as important as writing; you’ve got to be good at both to create anything worth a damn.

Well, that’s it for me today. I’m going to watch The Golden Girls and relax. See y’all on Friday with this week’s literary libation!

–C

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