I'm grinding through edits at ten pages an hour. That's about twice as fast as I wrote them the first time. Does this mean editing only takes half as long as writing?
Ha ha, what a hilarious question! I wish revisions only took half as long as writing the damn thing in the first place. For me, revision is much slower. In the first draft I'm easy on myself.
But now there is no mercy. No "I'll just figure this out later," or "I think that word is close enough." Close enough ... isn't.
This morning I tried to calculate how many pounds of coffee beans I've ground into coffee during these revisions, but couldn't carry the four or figure the square root gerund participle of eleven or something. And I'm not sure I want to get to a "coffee per page" count. That is a lot of coffee.
I wonder: without the various drugs of history -- stimulants, narcotics, the Internet -- would we have the same vast field of literature we have today? Let me sip another cup and ponder that....
2 comments:
When do you know when enough is enough in terms of revisions? Is it when the coffee runs out?
When the coffee runs out? I will have to treat that as a joke?
The revisions are never enough. Even after the book is printed I will still have the capacity to tinker.
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