Galloping Nowhere

This blog post is entitled I Can't Stand Revision Not because It's Hard Work but because It's too Much Like Cleaning My House.

To clean my home, I dust, vacuum, sweep, mop, blah, blah, blah and then (sadly, I'm sooo not kidding about this next part) twenty minutes later the house is dusty, dirty, unkempt, blah, blah, blah all over again. And I'm left standing there scratching my head and wondering how on Earth I could have possibly missed the tornado that just blew through. I know I'm going to have to start over only to have my work undone again. Big, big sigh.

Revising feels like that sometimes. I clean up a section and move on then come back to be sure everything is still moving smoothly only to discover a big hot mess of writing. Sigh. Begin again. Clean it up, move on, come back, what the hell? How'd this get messed up again? Enormous sigh. Begin again. Drink heavily. Reread and think, oh, I am the world's best writer. Come back the next morning only to find out that I am not the world's best. And, yes, I must begin again.

I know I've whined about this before, but its days like this that I feel like my cart is miles before my horse. Come on stupid horse! Catch up! Some agent (big-time, influential agent preferably) should just magically discover me and lead me by the hand through the entire revision process - stealing away pages once they are finished so I can never reread them and think, why, oh why, did I write that drivel? Horse in front of cart. Nice horsey. Look at that horse pull that falling to pieces cart!

Instead, I'm on my own, shaking my head as the dust settles around me once again. Sigh. Begin again.

Tune in next week as the whiny writer wails on in Query This, Asshat!