On Editing…

I may have found the largest impediment to my career.  It’s not ideas, it’s not even the act of writing: It’s editing.  I loathe editing.  For my blog posts, I refuse to even do it anymore.  It is a time consuming, often depressing aspect inextricably linked to writing, and there’s a very real possibility that unless I can curb my hatred of it my career will never get off the ground.

Writing, for me, started out as a harsh and painful process.  It wasn’t something that I was good at, and it wasn’t something that came even close to naturally.  That’s just the simple truth of beginning a career in writing at age 31, nearly 32: I’m just older.  It’s harder for me to do things like this.  My brain has begun to be set in it’s ways, and is very upset with me for messing up the nice ruts it had carved out over the years.  However, with consistent application of sheer repetition, writing has become almost incidental.  I’ve come to do it so frequently that I’ll often find myself writing instead of doing things I used to do for enjoyment, and not even noticing.  In times which it has been allowed, I’ll even write at work now.  That’s mostly the result of a new boss who is actually a human being instead of a mindless rules automaton, but it’s also a result of a powerful truth: I’m an author now.  Writing stories and engaging with individuals who might read my work are becoming second nature, and it’s eerie how well I’m taking to that change.

And that brings me back to the subject of editing.  I write a lot.  Since I began seriously writing in late June / early July, I’ve written an extraordinary amount.  Between works published on the blog, works written for D&D, and the novels I am working on, I’ve easily amassed over a hundred thousand words.  That is an obnoxious figure, especially for a new author in such a short amount of time.  And that includes the beginning of my writing, which was a time where it was hard for me to even produce two hundred and fifty words a day, let alone the thousand plus that I’ve written rather consistently five to six days a week for the last month and a half or so.  The backlog for my editing has become a living thing, and I’m scrambling to get out ahead of it, but I keep going off and writing more.  I’m trying to stay ahead of a starving wolverine while wearing Lady Gaga’s Skirtsteak.  It’s… it’s not going well.  At this stage, my career is in one long macabre Catch 22: I have to write, because writing consistently and with purpose is the defining attribute of an author.  However, I have a day job and a three hour commute each day, so although I might write heavily, I don’t have a lot of time to edit my work.  I could pay to have it done, but that’s expensive.  Approximately fifteen dollars every thousand words.  I need to monetize my writing, but in order to do that I need to have a product worth buying.  In order to have a product worth buying, I need to spend time editing… which I don’t have.  And I can’t afford to pay for editing… because I can’t monetize my writing without it.  Lather, rinse, repeat, ad nauseam.  Don’t even get me started on the need to find a skilled artist to do the cover art!

It’s become a negative feedback loop that I can’t seem to climb out of.  I can’t get Patreon off the ground, I haven’t been able to garner a consistent audience with my blog.  Heck, I can’t even get an organic comment to save my soul!  Everyone who posts is either a friend or my wife, and that’s it.  So I’m stumped.  I have a very great serial short story in Temple of the Stars, and basically all the other work I’ve produced to date could be brought up to snuff.  It’s perfect for both my writing style, and as a segue into writing an actual novel.  It’s exactly what I need to be able to quit the day job, exactly what I need to give myself time and training to write a novel.  EXACTLY what I need to find an audience, and build it.  EXACTLY what I need when it comes time to find a publisher for the novel whenever it’s finished.

Here’s where I’m at, mentally.  I’ve found an enormous cache of gold, easily enough to last for the rest of my life, to live a stress free existence full of my family, my writing, and my passions.  Yet the gold is coated in a very hard layer of rock.  I’m more than willing to take as much time as I need to bust that layer of rock off, but the pick used to do it is very expensive.  Prohibitively so.  I have to be able to find a way to pay for the pick and pay to maintain it for as long as it takes to break through the rock.  I could do that, easily, with some of the gold.  But I can’t get the gold out right now.  It’s beneath the rock.  Which I need the pick to break into.  Which I can’t afford right now, because I need the money from the gold to pay for the pick.  But the gold is under the rock…

Rockfully,
Justin