After wrapping up another round of editing and unwrapping some awesome presents, I can only wonder how editors [ the ones that actually get paid ] keep their wits about them. Editing myself has felt like running a marathon while holding a flashlight in the dark, rerunning the route to make sure no short-cuts were taken so it could be retraced, and then finally going back again to pick up any trash that may have been left on the course.
It’s funny, thinking back to earlier times, when I just knew I wrote platinum… where everything that came off my pen tip was sacrosanct and impervious to review. Not editing then was more of a refusal to acknowledge my shortcomings than any real lack of effort. While I sometimes feel a twinge of nostalgia for the reckless passion it imparted into my writing, these days I don’t even write my own name without spell checking it twice.
Maybe editing someone else’s work is always easier because a call for help can be made if one gets lost. But the trailblazers, to whom do they turn? They’ve been lost since the beginning. Being found, to them, is merely to visit the same place again.