You know the biggest thing that keeps me from writing blog posts? It goes like this: Pretty much the only thing I've been doing lately is writing and I'd kind of like to blog about this one insight I had/problem I resolved/whatever, but so far I haven't really posted anything about this book or where I am in the process so I'd first have to blog about everything that came before this point, and that sounds like way too much work.

I have a hard time doing things out of order. If I'm going to watch a show or listen to a podcast, I have to start at the beginning. If I want to get into an author's work, I have to start with their first book even if it wasn't very good. There are some merits to this so I won't say it's stupid, but when it gets in the way of me writing my own blog about whatever I want, it is a little bit dumb.

So here's what's going on right now: I'm editing my YA book based on feedback from my agent. On paper the changes sound pretty simple--change the order of a few scenes, and age up the child victim. But it turns out that even a small change has ripples throughout the manuscript. If the child is older now, his personality has changed. His mother is also older, so her personality has changed. The way people interact with both of them changes. People's feelings about the child's death, and their responses and actions motivated by those feelings, all change. Theories as to how the child died change, because certain things that can kill a five-year-old won't kill a 12-year-old, so the investigation changes.

And this isn't even a murder mystery. The child's death isn't the main story. But making this change has required other changes throughout the book.

The result is that these edits are taking me way longer than I thought they would. Back in October when I got the feedback, I thought I could probably finish by the end of December, but gave myself till the end of January just in case the holidays got too crazy. Now here it is mid-March, and I'm not going to be done by the end of this month, either.

Since this is the first book I've ever gotten this far, I'm learning my own process along with the publishing industry's processes. This is the first time I've ever made a change like this, this late in the process, based on someone else's input. I think the change was the right thing to do and the story is better for it, but I've just never done it before so I had no idea what would be involved.

I'm caught in a constant battle between the voice in my head that says you're not doing this fast enough and the merciless reality that I can't do it any faster. When I try, I just exhaust myself and then have to take time off to recover, and in the long run I go slower. And what does fast enough even mean? I don't have a deadline. My agent told me to take as long as it takes. I'm not required to write books within a certain time frame. Obviously it would be nice to, because I'd have that many more books to sell, but it's not like I'm doing this work to pay the bills. There's absolutely no reason I have to go faster, except this internal pressure I feel.

There are other books I want to write, and maybe I feel like I'm getting started too late. Maybe this pressure to get a move on is really residual shame that I never managed to finish a book until now, as I'm reaching the end of my forties, despite trying for close to twenty years. I know there's no point feeling shame about this--I can't change it now, and I couldn't change it then, either; it's not like I didn't try. But I think some part of me feels I have to compensate by writing all the books I haven't written, as quickly as possible.

I wish I had a pithy way to wrap this up, but life isn't that convenient. This is what I'm struggling with right now, and what I'll continue to struggle with for the foreseeable future. I'll use various methods of assuring myself that I'm doing fine, and the fear that I'm not will come back anyway.

So, until next time!