editing & state of mind
For the last few weeks, I’ve been sorta out of myself. This morning, I slept in a bit and for the first time in a long time I actually had some sensory experience (cold drizzling rain on my face in the morning), something that actually surprised me.
The mundane explanation is it’s sleep deprivation and exhaustion (after all, I just finished a NaNo novel), and this slipping slightly out of sync is normal.
However: I am also doing extremely well on editing (almost zero despair, even though I just slogged through the most boring 50 beginning pages *ever*), I am not thinking that I wrote all that. I’m approaching the novel as if it was something somebody wrote and gave to me, saying, “I wanted to write a novel that you would love, a novel just for you, now could you please skim through it and tell me what can I do better?”
And I’m delighted to help even if the novel isn’t the best thing ever written.
Still, I’m skimming life just the same way I’m skimming Vega, and I don’t like it.
So, basically, the question is do I *need* this state of mind to edit, and have I subconsciously developed it precisely for editing, or are the two things unrelated, and if this state of mind is doing me more bad than good then what do I do to get out of it?
