Full set of edit photos here
I’m deep in edits right now.
Basically 75% of them are something like: You have used the word purple to describe someone’s skin on 10 different pages. Now cut half.
And then the remaining 25% are things that are requiring me to do some real writing to make a scene work better, or make a moment more believable. I have had to do a little bit more research. I had to interview a vascular surgeon and also bug my friend Alina about things related to Ukraine and Russia.
Other writers have asked me how my edits are. This is what we ask each other. We are fascinated with our edits.
I was talking about them with another writer I ran into at one of the Blake Butler readings.
– Blake’s publisher, Harper Perennial, set up group readings of his forthcoming book over the course of four nights, and I went to the last one at Powerhouse Books in Dumbo. I found the whole event exciting and exhilarating even though I generally find it hard to follow along at those types of things. But the readers were really into performing, and no one took their task lightly. I will add that all of the characters in the book are nameless, which also makes the listening experience a little unique. They are known simply as “the mother,” and “the father,” and “the son.” So when Blake was reading the last segment of the book, it was all about what the son was doing, like: “The son drank too much beer.” Or: “The son leaned against the wall for support.” But, you know, more literary than that. And, after having stood for an hour, my mind began to wander, and I began to imagine that he was in fact talking about “the sun.” Like that every action he was describing could be attributed to that giant burning orb in the sky. And it really made the book even better for me. With no offense to his original intention, of course, which was quite epic on its own. But picturing the sun doing all those things was really an interesting place to go in my head. –
Anyway, I was talking about edits with another writer I ran into at one of the Blake Butler readings. He asked me how my edits were and I said, “Super anal and intense and awesome.” He had sold his book about a couple of months ago, and had also gotten his edits already, and it sounded like he didn’t have that much work to do at all. I was really happy for him. It had taken him five years to write the book, so I am guessing it was as close to perfect as it was going to get on submission.
Practically perfect, what a place to be.
Five years! I wonder what it would be like to take that long to write a book. To have that time. I wonder if I could invent new colors entirely by then, or at least learn all the variations of the color purple.
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I’m reading tomorrow night, Wednesday, March 23, at the How I Learned Series at Happy Ending. The topic: How I Learned to Fight Back. I am excited to read a true story as opposed to fiction for a change. Bob Powers (who I am pretty sure I have read with like 80 times), Cynthia Kaplan, and Joanne Solomon will be reading as well.
I’m also reading again on April 17 at a fundraiser for a new literary magazine, Dreamboat, at Goodbye Blue Monday. And then I don’t think I’m doing anything (at least in New York City) again until the fall. By then I will be a totally new person. Just you wait.
I’d love to go to a reading like that and hear all the variations on what the son/sun did. I’m Peruvian, and I’ve always loved how the Incas worshipped the sun as a god, so it’d be awesome to have that added layer in there, imagining how a sun god goes about these seemingly mundane activities.
Five years does sound like a long time to write a book, until I realize I’m only a year behind that! It took me four years to get to my current draft (admittedly, I took several months off between drafts) and only recently got an agent. By the time it publishes (if/when…I’m trying to think positive thoughts!) it may well be 5 or 6. I told this to my sister, who’s a doctor, and she said “You could’ve been a doctor in that time!”