Editing fatigue, and what’s next

You know how your body can shut down after you finish a par­tic­u­larly daunting schedule? That has hap­pened with my will to edit, I think.

For so many years I’ve worked on these first two books, and when I finally stopped and sent out the proof­reading drafts of book two, I found that I wanted to do any­thing but look at that story again.

I real­ized this just as I was get­ting some great feed­back. Lisa in par­tic­ular gave useful sug­ges­tions about how to level one character’s arc and how to restore some humanity to another char­acter that I had appar­ently come to despise — but the thought of dig­ging into that text again is some­thing I haven’t been able to stomach.

These first two books — and per­haps the sequels that will com­plete the story — feel like the books before the books. If I have the good for­tune of writing more novels, I think these will become, in hind­sight, my equiv­a­lent of those early works that help authors purge the overt, self-indulgent auto­bi­og­raphy from their art and give them the clo­sure they need to start some­thing truly fresh.

For example, the first chapter of book three has a much dif­ferent feel to it in that I’ve taken a large step out of myself. Even the extra chapter I added to book 2 last year has that same quality.

C.S. Lewis said he wrote his space novels largely to get sci­ence fic­tion out of his system, and I’m starting to feel the same way about swords and horses. The truth is that, like 80% of the people who’ve read my book, I don’t usu­ally read “that genre” either. Fan­tasy is great, but I will be happy when people no longer com­pare my very non–mag­ical work to The Lord of the Rings because that’s their only mental reference.

That said, I’ve decided that my next project will, in fact, be the com­ple­tion of this series. I thought about jumping into one of the more modern ideas I have, but I’m now of the mind that they can wait and that they will ulti­mately be better for it.

I don’t have a schedule for returning to finalize book 2 just yet, but it will likely be in the next few weeks. Until then, I’ll con­tinue to enjoy my time away from the story, reading and pur­suing other things.

Without real­izing it, how­ever, I’ve actu­ally written a decent sized children’s book over the last couple months, thanks to my son’s request to tell him sto­ries at night, and the feeling that I should write them down. I thought I was taking a break from writing, but appar­ently not. That’s a good thing.