NVDT – Writerly Concerns – *&%$ing Editing

Yes indeed. I made a resolution with myself in 2021 to compile and edit all my WordPress nonsense that resembled writing. That is, not the posts about writing or any other fluff, but the things that resemble writing. I even paid for a meagre bit of BlogBooker which makes it infinitely easier (to me) to drag chunks off of a Word file and into Scrivener for assembly than scrolling through pages of a blog.

Well, 2021 went *poof*, 2022 “came and went”, and I hadn’t made shit for headway except to get some of Bobby B into a file there sometime back. Which was when I discovered I’d written the second one without finishing the first. One of the beautiful things about Scrivener, particularly if you name the chapters, is how the holes become blatantly obvious. I wrote some stuff to fill out Number One, don’t think I ever completely got there. You know, those kinds of Awww Fuck moments are a real wet blanket on the momentum fire. Then I got distracted by hernia surgery, and back in summer by part-time all-the-time grampa duty and spent what little time I could cobble together writing away on mobile devices for the characters who keep showing up with their C’mon Already pitches.

Here it is 2023, and not long ago, at least in recent memory, I bought enough BlogBooker (it’s inexpensive) to download another year and a half’s worth. I reloaded and upgraded a hand-me-down laptop from the Professor and leave it at the grandkids. They are self-sufficient and I am left to my Kindle, a real book or the Dreaded Editing. With a lot of help from their three-year-old German Shepherd, one of the few creatures on the planet who thinks I’m fun.

None of my junk was near good enough to buy an ISBN for, regardless of the Hell Everybody Does It mentality. Still, why bother? The stories were out of my system, next. I had no delusional dreams of hitting the big time. See, I spent my working life in the creative for cash business as a side to and part of Of Service to the Top End of the food chain in the music business. And I can tell you there is no rhyme or reason as to why or how someone “makes it.” Perseverance is bullshit, regardless of what JK Rowling says, because I have seen the exceptionally talented stay shunted into music director or teaching or sideman gigs (a riff in “Nocturnes”). And seen the equivalent of EL James (Fifty Shades of Grey) soar to the top. Short-lived, but what the hell. Shit and Shinlola are often short-lived. They flame out or the audience gets bored or the sophomore release tanks.

Where was I before I distracted myself? Oh yeah – personal resolution. Like with WordPress, I use certain things as artificial deadlines to Get Something Out and this time it’s personal. Finish This Shit or Quit. I resolved to clean up everything I had to the point of it not being embarrassing (aside from content and the Epic That Shall Never See Daylight) and be done with them. I mean, it’s not like I sit around eternally polishing turds. Like I said, Finished is Enough. But in truth, Done Ain’t Done Till It’s Done. So, I’ve been spending my time running a rag over the piles and committing them to compiled works. The interesting thing is the further back I go, the more work there is to do. I was shocked at a few things in the first Meyers, but it was novella short, and it cleaned up okay. This last thing about Bigfoot and catfish just had some holes, a few soliloquies that ran long and a few of those paragraphs where this sentence goes up here logic issues. Now they flow better. Instead of reading like they fell out as the character thought of them, which is probably true, but no one has shown up in my dreams to give me any grief about their parts getting a logic fix. In fact, The Fat Man’s Granddaughter and Murder in Sepia are done except for tweaking the compile format. Meyers is up to something in the background, the Pontotowok County crew has a short about fake churches and write offs and adverse possession covering a real estate development. Even Bobby B has a whole thing simmering on the stove. But they’re on hold. Because it’s Finish the Shit You Have time.

Editing is where the story gets what it deserves. It was a gift in the first place, and as such deserves the best we can give it, and an opportunity for an audience of more than one. But damn… I throw the jams and live off the evanescence of the moment. Editing, other than strapping a compressor across the Master Bus for glue and some delay and reverb here and there is a time-consuming Pain In the Ass.