Editing Is The Devil

Why can't the damn story come out right the first time?  Seriously, I'm about to dump all 6000 words into cyberspace and not feel one bit of regret.

Call it the flaw of perfectionism, OCD, or just plain sitting on a pitty potty, it matters not.  The end result is the same:  I can't stand editing.

It's not the hard work that kills me, the constant deletion and additions that take up more time than the actual writing of the story. It's the feeling I get as every hour passes, that NOTHING I do will make this story worth something.  That every single deletion or addition is only serving to reduce my words to meaningless dribble, and the more I touch, the more I harm.  Until, by the time I've finished, I can't distinguish between a brilliant sentence and a fifth grader's attempt at what he or she did last summer.

Why can't I realize during the actual writing, that the paragraph I just wrote doesn't do squat for the momentum of the story? Why can't I realize, right then and there, as I'm typing my thousandth word, that I have completely screwed up the story logic, or better yet, never got to it in the first freaking place???

I'll tell you a shameful secret -- it makes me want to quit.  Seriously.  And what makes it almost unbearable, is that writing is the loneliest freaking business out there.  I see all these opportunities out there, all these great posts about people selling their novels, getting a story accepted to a great magazine, and it energizes me into action, because I'm a writer, damn it! I can DO this. I HAVE done it.  But then, that old devil called doubt creeps in and stomps on me.Yes, writing is lonely.

I hate it.

I also love it.  But I'm not loving it now. Now, all I want to do is cry.  And throw my laptop out of the window.

It's almost 11pm Arizona time, and I'm grouchy because I've been at it all day.  I'm nothing if not persistent. So maybe tomorrow, I'll get it right.

Let's hope so, at least.

Okay, rant over. For now.