Just the thing I need, how nice...

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Main Gauche of The Short Path.

Get yours.

Finished. Again.

This last fortnight, I've been reading through & revising 'River of the World', by editorial request: basically cutting some of the wading-through-water passages (it's a very wet book, and much of it happens in the sewers of an alternate Istanbul) and fine-tuning the end. It's the kind of work that can feel like the definition of diminishing returns: the first time through, last month, I cut 36,000 words; this time, it took just as long and just as much concentration, and I cut 4,000 words. It is necessary, though, this second pass; you need the rough-cut of the first pass to take out the gross excess verbiage, before you can begin to see the true text peeping through. First you cut, then you polish; first you chisel, then you grind. Etc, for whatever craft you care to think about.

And then, in this craft, you get the copy-edited manuscript back, and you go through it again; and then you get the proofs, and you go through it again. All in too-short order. Surfeiting, the appetite sickens, and so dies; is it any wonder that very few of us revisit our own texts, once they're published? I've almost completely lost touch with the writer I used to be.

Still, the revised text has gone off now (two weeks early, for which I expected praise and credit and love; what did I get? An out-of-office autoreply. Sigh...) and for the rest of the day I can be that completely different kind of writer, the kind that doesn't actually have to write anything. I'm going to Sunderland, to look at something new of Bryan Talbot's, and then to eat and drink and be happy. Grindstones are tomorrow's promise; tonight we blunt our noses.