I was, perhaps, a bit too optimistic in my update last week about getting back on the editing horse. I got very little done this week, I’m ashamed to say. Looking at my word tracker for the month, April has been pretty much a write off, editing-wise. There are several reasons for that – I was fighting off illness for the first couple weeks, then I had my mother visiting, and this week it was just generally getting caught up on work and my social life, after the weeks of illness and visits.  

So, this has been a week to practice being gentle on myself and remembering that I only have so much energy, which sometimes needs to be spent elsewhere. As long as I don’t let being gentle with myself turn into letting myself be lazy, it’s okay to get off track sometimes. And so I’m here, back at my Sunday writing sprints to write my blog entry and then do some editing, in a way I haven’t done for at least 3 weeks. I’m determined not to cross over into the territory of laziness.

It’s not helping that the last few times I did settle in to write, I continued to be plagued by the problems I previously described of one of my characters really fighting me because I’m trying to write about a thing he wanted kept hidden. I got through the big reveal of his secrets and I’d really thought things would ease up now that it was all out in the open.

Nope.

Now all of my main characters are upset. The one who’s secret was revealed is being marginally more cooperative now that it’s out but he’s still not exactly happy. The other two are mad about it now that they know because they’re feeling hurt by the one who had the secret. The end result has been that all three of them are pouting, dragging their heels and not wanting to cooperate. Everyone wants to retreat to their private corners and mope. I didn’t anticipate this.

This is, obviously, one of those times where I’ve had to ask myself whether this is really the direction I want to go, if it’s proving so damned hard. All I can say is that while I haven’t been doing a lot of editing or writing this month, I never really stop thinking about the book, so I’ve considered this reveal ad nauseam. Unfortunately for my characters, I do think it needs to stay. It’s even fixed up some issues I was having about how to tweak the ending and tie things together. So while it sucks for my characters on a personal level, I think it makes for good reading. My characters just aren’t comforted by what’s good for the book.

I guess that’s understandable. If someone was writing a book of my life and wanted to put in the bits I find shameful, I also wouldn’t be much comforted by the assurance that it’ll be good for the book. The fact that these people are fictional assuages any guilt I might feel about airing their dirty laundry, but that’s not doing much for getting them to go along with it.

Sometimes I think of that joke that it’s ok to talk to yourself so long as you don’t answer, because then you’re insane. I often wonder what level of insanity it is to be writing full-on essays about how the characters I made up are arguing with and actively working against me. It’s especially disconcerting when I consider how normal I feel despite this.

Ah well, insanity or not, I have a book to edit. Fingers crossed for a week of better productivity, and, if I’m really lucky, less arguing with the people that live in my head.