Mercury
is in Retrograde (February 23rd-March 17) and my household is surely feeling
the effects of it. Little things going wrong, hubby had a sty in his eye last
weekend, around the time Merc went Retro, or shortly thereafter. He treated it
himself here at home with warm wash cloths and rubbing alcohol, but since then,
he's started noticing symptoms of having another staph infection in his nose.
He had one a couple years ago and the doctor warned him that once he'd had it,
he would always be susceptible if his immune system was vulnerable. Well, with
the eye issue and a cold and working some overtime, I guess he's gotten a bit
rundown, so it's off to the doctor for him today—to get this cleared up and get
him to feeling better.
I’m
still working on edits to my manuscript for LOVE BY DESIGN, which seems to be
taking longer than I had hoped and I’m not too thrilled about doing “revisions”
during a retrograde, but I figure I was already working on them beforehand, so
I should be okay.
I’m
sort of feeling trapped outside myself though and wondering how I’m going to get
this done and whether the minor changes I’m making aren’t actually major
changes I should have left alone. Thank you again, Merc, for making me rethink
& reassess what I’ve set out to do. You’re such a buddy…a super duper true
pal!
I
guess really I just need to purge the bad feelings from my mind onto the screen
here…perhaps if I relinquish the hold it has on me, this niggling that I don’t
know what I’m doing anymore, then I can let it go and come back to the
manuscript with fresh eyes. I know I feel like I’m just chopping the story to
bits and making it worse, but I know that’s not something that only plagues me.
I’m
sure many writers feel that way when they’re “in process”- taking useful
critique and trying to weave it into the story, hoping to build up the tension,
tighten the sentences, tighten the story and plot line and polish it until it
shines.
It’s
hard to do when the story is complete and it’s not always as easy to go back in
and squeeze in a puzzle piece into the jigsaw that wasn’t there before, but
might need to be.
Makes
me feel like my puzzle has bunched up on the tabletop though and will NOT lay
flat to safe my life or the life of the story. Rework is an emotional thing for
an author and there’s a lot of moments where you think—
“Yes,
this is working great!”
OR
“Wait,
this feels wrong!”
Of
course, that leads me to wonder if sometimes it’s better to trust your own gut
and stick with what you already knew, to the truth of how your story played out
to begin with, rather than trying to make changes that might be unnecessary in
the long run. I guess I’ll get it figured out. It’s just a matter of time and
hopefully a few more swipes through the manuscript and perhaps after a few more
eyes have seen it, maybe they can help me figure out if I reworked it enough, too
much or if all I’ve done was for naught.
Maybe
Mercury in Retro is trying to tell me something. I guess I shall have to wait
and see.
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