(grinning for the first time in hours, at nifty conversation)

Editing sucks. A lot. And I don't know if I even have the skills to write what I picture, anyway.

Editing sucks. A lot.

Have you thought about waiting a little bit before tackling this? You only finished...last week, was it? For me, at least, I need a good two weeks or more to read it fresh before I can objectively (as much as that's possible) edit and revise.

Yay for Kristin's good freelance deal! That's a nice chunk of change for press releases, my dear.

Yay for Kristin! Getting paid is always good.

I could definitely wait. But I'm thinking I need some sort of project to take my mind off upsetting thoughts today. I'll just look for simple fixes first. Still not my favorite though, but better than getting sucked in to awful TV about baby-selling rings or something.

Editing sucks. A lot. And I don't know if I even have the skills to write what I picture, anyway.

First of all, I agree with Amy that you might want to let your book rest a little more before you try editing it.

As for writing what you picture...well, skills can grow. A mememe story--when I first started doing this seriously back in 2001, everyone who read my work routinely told me they couldn't picture what I was writing. The characters were interesting and the writing was solid, but give us more details, please, especially more visual details. Four years later, I routinely get comments on how vivid, and especially how visual, my writing is! And while I've certainly tried to improve, I'm always surprised by the compliments, because I still think my writing is on the sparse end when it comes to sensory details. Someone will say, "Wow, this is vivid! I could just taste the dust from the road," and I'm thinking, "But all I did was say it was a hot day, and that my heroine was breathing the dust of thousands of marching feet and tramping hooves." Or they'll say, "Wow, that scene by the fire is so visual," and I think, "But all I said was that when he looks up from reading the poem, she's at the very edge of the firelight staring raptly at him--you filled in all the bits about what the firelight would look like flickering on her fair skin and suchlike yourselves."

Which is all a longwinded way of saying you improve with practice, and sometimes, apparently, much more than you realize.

Visual details don't come naturally to me. I can do stage direction well, but trying to describe the mental movie is a struggle. When I go back and try to add things, it always feels like padding.

ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssLUT

Ah, truth in advertising.

Stage direction always feels clunky to me on first draft, and sometimes on second and third. The thing that intimidated me the most when I got the idea for the wip was I knew it'd have several important action sequences, and hence much stage direction, while the first book was much more about people strolling and riding about pastoral English countryside being talky meat.

As for the visual/sensory stuff, I feel like what I've somehow accidentally figured out is how to tap into people's existing store of mental images and say just enough to make them flesh out the picture themselves. Because I'm certainly not painting word pictures or anything of the sort. But I don't know how I'm doing it. Not that I'm going to lose any sleep over it, as long as it's working.