Editing My Own Work

I suck at this. I suck soooo bad at this very thing that if I start editing my work, every word ends up in the trash. I am Queen of the backspace key I tell you. Princess of delete. They are my two best friends when I edit my work, and even at times while I'm writing.

Stupid? Yes.
Ridiculous? Absolutely.
Ludicrous? Ah, that's the one.

I mean, how am I ever supposed to be a good writer if I can't even edit my own work properly? A friend of mine knows about said idiocy and tells me what I need to do. Do you think I listen? Haha, nope. Even when I try to do what I'm told it doesn't work out for me. A few days ago I was editing my current SS and doing fairly well, at first. Then I started on the newest section that I have written and it went downhill from there. I had to stop myself, close the damn story, and even close Word so I wouldn't be tempted to do any more damamge to it. The thing is, the story is only five pages total so, it's not hard to edit right? Riiiight, sure it isn't.

It's hard for someone who can't stand to see how she writes because she knows for a fact that it's not good enough. My ideas are good, that I will brag about a little, but the way the stories are written is not. They are always filled with shit that doesn't need to be there. I swear when I finish this story and hand it to my friend, I'll get it back and more than half the words will be gone. Ramble much?

So what do I do? I try, really I do. It's just that when I'm writing a story I tend to like what's going on so much that I don't really pay attention to everything I'm writing. (Some of you out there will not understand that, but others will.) Then when I get to the editing process I look at my WIP and say WTF?!?!?!?! What were you thinking when you wrote that line? Or, various other things that aren't fit to print, warning on the blog or no. Hit the backspace key again... yep, it always comes back to that.

Another HUGE problem I have when I'm writing, not even to the editing yet, just the writing, is that I don't show enough of what's going on. I tell it. Idiot! Who's going to want to read a book like that? Nobody, that's who. I know people, writers, who tell me they went through the same thing and that eventually I will get better at it. I know they're right, I just wish it wasn't taking so long. That's another stupid thing, you have to be patient when you're a writer. If you are not prepared to wait..... and wait..... and wait, for your book to be published, then you won't get what you want out of it.
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Ok, so I got pulled away last night in the middle of my rant and now I don't even remember the rest of what I was going to say. Great. Not surprising really. It was probably just more rambling anyway.

So, I was thinking this morning about the one book I have managed to finish and how I haven't done any rewriting on it in ages. There are many reasons for this, one being the idiocy previously mentioned, but mostly it's just that the story doesn't interest me as much as it used to. I was hoping that taking a break from it would help, but it hasn't. The novel I finished is in the M/T/S genre and everything else I've been working on lately is in Fantasy. I suppose that's just the writing mood I'm in these days. That happens a lot with me. I can go months writing nothing but one genre and then suddenly I'll want to go back to the other one. An idea will hit me or there will be some part of a story I have to fix because I just can't stop thinking about it.

I guess that explains why I have 11 stories total on my hard drive. That includes the finished, well first draft anyway, of my first book. There are 6 in the Fantasy genre, 4 in M/T/S, and 1 that I have no clue where it should be classified. It started out as a short story for a particular place and has blossomed into a 19 part story so far, where hardly anything happens, but it is filled with tons of people. I know it may not sound like it from that description but I love writing that story. I take too long to get new segments out sometimes but my loyal readers are always pleased, and that makes me very happy indeed. Crap, rambled on again, my point was that not all of these stories are even more then a few pages long. I get an idea, I write a few scenes that I'm thinking about, I make little notes here and there about things I want to happen, or a certain way I want a character to be. But on some of these stories I can't seem to move any further. So they sit there. I like the ideas too much to just throw then away. Weird considering what I said before, but true. Outside of the ideas though, it's mainly the characters I want for each story that keep me interested in them so much, even though I can't seem to write anything. I know most of my MCs pretty well, but there are some that I don't know anything about. Oddly, one of my MCs eludes my understanding in some of her thinking, but I write her story more than any other. It's weird how that sometimes happens I think. You should know the person you're writing about, right? I mean, at least most writers do. But then again, I don't follow the norm most of the time. :)

Oh, and just a little heads up, new pics will be posted shortly after this is.