writing vs accounting

Ho hum, I’m still in the land of taxes. It’s enough to drive you to writing!

Yes, folks, writing can become an avoidance task if the alternative is boring/horrible enough. Such as trawling through receipts and being depressed at the transience of money.

Last night I tackled the re-write and did a decent job. This is my third major pass at the story. The first draft stood at 6,500 words. The second rewrite slimmed it down by a thousand words, and I’ve just shaved another 500 off it.

I still need to go through it with a fine tooth-comb–not tonight–and afterwards I’ll unleash it upon the reviewers and see what they make of it. There’s always the worry that in the attempt to strip it down to its essentials I might actually break it. I think it’s better now, but you never know…

I was thinking last night that a lot of my best writing comes from freeing myself from (self-imposed, and often, unconscious) restrictions and allowing myself to soar.

It irritates me how flaccid, lazy, and clich?-ridden much of my writing is in the first draft. And how I can limit my ideas and their execution by just not being imaginative enough.

I’m trying to make every sentence count, and not let any example of careless language get away.

It’s tiring, and a chore, to read, and re-work, a 5K+ story. It takes a lot of time. It’s not easy to maintain the interest and the desire to re-write it. Especially when that familiar voice pipes up every now again, with its usual mantra:

It’s not even original. Who are you kidding? No one will be interested in reading it.

Then I remind the inner critic that it’s this, taxes, or bed.

That shuts it up for a while.