Editing...

Editing...

You ever have one of those days where you spend many hours reading and re-reading, tuning and fine-tuning something you wrote years ago that has just sat in your computer waiting to be pulled up from the hard drive after months and months of neglect because a spark of inspiration occurred when you read a book by a well-known and very rich author and thought to yourself, Hey, I can do that?

Ever begin an editing session excited to have that inner drive that is many times lacking, a drive to attack a manuscript with the full enthusiasm of a young man anxious to show the world that there is good to be found in the digital pages you've written, good that needs to be shared with the rest of the world only to lose steam after a few hours and wonder if the words are, not only acceptable, but perhaps down-right unreadable and nowhere near good enough to catch the eye of some desperate agent in search of something to represent and ultimately publish?

When editing have you ever realized after trimming maybe 1/3 off the original document that maybe you've either, 1: edited too much and the original vision you were trying to portray will be forever lost in the great binary wastebasket never to touch another human's heart, or 2: edited not enough and you've dragged on (and not for the first time...) paragraphs to the point that they represent the literary equivalent of the Grand Canyon in both scope and philosophical meaning?

No? Me either...