One of the up sides of going to Boskone is just hanging out with fellow writers. One of the down sides is repeatedly being confronted with my difficulties in letting go of the stories I’m working on. There’s the pen story, in which a merchant’s daughter discovers that the pen she borrowed is a lot more important than she knew–and so is she. And there’s the bee story, in which an old woman’s empty house gets filled with bees.
I’ve been alternating between the two, letting one sit while I work on the other. The idea is to come back with fresh eyes. The problem is those fresh eyes keep seeing more ideas to unearth and weave into the text. But, as I was advised in the self-editing panel, there has to be a limit on rewriting.
So here are my rewriting wresolutions:
- The current “last” editing pass on the pen story really will be the last one. Then I will read it aloud one last time and send it out.
- Same goes for the bee story. It get one last editing pass, and one last read-aloud, and it goes out.
It’s the only way I’ll ever get the rejection count to go up.
Writing Every Day 