Editing my own work

I can’t really speak to the act of writing a book, having been only marginally successful at it. I mean, yes, I’ve gotten a few books published and done okay with them, but I’ve also gotten a few books not published. I think that, at heart, I’m a pretty good stylist but only a so-so storyteller, and to be honest, commercial success requires more of the latter than the former. Whatever. It’s not like I’m sitting around cursing my life or anything. All that time not writing NY Times bestsellers allowed me to create Nostrum. Twice. If that hasn’t left the world a better place, then I don’t know what has.

Of course, I can speak to the act of reading books, as I’ve done here explicitly as I do it for the DJ. I have a pretty good sense of books in general. I always find it strange reading anything I’ve written myself after, say, a couple of months have passed. I absolutely have no instinctive recollection of having written it. I can look at my own text in a state of total amnesia, which strikes me as rather odd. Most writers I know are completely wedded to their words, indelibly lined to every comma and adjective. They are their books. They are their writing. Their spirit is on the page. Maybe that’s why I never broke through. My spirit, I guess, is somewhere else. But that does make me a good editor of my own work. If I put something aside for long enough, it’s as if it’s not my own work anymore, and I know quite well that I am expert at editing the work of others, having done it for the last 40 years or so. I edit myself just fine. My writing process comprises, first, getting it all on paper in the first place, from start to finish, which is the hardest part. Then I comb through it and comb through it and comb through it, with great ruthlessness. It doesn't come out all that good in the first place, but I can edit it into shape given enough time. And every time I do, it's all new again. I'm probably lucky with that. Otherwise I don't think I'd have the stamina to stick with it.

The process of putting together Summer Street, after I completed enough drafts on my own to send it on, was mostly in aid of polishing the narrator’s voice. It is written in the first person, told by a kid. This is sort of tricky, and I was told to keep polishing it so that any vestigial non-kid writing was expunged. Good advice, and I think that I managed to do it. I won’t be going through it again, aside from checking the formatting per Kindle. It is what it is. I remember looking at Lingo when it first went electronic years after it was published, to see about updating it a little. But that was a mug’s game. Being me, with my personal writing amnesia, I read it as if I’d never seen it before, found it pretty amusing, clarified maybe two sentences that stopped me, and that was it. It was so much a part of its technological time that updating it would have done nothing for it. After all, it was make believe in the first place. How grounded in reality is make believe supposed to be? An old Apple computer couldn’t come to life? Does that mean a new one can? Pul-leeze.

The House on Summer Street, in other words, is as edited as it’s going to get. I spell-checked it one last time, and I’ll look over the formatting after I port it over to Amazon, but that’s it. In other words, I have about five minutes of work left on the text before I pull the trigger and make it live. But there are considerations other than the text themselves. Like the cover, for instance. I spent a lot of time last night playing with that, and I’ll pass along my thoughts next time.