The Corrective Path

For anyone wondering if I completed that comprehensive manuscript edit, it’s done; three or four days ago, in fact (and then I got to packing and moving more of our stuff). The manuscript was completed weeks ahead of schedule, and now I have breathing room. My work quota is looking a whole lot better, and for the most part, things are falling back to status quo.

Once I was done with the edit, I read through the entire novel again in one sitting, updating it along the way. The end result? I felt it was pretty good: Readable, polished, and easy-to-follow.

But it’s far from being publishable. Several scenes need to be re-imagined by the author and re-written. While I did take interpretive liberties during many scenes, tough decisions still have to be made that the author needs to do on his own, decisions that could dramatically alter the structure and direction of the novel.

Thing is, this story has real potential to be something good. The ending kind of put the kibosh on things (an “it was all a dream” style ending–not uncommon for first-time novelists), but if the author finds the guts to allow even some of the events in the story to be real instead of just a dream/delusion, there’s a lot of ways he could create a compelling final act, filled with stunning revelations.

The person who hired me to take on the job reached out by Email after my last post, offering a lifeline. That was very kind of him, and he was understandably worried about me (my previous post was hyperbolic in nature). I still wish that I hadn’t taken on the project, and I am glad it’s over. But I found myself hesitating to hand the project back over to him.

Washing my hands of it would have solved a lot of immediate problems for me, but my rant was just that: a way to let off steam. I was not ready to give up. And once that post was out of my system, I went right back to editing, feeling quite a bit better about it.

I was surprised at how connected I’d gotten to the project. It was a first novel (and one the roughest of rough drafts around), so asking me to do a comprehensive edit of such a manuscript meant that every single paragraph and every spoken line of dialogue had to be re-written, and sometimes even re-imagined. (Note: This is a big ask, especially when handed to a perfectionist like myself. By the way, I got a hard lesson on perfectionism yesterday that I’ll have to share with you in the future.)

The deeper you get into a project–the more work you pour into it–well, it turns out that part of your soul gets mixed in there as well.

When the dust settled, every inch of that book had been dramatically transformed. It was the same basic story, but instead of being filled with circular descriptions, unnecessary scenes, and nonsensical action, it was now lean, crisp, and direct. It had life. The results are something I can be proud of. But, I’m merely a ghost. I just have to be satisfied with the experience it provided, along with the satisfaction of a job well done.

I suppose that’s the curse of ghost editing, isn’t it? Being stuck behind the scenes, living in the shadows of other authors? Well, at least the authors are usually appreciative of your ghost editing skills. Usually.

I had no choice but to finish this project ahead of time. I did it out of necessity. As I mentioned before, my day job had suffering due to my focus on that manuscript, and I’m still feeling the repercussions.

I’ll be blunt: My data analyst training has not been going well these past few weeks, and it’s clear I’m falling behind my colleague in both knowledge and progress.

We got a bear of an assignment on Wednesday. I had this “grand plan” to catch up this weekend. But somehow, my colleague decided to overachieve and finish everything. EVERYTHING. He went the extra mile by solving every single bug and problem, and had it done by … early this morning. And then he went further beyond that into a new project for extra cookie points. He promised to have that project done by Monday, too, on top of everything else.

I’m not sure where or how he found the time to do all this, but he seems to be an unsleeping robot who would’ve been difficult to keep up with on my best of days, even if I hadn’t taken on this extra project in the first place.

The results speak for themselves. There’s this immense gap between us and the people in charge of this potential job are starting to notice. I’m sputtering in meetings, either staying quiet or leaning on jokes and banter, while he’s artfully solving problems I don’t understand while using terminology I also don’t understand, and getting accolades for it along the way.

With this morning’s revelation, catching up over the weekend went from “unrealistic” to “nigh impossible”. Perhaps it’s pretentious to think I can somehow bridge the knowledgegap between us in one weekend, but I’ll be darned if I don’t try. Just like with that manuscript, I’m not going to give up.