Monday, March 4, 2013

Getting Back in the Groove...No Thanks to Mercury

Mercury is in Retrograde (February 23rd-March 17) and my household is surely feeling the effects of it. Little things going wrong, hubby had a sty in his eye last weekend, around the time Merc went Retro, or shortly thereafter. He treated it himself here at home with warm wash cloths and rubbing alcohol, but since then, he's started noticing symptoms of having another staph infection in his nose. He had one a couple years ago and the doctor warned him that once he'd had it, he would always be susceptible if his immune system was vulnerable. Well, with the eye issue and a cold and working some overtime, I guess he's gotten a bit rundown, so it's off to the doctor for him today—to get this cleared up and get him to feeling better.

I’m still working on edits to my manuscript for LOVE BY DESIGN, which seems to be taking longer than I had hoped and I’m not too thrilled about doing “revisions” during a retrograde, but I figure I was already working on them beforehand, so I should be okay.

I’m sort of feeling trapped outside myself though and wondering how I’m going to get this done and whether the minor changes I’m making aren’t actually major changes I should have left alone. Thank you again, Merc, for making me rethink & reassess what I’ve set out to do. You’re such a buddy…a super duper true pal!

I guess really I just need to purge the bad feelings from my mind onto the screen here…perhaps if I relinquish the hold it has on me, this niggling that I don’t know what I’m doing anymore, then I can let it go and come back to the manuscript with fresh eyes. I know I feel like I’m just chopping the story to bits and making it worse, but I know that’s not something that only plagues me.

I’m sure many writers feel that way when they’re “in process”- taking useful critique and trying to weave it into the story, hoping to build up the tension, tighten the sentences, tighten the story and plot line and polish it until it shines.

It’s hard to do when the story is complete and it’s not always as easy to go back in and squeeze in a puzzle piece into the jigsaw that wasn’t there before, but might need to be.

Makes me feel like my puzzle has bunched up on the tabletop though and will NOT lay flat to safe my life or the life of the story. Rework is an emotional thing for an author and there’s a lot of moments where you think—

“Yes, this is working great!”
OR
“Wait, this feels wrong!”

Of course, that leads me to wonder if sometimes it’s better to trust your own gut and stick with what you already knew, to the truth of how your story played out to begin with, rather than trying to make changes that might be unnecessary in the long run. I guess I’ll get it figured out. It’s just a matter of time and hopefully a few more swipes through the manuscript and perhaps after a few more eyes have seen it, maybe they can help me figure out if I reworked it enough, too much or if all I’ve done was for naught.

Maybe Mercury in Retro is trying to tell me something. I guess I shall have to wait and see.

No comments: