Did I say a month?

A few of you might have read my post a few weeks ago about my plan to put a month of brain-cleansing waiting between finishing the first draft of my novel and editing it. Reasons: I hate editing, and it often makes me hate my work, especially when I get to that I’ve-read-these-words-so-many-times-I-can-recite-them stage. So I decided to (and my twin forced me to) wait a month. Let me forget the book. Then I could be surprised by how good the first draft is, instead of being demoralized by every scene I recognize and remember.

It was a really good plan. In the beginning, it was REALLY HARD. In the month where I finished Devil May Care, I trained myself to spend every waking second thinking about or working on the novel. Without this burst of productivity and dedication, I would never have finished the first draft as quickly as I did (a personal record: five months–with school, homework, and first semester finals thrown in). I’m proud of myself. Serious. Ridiculously. *pats self on back awkwardly*

But a month passed (two days ago, technically) and I realized another thing. I need more time. I want to edit this well. Not the half-assed, un-enthused editing jobs of my other novels that essentially ruined my earlier projects for me after five plus years of work. Also, school’s getting crazy. Finals are approaching rapidly (slow down!) and every one of my teachers loves PROJECTS and basically I don’t have the time to dedicate myself to my novel. Especially for editing. Writing is a quick process for me, a clumping together of stolen minutes to create a story. I’ll still be writing Hell and Styx, don’t worry. I’ll use my free time to write, because I won’t have much of it, and that’s how I’m used to writing anyway. (Again with the novel + homework thing.) But editing is a much more laborious task for me, and I need to be fully conscious, not sleep-deprived and stressed, when I do it.

So, new schedule! I’m leaving DMC on the back burner, closed off, out of my mind, until school ends. June 4th. One more month. Then, I’m dedicating my gloriously summer-school-free (no more getting ahead in math! no more awkward health class! huzzah!) summer to editing. Editing it well. Making it into a book I love and I can’t wait for people to read, instead of one I cringe at the idea of letting see sunlight. And hopefully without making into a book I can’t stand to read myself.

So. Did I say one month? I’ll take one more. Thanks.

Meanwhile, wish me luck on remembering how to graph hyperbolas and how to use logs and what exactly the Hardy-Weinberg principle says and what  the main themes in Fahrenheit 451 (a review for that coming soon!) are and the details of the Cuban Missle Crisis. Sometimes we have to balance our lives. Right now, grades > novel. I’m a high school freshman. It’s a sacrifice I’ll make. But this summer, you know that equation will be multiplied by a -1.

P.S. for non math people: multiplying or dividing an inequality by a negative flips the sign, in this case making the statement read grades < novel.