The Worst of Tasks--Editing

Yesterday I started editing Anarchy Veiled. I want to finish a second draft by February 13th. This means that I will probably start to hate everything about this book by about...oh...the end of this week..

The problem lies in the fact that I'm an awful editor. I've never finished getting a story through multiple drafts, nor even finishing a second one. Even my first novel hasn't really taken off into "second draft" territory. I don't know what is good or bad in my writing. When I read what I write, I hate it. I literally can not stand to read what I write. I can't get over the fact that what I write isn't as good as what I read in other people's work. Between the fact that my style is a mess, my grammar is twisted, and my word choices are, at times, awful. Wait, why did I start writing this again?

Oh, to complain about this editing thing.

Anyway, I have to get it done. I need to get to a fourth or fifth draft, and get the opening chapters into beautiful form so that I can start hunting for an agent again. Yes, despite the fact that I feel like my writing is the literary equivalent of a forty-car-pileup, some people tell me that I'm a pretty good writer. Some of these people are being sincere. The others might just be lying. Who cares. I like the stories that I am telling, whether or not I think that the work I've done is miserable. I still want someone to read it. And make money off of it. Yes. Money is an issue. I could write a lot more books if people were paying me money for what I write. And I could quit working in the Pit-O-Retail.

So I'm editing both of my books. Anarchy Veiled is taking priority over that catastrophe of a book I wrote in 2011. I'm in a peculiar spot with AV though, in that I am not finding a whole lot of errors. This might change as I continue with the mark-up of the book, but for now, it's a fairly clean draft. Or I'm blind. Or stupid. Something. Hmmm.

I'm currently about 25 pages into the mark-up, and working a mid-shift today didn't exactly give me a lot of time to scribble in my printed copy of the book. I'm going to get to it after I finish rambling onto this blog thing, which is proving to be an amazing way to procrastinate on the one part of writing which I still can't seem to get a handle on.

I'll ask one question:

How do you know if you've got a good draft on your hands? Really. I need to know this.

Maybe I should read some Kevin J. Anderson Star Wars novels, so I can see that there are (likely) worse sci-fi writers than myself.

Until I find something else to complain about, farewell.