Over the last year I’ve had to curb my book-buying addiction. You know the one I’m talking about. You see a book that piques your interest so you buy it. What’s wrong with that? It becomes an issue when you’ve got a two-year queue of material and you still haven’t stopped buying.

Because you know… I have to buy all the books in the world RIGHT NOW otherwise I might not be able to read them later, when every single one of them goes out of print, or Amazon explodes, and libraries everywhere shut down. I must prepare for the literary apocalypse, upon which my collection of unread books will become priceless!

It will be like Mad Max. Collectors and librarians will start showing up at my house with mohawks, leather outfits, chains and sawed off shotguns, threatening me to turn over my pristine copy of Philip K. Dick’s ‘Dr. Futurity.’

No, no. We must calm ourselves and realize that this is never going to happen. If you’ve got five thousand books to read, another one isn’t really going to satisfy the hoarding compulsion!

My last few posts have been gripes about the editing process, so I thought I’d turn things around a bit and talk about the fun parts of editing.

Much of the editing process is hyper-critical of the language and ideas. Occasionally as I edit I find golden opportunities to insert something important that strengthens the themes and ideas.

For example, there is serious black market trade in my universe. The heroes enter the hideout of a shady character. This shady character is a trader and a scavenger. When I wrote the first draft I described some interesting things he had laying around his hideout.

I realized during this editing pass though, that none of the things I described were necessariliy illegal. They were just ‘interesting things’ in a broader sense. Bits and pieces of larger things you might see in this futuristic city and world. So here I have the opportunity to insert description of some of the things that are illegal to trade or very rare. Somehow I missed out on that opportunity the first time around.

Rediscovering this opportunity on the editing pass brought a smile and surge of excitement. Opportunities to strengthen the ideas and themes of the world or characters brighten the drudgery of language edits & cuts.

There is some joy to editing afterall!