I felt like such a fraud. I don’t think I’m an expert, but I do tend to think I’m better at internet-things than that.

You know how self-doubt always brings friends? I spent yesterday fighting in the ftp of my blog. While waiting for my client to do whatever I’d decided I needed to do this time, I wandered the internets looking for opportunities for non-annoying self-promotion. I found that despite my hopes (foolish, I know) the better-known places reviewing gay fiction are no more inclusive of self-publishing than their more traditional counterparts. I jumped into a few conversations in a site where I’ve been a member for over a year, and was completely ignored (the horror!) in half of them.

I started to wonder. I think I’d be an idiot not to be anxious about my self-publishing venture, but normally I can keep it under control. I am not, after all, risking my (non-existent) farm on it. I’m taking a chance to make my life bigger, but I’m not gambling anything but my belief that my books are worth reading.

It was that belief that came under fire yesterday. With writers–at least with this writer–in the end, it all comes back to the writing. I didn’t jump into conversations pimping my book–I posted my thoughts on the topic of the thread. Did I say it badly? Did I repeat someone else, being too dense to see it? Why didn’t they like me?

The review sites–why are they excluding people? Gays know how it hurts to be marginalized; why wouldn’t they even give me a chance? Why won’t they like me?

How could I even think of hoping people would look at my book and like it, if I couldn’t even get them to look at me?

Whine, whine. It was a day of whining. I’m better now, and able to realize that yesterday my pouty self was acting like a two-year-old.

Here’s what else I realized/remembered today:

• This book made a respected agent dither for a year before she decided not to represent it. Sure, she said no–but not until she thought about it for a year.
• This book was rejected by another agent because he didn’t think it would sell due to the genre. Same agent asked for any fantasy I had.
• This book was read in one sitting by a friend who “hates first-person” and hasn’t read any book in one sitting in quite some time.
• My books have kept people up all night.
• My books have made people late for their cousin’s wedding.
• My books have made people threaten me if I whine that I’m going to stop writing.
• Yes, most of the people who love my work are my friends–but many of them are my friends because they read and liked my writing, and reached out to me because of it.
• I’m not going to hit the NYT bestseller list, but I’m not aiming for it. Sell mega-numbers of an SF book featuring a gay main character who doesn’t die? Yeah, that would really be dreaming.
• I love what I write. I’d rather be moderately (or even not at all) successful sharing work I love than drive myself mad trying to write “the next Twilight.”

So here we are at today. My blog is fixed, and my writing is pretty good. The questions of “is my writing good enough?” and “Can I market what I write effectively?” remain to be answered–but that’s about where we were before I broke my blog, so I’m okay with that.

Yes, I know I said I enjoy editing. And I do–most of the time. But there’s a reason Holly Lisle calls this part the “manuscript slog.”

[Disclaimer--this may not actually be the way editing goes for you. But it's the way it goes for me, and others I've talked to, so I'm going with second person plural. If it doesn't apply to you, I hope there's still something of use here, even if it's just the sense that other writers have their problems too. Heaven knows we all have our difficulties.]

In the beginning, editing sucks. OMG, how it sucks, like a vacuum, like a black hole, it sucks so majorly hardcore you’d rather clean the grout or separate all the coffee filters than edit, it sucks like THAT. It’s a mess, it’s all a horrid mess, why did you write that, and what did you mean by this, and ZOMG, why does this character even exist? And the really big question, how on earth or beyond it did you ever for one moment think that you, stupid hack that you are, could actually write?

But it gets better. You flail a lot, and fix a few things, flail a little more, fix a few more things, and before too long (but not soon enough!) you are doing more fixing than flailing and you are trudging onward, slow but steady, unbowed. You start to think you’re going to do this. You’ve found a few gems, and you’ve enhanced their setting, cut away some deadwood, added subtlety and humor and integrated a bit of description in a marvelous way, and you think you’re going to make it.

Your MS is waiting for that, of course. Just waiting for that heady sense of accomplishment so it can flatten you but good.

Sometimes you’ll hit it as your novel gathers itself for a smashing ending. Other times you’ll still be in the muddle of the middle, and it will hit you.

This time for me it was a scene, a beloved scene, that introduced a very important, heavily-foreshadowed character–but did absolutely nothing else. No story advancement. No conflict. Nothing to keep anyone reading who wasn’t charmed (as I most certainly was) by this wonderful new character. I hit that scene last Sunday, and knocked off for the day because I had no idea what to do with it, and I already had three hours of editing in. Maybe overnight my muses would tell me what to do with it.

Monday brought some bad news that really shook my world. No editing was achieved. Tuesday the same thing. Wednesday I tried. I claimed one hundred minutes, and most of that was flailing. But if I flail with red pen in hand, marking up my MS and marking up my marks and reprinting and trying again and yet again, that counts.

Thursday I claimed ten minutes. Friday, twenty.

Yesterday, Saturday, I claimed 240. The scene is still not fixed, but I think I see how now, and that came about by my working on it Friday and Saturday night, scribbling notes by the stage-lights as I waited to go on at Valley of the Moon.

If you’re going through hell, keep on going.

And never, ever, write a scene with no conflict. You’ll hate yourself later. I am so not kidding.

I’m still waiting to see if I can do it again. After work, grocery shopping, and swimming, I’m not sure I’ve got it in me.

But…note to self (again): when you’re going crazy, hating life and everything in it–for God’s sake, WRITE!!

That is all.

Then I had to change one more number, that was connected to the first number.

Then I realized I’d changed the entire history of my galaxy, as that second number was the date of the ambush that altered the course of Eve’s life and, by the way, plunged the Union into a war that lasted ten (was nine) years.

Do you have any idea how many times I’ve mentioned that war in the three complete novels and fifty or so incomplete novels/novellas/short stories/drabbles I have all over the place?  Yeah, pretty much all of them.  Want to know how many times I’ve said how long it lasted, or how old someone was when it started, or something like that?

Exactly.  No clue.  So it’s change it back–even though it makes more sense now–or change them ALL.

Change them ALL it is.  Don’t ever let anyone tell you I don’t suffer for my art.

Bly says I’m not allowed to change any more numbers.