Half way through editing and I made even song

I got another two chapters in proof this weekend and I finished about 5:30 pm so I snatched a meal, briefly rang my parents and headed off to the Cathedral for Evening Prayer. Got there just in time, not quite the last in the door but almost and the Old Testament reading included:

For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept
line upon line, line upon line
here a little, there a little.

Hum it sounds like God has been doing some editing as well. When you here about editing it, sounds tedious and editing 80,000 words sounds very tedious. Well I am not finding it so. It is far more similar to doing a large puzzle when you know you have the basics worked out but you need to get everything exactly right. It is concentrated effort. I think there is one sentence that I rewrote three times today just to get it to express what I wanted it to say!

Writing has the satisfaction of producing

Drafting has the satisfaction of shaping it 

Editing has the satisfaction of getting it right.

Each satisfaction feels different and has a different downside. The fear when you are producing that the words will not come, the way that shaping a project just takes over the whole of your brain and the frustration of not getting things right.

There are times when all I want to do is go out and do something different, such as the time when Grammarly decided to forget that I had gone through a section deciding which words to use and therefore made me go through it again pressing the ignore button for twenty minutes. There are times when I look at a sentence and I can not make head nor tail of it, or if I can it is utterly irrelevant to what I am saying at that point in the chapter. There are also times when I wonder if I have gone through the same passage three times or whether there are three very similar sounding passages in what I have written. Repeated sentences are one of the trolls waiting to catch you out when you are drafting. Then there are times of utter frustration when you go to look up a quote and you find that instead of ordering a book, you have ordered a book about the book!

That said five chapters in draft, which leaves me worship, methodology, introduction and conclusion to go. That is four. Hoping I will be able to extend the long weekend next weekend so I can get all this done with a couple of work at home days.