Self-Editing

I reached a milestone in my current book edit of Parsifal - I'm up to page 400, two-thirds of the way through. This edit cycle is excrutiatingly slow, because it's the very first one. I forgot how much work there is to do on the first run-through after completing the manuscript draft. I finished writing my previous book back in 2004, and edited it over the next two years, in fits and starts between moving and dealing with Hurricane Katrina and life in general. Then I put it down and wrote this one. It was more than a year before I picked The Flower of Knighthood back up, and I had done several drafts of it to that point, so it was fairly refined before I looked at it again earlier this year, and it STILL took a huge amount of effort to polish it to my satisfaction. So, I am sure I have a lot of work ahead of me, but as I always say, it's worth it to me. What else would I be doing if not this? I like to write more than anything except making and enjoying music, and I'd rather spend my time refining my own work than doing anything else, except maybe making more artwork. I want to live the life of a productive artist more than anything in the world - it's the only way of life that makes me happy and it's worth any amount of hard work.

Speaking of music and productivity, I posted a review of the show I went to last week - it's up now on my music blog, at:

http://fleurdamourmusic.blogspot.com/2008/09/one-trick-ponymarvelous-toydivisadero.html