Africa book re-edit finished

So I finished it today, coming in with a whole text that I feel fairly good about and that is under 94,000 words… Plus, two days before deadline.
At times there, cutting my own carefully crafted prose felt like cutting a live baby. At times, I got totally into the Zen of it and remembered why it is I just love burying myself in text and working with it like clay. (I work on the text; the text works on me.)
No-one ever taught me to write. When I was in high school in England from age 14 onwards I only studied Pure Maths, Applied Maths, and Physics (that was my A/S levels)– oh, I guess there was a nothingy little exam in there that one had to take called “Use of English.” Three or four years ago, when I was co-writing our Quaker book on Palestine with a bunch of (mainly) US-educated people around my age (or older), I was gobsmacked to discover all the formulaic things they’d been taught about “How to Write”, back in 4th grade– and they had stuck with them ever since. My friend Jim Matlack said he felt phsyically almost sick when he saw me trying to start a sentence with “But”– and he said he could still feel his fourth-grade teacher sitting on his shoulder spelling out all her writing rules to him
Who knew?
A few years ago, I figured out about myself that I really need to get into the physicality and the flow of any long text I’m working on… to be able to read it all in front of me and see the broad flow of the argument and the rhythm of the prose as it unfolds. So at some point– even though I now have a very wide computer screen that lets me put two or three whole pages of text up side by side– I have to work with printout. One-sided printout. And I’ll carefully read each page, mark it up for revisions in a complicated hierarchy of erasable colored pencils (with Post-it notes added where needed), and then shove it off to the left… and then keep doing that till all the pages are laid out side by side there. Well, you can only do that with– on our dining-room table with both leaves extended– 13 pages of text side by side. So then the next 13 pages have to be placed below those; and then the next 13… and by that time I’m crammed off the near-side of the table and this whole text is up there in front of me. And I can stand up on a chair (like G-d?) and look down and see what my creation looks like.
(The reason I’m on the dining-room table at that point is that the very long work counter in my study that I designed specially to be able to do this same thing with has been piled with an archeologically significant set of striations of books and papers for the past 3-4 years.)
But the dining-room table thing only works for text that is 39 or fewer pages long. Some of these chapters I’ve been working with over the past month were around twice that long, and I couldn’t get them all into my head in that very phsyical/visceral/visual way that I need to, all at the same time. I had some anxiety about that.
Then, keyboarding in the edits was a pain. Literally. A couple of times my right shoulder became very inflamed from all the mousing in there. (Apparently, I need to get something called a mouse bridge.) Intermittently I would think, “Hey, Helena,you should really hire some grad student to be doing this.” If I were a male person from a certain generation, no doubt I’d have a lovely wife at home to do it for me. But I do it myself. Okay, I’m not exactly a control freak… but still, there is something valuable about having repeated, intimate relations with a piece of text.
So last night I almost-almost finished it. (Okay, truth in advertising: I thought I had finished it.) I ran myself a deep, hot bath, ate a bunch of chocolate, and had a glass of wine. Spouse still overseas, but son very supportive and celebratory.
I woke up this morning with one final, excellent tweak right at the end of the last chapter in mind… worked on that a bit…chained all the chapters together into a single Word doc and sent it off to Paradigm (and Kinko’s). I ran five miles, did a few other things, picked up the spouse from the airport, and have been generally winding down since then. I think I’ve been going on high adrenaline for about a month and I definitely need to sleep some.
Along the way– did I mention this?– I had to tell the spouse I wouldn’t be going with him on the trip we’d planned to Egypt together. Bummer. But I really needed to focus on this manuscript.
My reward to myself is that next week I’m going to make another trip… one I’m pretty excited about. Yeah, of course I’ll let you all know about it at the appropriate time.
And tomorrow, I’ll get back and write something of my usual insight (!) and trenchancy (?) here on JWN.