So, editing my book is continuing apace. I have been doing 1-2 chapters per day, so now I am up to Chapter 14 out of 30. (Should be 15 but I had to miss a day due to an Internet outage.)

I have settled into a groove when it comes to the editing. It is the same groove I got into with the previous book, although I had to find the groove again in order to remember that.

What keeps me going in the editing is the joy and pleasure of read (or is it rereading?) what I wrote. In general, I am pretty happy with what I have written, and rather enjoy reading it while I edit this and that.

Mostly, I just proofread and work on sentence structure. That’s about the level of editing that I can handle at this point in my development as a writer and as a human being.

I hope that, with time and patience and therapy and recovery, I will become strong enough to look at my work from a greater height, so to speak. To have the confidence to handle larger issues, both in diagnosing them and in fixing them.

As it stands, I have confidence that what I write is a decent read, and a heck of a lot better than a lot of stuff on the shelves. (And the… eShelves?)

But I am still somewhat dissatisfied with the work as a whole. I feel like my most recent book, just like the previous one, is somewhat of a mess. It lacks the deep, solid structure that makes a book truly great, and not just a bunch of stuff that happens.

Don’t get me wrong. Lots of perfectly wonderful books are more or less just a collection of things that happen. The sort of solid structure based on a deep understanding of theme that leads to an amazingly meaningful conclusion that I wish for is probably, when looked at objectively, something that only the greatest writing in the world has achieved.

So I am probably setting the bar pretty high there. But I am not expecting myself to achieve this goal any time soon. In fact, I will be happy to achieve it at all in my time on Earth as a writer. If I manage to write one book that I can truly say is the sort of solid and coherent story that I have always wanted to tell, then I will die a happy, happy writer.

And of course, it would help if I was writing according to some sort of plan, or even an outline, instead of just starting with a few scenes and a few characters in mind and winging it from there.

But I don’t know. I have been pondering the idea lately that maybe I am better off winging it and trusting my instincts when it comes to the bigger picture. It is certainly a way to keep from overthinking things and getting all tangled up in anxiety and worry and complication and multiplication of variables.

Don’t sit there on the shore trying to figure out the perfect dive. Just jump in and swim.

Not the way a thoughtful and deliberative planner like me usually goes about things, but then again, I have written two books by winging it and none by thinking things through, so I would have to say that so far, winging it is winning by roughly infinity percent.

SO that will be, I think, my method in the future. On paper (remember that stuff?), the proper and sensible way to write is to write an outline, then flesh out the outline, then write a rough draft based on the outline, then carefully revise the outline over and over again until it’s as good as you possibly can make it, and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz I am already bored into unconsciousness.

I don’t think I am capable of doing that. At the very least, if I tried to do that now, I would not end up with something I liked. And if I don’t like it, nobody else will. I truly believe that the artist has to please themselves first. Otherwise, what they are doing is not true art, but mere simulation, a trick used to please others at the expense of your own voice.

And I truly believe that making sure your art pleases you results in better art. That special kind of coherence that makes good art stand out can only come from a unity of vision that, in turn, can only come from the deep and sincere desire to express something from deep within oneself.

It could be said that great art comes from something the artist needs to express. Something inside them needs to come out, and the art is the method of escape.

This need not be as dire and serious as it sounds. A strong desire to amuse and entertain can be just as sincere and powerful motivation to create art as releasing your inner demons onto the page. Joy and merriness are emotions people suppress just as much as their sadness or rage.

So I figure that I am the sort of artist who had to learn by doing. I can’t learn writing from books or web pages or seminars or any of that. Integrating outside information into my highly intuitive and idiosyncratic creative process is just too damned confusing and hard.

This is not an act I can perform rationally. Creativity is not like that. It come from within, and the trick is to capture it in action, not turn it into a mechanical process.

Luckily, I have an amazingly fertile mind, so it is not like I am worried I will run out of idea. I will just keep writing things and submitting them places (that’s the tricky bit that I have not done wo well on so far) until my stuff is good enough for either the eBook market or a big publisher, or both.

And maybe then I will make enough money for a minimum wage lifestyle! w00t!