27/08/2020 – Recovery

I finished up my edits two days ago. It felt like letting out a breath I’d been holding for nearly a month. It felt like racing for a finish line that only existed in my head and where no-one was competing against me, but I still felt compelled to race.

Yesterday I crashed, hard.

Part of having Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is being tempted to fall into a boom and bust cycle when it comes to energy. The short version is: You feel tired 75% of the time, so when you feel less tired, you feel the need to do all the things that you couldn’t do the rest of the time, so you try to do ALL THE THINGS, so you burn through your energy and crash.

What happened to me in August wasn’t exactly that, but it was similar. Anyway, it’s done now. I’m happy with the state the book is in. I’ve sent it out to an editor to get it evaluated so I can find out what the next step is. For those keeping score, the current amount I’ve spent on editing for this novel is around £3,100. Just over a sixth of that was the evaluation, the rest was the developmental and line edits the book has gone through so far.

I should do a full post about this at some point, but whilst I remember: Writing books is really, really expensive. By which I mean: To write something good, you need an editor, and editors are expensive as hell, because editing requires a lot of skill.

The upshot of this is that writing is becoming extremely classist. Poor people will find it much harder to break through with their writing because they might be able to afford to get one of their books edited, but can they afford to get the book after that edited if the first book isn’t picked up? What about the one after that?

My book that’s currently with an editor is book #7. My first book wasn’t edited by anyone other than me (and WOW it shows), my second and third book were edited by friends (I should be clear that I paid them). My fourth and fifth books were professionally edited, but pretty far down the line, so there were structural problems with them that it was quite hard to deal with by the time editors got on board.

My sixth and Seventh books were my first work to have editors on board as soon as they’re supposed to, I.E. – I write a first draft and send it to an editor who says ‘yes’ to some parts, ‘no’ to others, and I then go back to make massive structural changes when writing the second draft.

The only reason I was able to do all of this is because I have ready access to money. Not a lot of it, I’m not doing massively well financially, but I can still afford to. People in lower income brackets than mine wouldn’t necessarily be able to do this. This is one of a hundred thousand ways capitalism maintains the status quo. It keeps poor people poor by blocking off ways they can break out of poverty.

This post got away from me a little.