It’s got me down, man.  I swear.  I’ve been trying to figure out how long I’ve been working on this last edit on Earth Shatterer and I’m figuring, you know, a month.  Maybe two.

Then I caught something on my Myspace . . . a post I’d written about starting the edit again . . . at the beginning of June . . .

Yup.  That sounds about right considering that’s when I got the last of my beta input and started on the real overhaul.

Beginning of June.  Four months.  And I’m on chapter five.  I think this says something.

It says I need to step away.  It’s not taking me this long for it for nothing (wow, let’s beat on grammar some more, shall we?).  I’ve been working on it pretty much nonstop (save for a couple little breaks) since February, was it?  Maybe March?  Yeah, I know.  I understand that when my work actually gets to print, I won’t have the luxury of taking my sweet ass time getting the edits done.  Deadlines and all.  The thing is, deadlines are surefire motivating factors for me and personal deadlines don’t really work.  Not for me.  Because if I don’t meet them, nothing happens.  I just reset.  Bad mentality, I know, but that’s how I look at it.

So while I have the opportunity to take my sweet ass time working through these edits, I’m going to step away from my manuscript (just as I’m getting to the actual blending instead of total rewriting, another thing that really got on me) and do some side writing.  I’m entering a very short piece into a teen lit Halloween contest on Absolute Write.  It’s horror and I’m actually pretty proud of it.  I want to write a little more branching out on my first Write It Wednesday piece about the crazy roommate and vampires.  I want to write a Coney Island Psychic short and mainly, I want to read as much horror as I can this month.  It’s a little bit of a goal of mine to make a dent in my massive sitting TBR pile and I can double up on that challenge (which actually is a challenge hosted by another review blog) but a YA challenge that I’ve let go stagnant because I went OCD on my ARCs and I’ve been reading them by pub date.

I also got my friend Jev’s newly released eNovella titled “Swan Song” which is his kick ass version of vampires.  It’s available on Amazon (author name Jevron McCrory, from London) if anyone’s interested.    Since I can’t take it anywhere with me, that would mean denting into writing time anyway to get it read.  And I want to read it.  So there’s that too.

I feel like I’m making excuses and I do feel guilty for letting my manuscript sit even longer but it’s not like I’ve stopped writing entirely.  And I know I have an agent that’s waiting on a manuscript (sort of, she knew when she met me that I was in the middle of writing my first book so she was keen to waiting, and then I had to scrap that and wrote the second which is still being edited) but the way I see it, I would think they would rather wait a reasonable amount of time (this was March of 2008 and I’ve gone through 2 manuscripts, it’s not like I’m still toiling at the one) for something that they can actually sell instead of a piece of shit that’ll just get tossed anyway.  I remember reading something about that on Kristin Nelson’s blog.  She’d rather wait for a good manuscript instead of getting something rushed.

I just think my brain needs a bit of a reboot.  I’m not out of ideas or anything on Earth Shatterer.  Not even close.  I’ve just been up to my eyeballs in it month after month after month that I really just need some space from it for a little while.  And the little stories brewing in my head want to come out and play!  But they totally understand that when it’s time to get back to work on ES, they must go back inside for a little while.  They can’t distract me from the bigger project!  Nothing will ever get finished if I allow that to happen!