stonepicnicking_okapi

In theory, I was planning to start on the structural edits tomorrow; in practice I feel like I'm being clever "cheating" by starting today. No, I have no external deadline. This is just My Brain vs My Brain and winning 😎 (maybe???), lol.

The feeling most at the surface at the moment seems to be a kind of terror, which obviously is not nice to feel but I'm also fascinated by it. Why do I feel like this? This is the first round of editing. I'll have at least the prose edits later to refine stuff, and proofreading, and then whatever changes happen after beta-reader feedback. That means while there's a ton of work immediately ahead, there's also not as much pressure around "MUST GET EVERYTHING RIGHT LAST CHANCE!!!" Yeah there's a lot to do, but I've been working on the Cursed With for nearly 3 years. I know I can put in the work. I'm using a new method of editing based on that workshop, but normally I'm excited to try new things, especially related to something I know I have difficulties with (clearly my way of doing structural editing for the witch wasn't good enough, considering how much structural rework I had to do again after beta-reader feedback). Is this overwhelm? Is this because, while I was proofreading the witch and noticing different ways subplots or other arcs could have been worked, I kept thinking "Well, at least I'll do it better for the Soul Thief!" and now I feel some kind of pressure around it?

I noticed before that when I transition between projects, there's always a few days feeling out of balance, paddling frantically without finding my footing. Sometimes it's because I'm doing something new, like figuring out how to handle beta-reader feedback when there is a ton of it and some of it requires massive rework. But even when I know how to do something, like the proofreading of the witch earlier this month, there's still a similar adaptation period, even knowing what I wanted to do (use text-to-speech) and having previous experience doing it.

It's interesting to reread that post about implementing feedback because I suspect I wrote the post with the same kind of feeling I'm swimming against today. So I must have started writing the post, and then I made a list of what I intended to do. And today I want to break things down like that as well. There's so much to do, and the very first chapter in particular needs a ton of changes.

( The Plan! )

Okay, self. You got this. And look: there's still a bit of "oh-no-this-is-new-i-don't-know-how-to-do-this" dread, but nothing terror-like anymore. There's a plan! You follow the plan. And if it doesn't work, then you learn something from it and make a new plan.