This is too much like work...

     ...was one of my mother's favorite expressions. Of course, she always used it in a joking context, like when we were hauling the dock and raft down the hill and into the water at the beginning of the summer. Or when she had picked buckets of raspberries that had to be made into jam while they were still fresh. In other words, she was putting the work into something that, in truth, she actually enjoyed doing, or ultimately would appreciate having done.
     I was editing and outlining chapters of my newest works in progress this morning when suddenly I was struck by the perfect relevance of her treasured saying. While just a few hours earlier I woke up to a gloomy, rainy day, the sun was now out, the temperature rising, and the beach beckoning for a springtime walk. After all, it's only spring on Cape Cod for a couple hours between winter and summer, and it seemed a shame to waste them. But this was also my cherished writing time, and how could I be thinking of giving it up, when it is something I truly love and look forward to, right?
     Wrong. Editing and outlining are boring. Methodical, tedious, and boring. But also, they are, unfortunately, necessary to the more enjoyable parts of the writing process. For example, I would much rather be creating descriptions of my fictional domains and then letting my characters loose in these "places," to get into trouble, fall in love, suffer disappointment, or simply chase after their dreams. That way I could just run along beside them and enjoy their company, as I escape into my love of words. Why bother with the boring stuff, right?
      Wrong again. The initial mistake I made as a would-be Best Selling novelist was to plunge headlong into my first book with a creative frenzy, thoroughly convinced that my artistic flair would far surpass the distraction of any grammatical or contextual errors. My readers would be so enchanted with the plot, characters, and enriched setting I presented, that they would be unlikely to notice any mere discrepancies...let's see, like changing a character's name halfway through Chapter 9, or having it start to snow when the Chapter title was "June," or use "there" when I meant "their," "you" when I meant "your," or in some cases, using a word that was the complete opposite of what I meant...either that, or leaving out whole words entirely.
       Imagine, if you will, that James Fenimore Cooper typed an "i" instead of an "a" in the title of the novel that brought fame and recognition to New York's Hudson River Valley. While many readers certainly would be curious to learn about the "Last" Mohican, how many would want to just read a "List" of the members of that Native American tribe. And what about Charles Dickens's novel depicting the grim realities of the French Revolution? Who wants to read a "Tale" of "Too" Cities? Does that mean one was a city and the other one was also? Who cares? In all honesty, the reason I could never drag myself through War and Peace was because the Russian characters all had nicknames that didn't resemble their actual names in the slightest, and I kept thinking they were supposed to be different people.
      So, here's what happened in my case. I rushed into publishing novel #1, which was then (perhaps reluctantly) purchased by 30 some loyal and kind acquaintances, many of whom dutifully read it. It wasn't until I reread it myself that I discovered the surplus of errors...and guess what, it did detract from my artistic flair, even for me. Since then, I corrected these errors and put out a second edition, but sadly, it was too late (i.e., my "fans" already...supportively...read the uncorrected version and were done with it). Another sad fact, for many of them, was that that was the end of their kindness and loyalty, and even though I've gotten better as a writer (both grammatically and contextually), many former readers weren't willing to take the chance that this was true. (Book #4, Taking Flight, is really good, by the way.) Sigh...
      So yeah, editing, outlining, rereading, fact checking, researching, are all boring sometimes...and tedious...and methodical...but also important and necessary, and occasionally satisfying enough to be enjoyable (or at least ultimately rewarding in terms of having been done) ...even though a lot of the time, well, it seems too much like work. Huh...now that I think of it, it's a bit like keeping up with a blog...