Editing fatigue

Fatigue is the undercurrent of this past week. I learned about a variety that immediately felt familiar: auditory or listening fatigue, which is a real thing. It’s the tiredness from straining to hear when you can’t hear normally, where your brain is working harder to parse words being spoken and extract meaning from them. I feel this often, but this week, acutely.

I’ve often wondered if there’s a relationship between the loss of one sense and the enhancement of another. Did my eyesight become more keen as my smell went away? Is my ability to communicate in writing better because of the poor hearing? Maybe the fatigue takes one form of energy away and gives another in return.

There’s a checklist and a kanban board I look at every day and a second draft of this manuscript has been decomposed into tasks. Nearly every printed page has some sort of mark on it, orange highlights and purple pen, abbreviations and question marks. I’m realizing now the composition step, writing to produce a set quantity of words - that part was easy compared to what I’m doing now. Editing is taxing, slow and hard-fought. I am deliberating with myself about how to describe my life. Maybe this is another sort of fatigue, the kind you feel shapeshifting into different contexts and personas. Editor, writer, worker, manager. No wonder I need so many naps.

I read a lovely book recently, about writing and editing, but I can’t tell whether it’s increased my neuroticism or simply given me new words for it. There are elements in my story about identity, grappling with how it changes over the course of your life, shaped by things you live with and through. This manuscript is a piece of my writerly identity, something that exists because of me, while also discrete and independent of my self. Betsy Lerner, in the book I mentioned, describes this in a way that made me laugh, but only at first:

Writers want love, they hope that through their work, they will be recognized as gifted. And that is why most writers are so crazy. When a writer gives his editor the pages of his manuscript, or when is book is published, his entire sense of himself is in limbo. Waiting for feedback is like waiting for the results of a biopsy.

I have this new fantasy, that once I finish my book and then publish it, the right person is going to find it and read it and decide to offer me a job. This probably sounds ostentatious and self-serving, but it’s possible, right? Maybe a memoir can be a resume of sorts, a long form explanation of who you are and what you’ve done, real in a way an interview and two pages of keywords can never be. I imagine there is some job that exists, or will exist, which involves writing and helping, planning and creating, connecting people and ideas in unexpected ways. All the better if the work benefits patients and the providers who care for them. This is a theme I keep returning to again and again, which probably means something.

Hopefully, in two weeks or a little less, I will hand draft two over to my editor. I’ve hired someone. After seeking out referrals, getting quotes, sending unsolicited emails to publications, I found exactly the right person. She will be with my manuscript for a while and then another phase of this process will begin. By that time, the cover design should be complete or nearly there, and I won’t be doing any rewrites for a while, several weeks. The thought of it is stressful, taking time away from this routine I’ve constructed. But, I will have more time to share with you here, and I look forward to it. I will probably be antsy, feeling impatient, waiting and not knowing.

I keep telling myself yes, I’m glad I decided to do this, to write a book. It’s an accomplishment, getting this far. Most people say they will but never do. True. But when I look at this manuscript, it’s so far from a book, sharing little more than chapter titles and a memoir adjacent word count. I can say these things because I do not want to raise an egotistical manuscript. Right now it feels like a half finished project because it is. I was able to get started - great - but let’s hold off on celebrating until it’s done.

When I was in college, I had a professor who thought I’d make a competent teacher of undergrads, American lit perhaps. Whatever essays I wrote back then are lost to time, in the days before cloud storage, so I don’t know what gave him that impression, if it was something I wrote or how I spoke about ideas and stories. I wonder if he’d remember me - Doug was his name. He was one of several professors in Oregon, where I spent a semester and finally (and loudly) declared I was no longer religious. I’m still not. Books helped. There’s probably another memoir concept in those hazy memories. Maybe I’ll reach out to Doug and tell him about my book, the one I’m working on right now.

I’m hopeful there is a way to write and teach and help people more directly while also paying the mortgage. Maybe all the fatigue now will produce something like a revelation, or a connection to a reader who is inspired. I don’t know. In the meantime, I’ll be editing.