TIRED

/ janpriddyoregon

Twenty-twenty-four was a great year for finding my way in editing and understanding my own work on the page.

A story, two reviews, and a novel found homes. All of them needed revision after acceptance. It’s the way things work in publishing. I revised. I will be asked to approve edits on that short story. I’ll manage.

Seven drafts of the novel alone. I am so very tired of revision that I wrote in my secret revised 2025 Resolutions not to write or work on any fiction this entire year. Nothing. Make a quilt or knit a sweater or weave, I promised. Do all those things. Blog. Send emails. No work on fiction. Don’t try to revise anything old. Don’t look for anything new to write. No fiction for the duration! Just a month before, my goal had been to complete a new and polished draft of A SINGLE FACT, and now I can’t bear to think of doing that.

This is what I should be working on: something with these glorious greens and violets, or the Coral Sea warp, or the pink-striped sweater…

This past year has been busy indeed. I have met my NaNo goals many times. I can get words on the page quickly, but I’m slow to understand my own writing. As I explained to someone—who? I can’t even remember and it was just the other day—there are orderly, sensible writers who begin at the beginning of their story and continue to the end with a clear understanding of their own purpose. Alas, I am not among them.

I am unclear. I am seeking. The way forward is clouded with questions. I alter point of view and verb tense, which affects every sentence. I add and delete scenes and characters. I thrash about and reorder and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, until I finally understand what I’m trying to say. It is an arduous process to discover the point of my own writing. Imagine the frustration of editors trying to do the same thing!

To achieve the utopian future I’d aimed for, I thrashed about since before January of 2018 seeking that story. It was a short story at the beginning, just one voice. Every time I tried to shorten it, it got longer until it became a novel in November of that year. Thirteen thousand words in April grew to 70k words during NaNo. I found multiple voices, which is something I’ve wanted to do for decades. I charted characters, early on, but it took me six years to commit to a timeline. There is no reason to this; it is an unreasonable process. Trust the process. I know that much.

Just in the past year, much has changed on the page! Not just subtle changes, well, maybe the fifth and sixth most recent drafts in 2024 focused at the sentence level. But also massive, glacial shifts. I completely reordered my characters’s tellings, cut tens of thousands of words, written tens of thousands of new words, rewritten scenes, rearranged chapters several times, combined chapters several times, altered the ending of the book, well, several times.

This was my first time working with editors on a novel. Editors I’ve worked with in the past were closer to my age and only addressing an essay or short story. That was purely fun. I was told by a highly reliable writer that book editors are often excellent at identifying problems. I’ve found that to be true. They also warned that editors are rarely useful in suggesting specifically how to correct those problems. I have since found that to be true also. It was hard work for us all. [I recently shared a short story in an editing group and found their confusion marvelous and useful. The story comes out in Catamaran next month.]

Also, I agreed to a theoretical interview about the editing process a month ago, then I went through my ms three times working from 4am through the day. I just heard back that they want to do it soon, and now I dread thinking of it. The study asks “how have conscious editing practices in the past five years affected how white and BIPOC authors write voice, narrative, and authenticity for BIPOC and POC characters?” Seriously. Tired. I have no clue how to even begin answering that question. No clue what the research hopes to reveal.

On top of everything else, one of my favorite events is coming up. My former MFA program’s winter Residency in Seaside begins in a few days. How will I stay awake for the evening readings? I used to welcome phone calls from my students. [Not their parents who only called to shout about their child’s grade.] But I warned them not to call after 8:30 because “even if he’s sitting beside me watching television, my husband is asleep by 8:30 and the phone ringing will startle him.” He’s also awake and busy early. We’ve been married for fifty years and in the past year, because I’ve begun editing most every morning by 4am (awake at 3 doing Spelling Bee and Wordle), I now fall asleep by 8pm sitting up on the couch. [Last night we were both still awake at 8:30pm and considered it a triumph!]

And empty houses. The Christmas tree is in full blaze in the rental house on one side of us (no one is there) and on the other side new flood lights light up their yard, our house, and the beach… and no one is there either.

9 thoughts on “TIRED”

  1. I HATE yard lights! living out in the country (sort of) I found that people newly relocated from the city are, I guess, uncomfortable with the dark andf they immediatly install yard lights.

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    • Yes! They are scared of the dark. Years ago, while writing an essay along with my students, I did a lot of research on night lighting of outdoor spaces. It does not make highways safer (that was discovered entirely by accident), it doesn’t prevent crime, and what is does do is all negative. It messes up our own sleep, the navigation of anything flying by night, the internal clocks of nocturnal animals, and it’s a waste of energy. We have Dark Sky approved outdoor lighting which we only use when it’s necessary—that is, hardly ever.

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  2. fanny lou Hamer said I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired
    she knew what tired how tired why tired
    yet somehow managed to carry on
    maybe Harriet Tubman was her inspirational example
    one more step
    im not sure cause I’m not there yet
    today 90 years ago an example for us
    sang out of Mississippi mud
    only to return forty-some years later
    look and learn and live
    heckle and jeckle might be close
    but they are just cartoons
    so keep moving -stay warm
    write on stay awake
    more coffee?

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  3. Outside yard lights are awful! Especially painful for my husband since he enjoys astrophotography, and it is increasingly difficult to find a dark sky anywhere (and no thanks to Musk who is further mucking things up with the thousands of satellites he’s put up there). Studies have shown that bright outdoor lights do nothing to deter crime, but you can’t tell my neighbors or city officials that.

    I remember a biologist from a writing workshop I took a few years ago and the essay she wrote about moving with her young family from Southern California to British Columbia. She had to explained to her little son that those lights he saw in the night sky when they finally made it out of the city were stars. The idea of children growing up without ever seeing a dark sky was/is horrifying.

    Okay, that said, I am thrilled that you “seek” with your writing as much as I do. One of my novels has been in the works for many years in large part because I keep changing the POVs and narrative structure. I don’t want to use a predictable structure (like third-person omniscient or whatever), but the way I have it set up right now is painful for me to review and revise. Three POVs from three very different women. I tried it out in that writing workshop and everyone including the facilitator (Scott Russell Sanders) was enthusiastic. So I feel like I have to do it this way (the three POVs) even though it’s really, really hard! 🤷🏼‍♀️

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    • Thank you, Marie. It’s good to know that others feel the same way about loving the dark. The first time I ran in the dark was a revelation. It was my first Hood-to-Coast, and I was first out of the second van for what was rated a “Very Hard” 6+ miles in the middle of the night. I’d never run in the dark and I was nervous because it looked like I’d be alone in the dark. And it was wonderful! I was required to carry and use a flashlight, but every time I couldn’t see another runner I turned it off. Pure glory!

      The family beach house used to be totally dark at night, but now there are neighbors with lights on all the time. Whether anyone is there or not, they spoil the darkness.

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  4. I don’t mind sitting in the dark but moving around makes me nervous 🙂 I worry about landing my foot wrong and going down, even when walking … unless I know where I’m going. That said, once when Greg and I in a wildlife refuge walking back to our car after a long hike and it was dark enough that the trees were barely silhouetted against the sky, we heard a loud cacophony of whoops and cackles. My first thought was, “Monkeys?” Just as quickly we realized it was a group of owls starting to party. That was magical.

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    • HaHa! I was traveling with a friend in southern Oregon. We’d walked our dogs (it was a dog show circuit—yeah, more about that probably never), and since I only had one dog and Bonita had two, she came running back to the hotel to call me out to see the beautiful birds. When I saw them outlined against the moonlit sky, I recognized them as very large bats. Bonnie freaked!

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