from an email to my editor after editing my shitty second draft

Saturday edits 

It's a bit disheartening to axe a whole chapter. Especially the first chapter.

My initial thoughts—“Wow is this all so terrible?? Oh my god what fresh hell did I actually send to her? Am I even paying her enough to read this digressive meandering drivel? And here I was all proud of my work when really it's a bit of a hot mess in most places.”

Poor poor chapter one suffering from first book itis and deserved a merciful death. It was quickly euthanized with a backwards pull of the cursor and the swift deployment of the delete button. The only suffering was your's and my own as we had to read and re read that meandering scroll. I tried to write the book with one chapter. I failed so now the best bits of old chapter one have been Frankensteined into an introduction.

Perhaps it's me protecting my "darlings" and I’m not usually that bound up in slashing my words. But I'm having difficulty letting go of a couple of sequences. Unless you tell me to slow my roll I'll send you an additional chapter. God willing it won't need a heavy edit. 

The second read through was reviewing every instance of the word "would". Good god woman, how many of those fancy coffee drinks did you need to stay awake in the face my passive voice, equivocating and dancing around the narrative screaming to be shown rather than told? My humble apologies for putting you through an entire MS with that mess. Seriously, doing just that was a huge help trimming the fat and making the prose more pungent. And I know better, that's what kills me. A writing professor I had once upon a time said: "Nothing kills a great story faster than the passive voice" And I’ll be damned if I didn’t try to kill a perfectly good essay collection with the word “would”.

-to be continued.