The Creative Process.

Oh how I hate my manuscript right now. Don’t worry, those exceptionally kind people who have pre-ordered the book from Amazon, I have every faith the final book won’t make me want to go after it with a carving knife. But the stage we’re in right now is ripe for metaphor; it’s the transition stage of labor, it’s your eighth-grade school picture, it’s 85% of your Internet dating experiences. It’s that ugly and awkward. Right now, splayed obscenely all over my kitchen table, is my manuscript. It has been to the copy editor and it is filled with red marks, all of which I have to consider. Did I mean to use the word “Clearly” that often? I didn’t realize I had but now that you’ve circled each and every one, I’ll find a synonym or two. Did anyone teach you grammar? Copy Editor, it’s a valid question, but you have to understand that I went to elementary school in the seventies when grammar was deemed to interfere with self-esteem. I do have an old copy of “Free to Be You and Me,” if that helps. What’s with all the italics? They make me feel warm. And so I sit, hunched over my manuscript, fixing, endlessly being reminded of my cavalier attitude towards comma placement.

But I’d spend all eternity making my manuscript readable in English if I could just avoid the content notes. My editor got the copy-edited manuscript the same day that I did and must have thought “Gracious, this book is being filed under ‘Comedy’ and yet it has all the buoyancy of a matzo ball. Must…give…book-saving…notes…”

So drizzled across my table-spread manuscript are the emails I’ve gotten from my editor over the last few days with such terrifying and open-ended comments like “I think this could be funnier” and “Find the guffaw here. I know there is one” and “Is this what you meant to say?” Who wouldn’t love someone so eager to help them find their personal best? Me. I stare at a note about how I should make a paragraph funnier and I actually start to pass out, the tunneled vision seeing on the words “Funny” and “Could be better”. Yes, it could be funnier, we’re all in agreement about that, but let’s stop to consider something. I’ve been writing this book for over a year; I’ve been writing this blog for over four years; I’ve been leading this life for over forty years. If I’ve put in up to four decades considering the humorous potential of some aspect of my life and have yet to find it, perhaps we need to look into outsourcing. There must be someone in Mumbai who can come up with a quirky yet wise spin on my person struggles.

In the meanwhile, I am going back to work. Not for me the soothing aloe of a blog, a thousand words or so on how I feel about toast and naps and we're done without rumination. Instead, I will spend the rest of the week constructing a sentence here, a digression there, mining the bit of funny that I hopefully have left to seed throughout the book. And then I will eat toast and have a nap.