Last Friday I slipped into a fairly deep funk. Most of it had passed by the next day with only lingering effect through the next week. Today was the first day I truly felt like I had shaken off this depression. I know exactly what prompted this feeling.

As you know if you have been reading my blog I recently got my official rejection from a major publishing house for my military SF novel, Love and Loyalty. When I looked at chapter one with an eye to reading it at the Mysterious Galaxy Writers group I saw that I could improve the quality of the writing and decided to do a new line edit through the enitre novel.

Friday at my day job I was working on Love and Loyalty ,(during breaks and lunch, my boss get his money’s worth out of me) and suddenly I was struck just how ineptly I had written the book the first time. Mind you this was a manuscript that I had written, edited, gotten beta-read feedback on, re-written and then re-edited.  It had been through at least two full line level of editing.

Despite that the lines looked utterly crappy to me. I had been blind to my crap and the enormity of it staggered me. I was so upset that I think if someone had said a cross word to me I might have wept.

Just look at the number of changes and corrections I have scribbled onto this one page. A page that has been changed and corrected more than twice before. I don’t know why it hurt and devastated me so badly Friday, but there is no doubting that it did do just that.

I have kept working at it, hoping that the crap I am blind to is not as major as the crap I had been blind to.

I will not quite. I adore my characters and the adventure, but I do get discouraged.