Over on rec.arts.sf.composition, a poster wondered whether his book is ready to publish. Patricia C. Wrede wrote:
So: What you *want* is somebody to tell you whether or not this thing you have written is publishable. What you *need* is a way of deciding for yourself whether it is time to send it out. This is how I have done it, right from the beginning: and she lists a series of questions for deciding whether something is ready or not
The four questions involve thinking about a) whether you can actually solve the problems with the book, b) how long solving the problems would take, and c) whether solving the problems would make the book better.
This is a way of thinking about editing that I found very helpful, because I know my current book has problems, but I don’t know how to fix all of them yet. Some things (emotions) will take me a lot of practice – probably a whole nother book – to learn how to do better. I could spend the time and fix this book, but it probably would take too long, and that time would be better spent rewriting the next book.
So I’ve divided up the fixes into mental categories:
1. Stuff I can safely leave un-fixed, because it’s minor and I’m not quite sure what to do about it anyway, like the occasional odd word choice.
2. Stuff that needs to be fixed and I know how to do it – that ranges from typos to the Trust Issue.
3. Stuff that I don’t know what to do about yet – a lot of that is aspects of the overall big picture. Voice, setting.
Category 2 is the biggest. Yay. Category 1 will get ignored. Category 3, well, I can practice on the next book. And then come back and fix this one again later, assuming I’ll get that chance because no one will buy it as is. And if they do buy it, then it didn’t need fixed after all.
The idea of sending something out that has problems that I can identify still gives me the creeps, though.