I finished Devil's Despair. I'm thrilled with the ending and the way the story wrapped up and so far my beta readers seem to be liking it. I'm slowly working through the chapters and editing them so that they'll be shiny and clean before I send it off to the publisher. I expect this process to take 45-60 days at least. That's a lofty goal for fully editing with three betas.
That's not the problem. The problem is Book #3, Titled Devil's Redemption. I'm 12,000 words into it, which isn't chump change by any stretch of the imagination, but it's stalled.
I want to write. I love writing and spinning the story. Each time I write a book, I feel privileged to be the one who gets to tell these amazing stories of people I wish really existed. I'm lucky to be able to immerse myself in another world. And yet, I sit and stare at those 12k words, happy with them, and unable to continue. Not because I don't want to, or because I don't know where I want the story to go, but because I don't seem to be able to make my fingers move.
I blame it on editing.
Typos are natural. My characters have "waffled" instead of "wavered", driven "cats" instead of "cars" and somehow known English when they're time-traveling from 30 B.C. Greece. Yeah, it happened.(sidenote: said character is a witch who had been training for said time traveling for 25 years, which is highly sufficient to learn a language)
The point of this rambling is this: typos discourage me. I'm a perfectionist. Every time one of my betas marks an error, it depresses me. The bigger the typo, the worse it bothers. My biggest thing is my propensity to begin sentences with conjunctions. I was so aware of that during the writing of the second novel, that every time a conjunction is marked in this book, it just makes me feel as if I'm not making progress. I know it's not true. I have gone from 50+ per chapter to 2-3. That's a HUGE improvement, but it's something I've worked so hard on it that every time I fail, it feels like some personal shortcoming of mine as a writer and makes it hard for me to keep going on my current works.
The question then becomes: what do I do about it?
I wish I had the answer. For now, I keep trying to write, working on the editing and hoping that the desire to write the story will eventually overcome the pangs I feel when I make an error.
