Well, I made it: a whole week of my “butt-in-the-chair” approach to improving my writing discipline, and I’ve done it! I worked on my revision for a whopping ten hours this week (two each day) and spent an additional three or so hours working on other writing (my youth novel, this blog, some freelance editing, etc.)

The revision is going smashingly, I think, although hey, as my daughter pointed out, it has not yet been accepted for publication anywhere, so we shall see. The work at hand right now is just to finish this revision, then the submitting process begins all over again, first to volunteer readers (anyone interested?) and then to publishers and agents.

But revision can be a dangerous thing: When we went to Mt. Rushmore this summer, there was a display in the visitors’ center about how long the sculpting process took, and I remember reading something about artists’ general inability to say definitively that a work is DONE. You can keep at it and keep at it, chipping away a little bit here and a little bit there, adding a splotch of red here and a swirl of blue there, until you drop dead–artists can tinker with their works indefinitely, so you just kind of have to agree to agree with yourself on what that point of completion is. How much of this revision is real, how much of it am I doing just because I’m tinkering? I have no idea.

So this time around, once I get to the end again, I’m going to give it to a couple of people who I didn’t let read it the first time around (one of whom is my husband, which scares me to death–his opinion carries far more weight with me than it should, but I can’t seem to relax about the thought of him reading my work with a critical eye; I respect his opinion too much.) After he’s done with it, I think then I will finally feel in my heart that I can do no more with it, and I will declare it done. Then I will submit it to a second round of professionals to see what happens.

Then, and only then, will I know if the work for whichI’m sticking my butt to the chair right now was worth it in conventional terms, but right now, I am loving every minute of the process. I love it! And that is another way of describing success, isn’t it?  Loving what you do? (Too bad love won’t cover college tuition, though…)