Spring Cleaning
I’m deep into editing Badlands Born 3 and trying to make sense of what past-Wade was trying to say when he was drafting. I hate past-Wade, he was a jackass. He changed the story three times when he got stuck and left it to present-day-Wade to fix and make coherent, because past-Wade was only graded on words per day. I’m graded on a nebulous metric called “quality” and it’s been a real slog. I tried to explain it to my wife like this:
You have a huge storage closet and it’s just not functional. You have to step over boxes, dodge sharp pointy things, and every time you move something you find another spot where the cat left a hairball. “Enough!” you say and move everything out into the bedroom and sort it into piles. It should be easy to start putting things back in order but you don’t know if you should rely on your old organization methods because look where that got you. Maybe you should use that new method you read about instead, that Scandinavian one that looks so simple and elegant, how does it work again?
Four hours later, you realize it won’t work without a totally new closet storage system and you walk into a bedroom that still isn’t functional and you don’t know where to start. You begin moving boxes back onto shelves and think you’re making progress. Then a box of your old CDs doesn’t sit quite right on a shelf that it used to fit on because it made more sense to move the suitcases up and the sleeping bags back because when’s the last time you went camping? Now you can’t decide if you want to put it back the way it used to be or if you can live with a box poking out that you KNOW will fall down if you bump it.
And so on. You know what it should look like when you’re done, but it’s going to take a lot longer to get to there than you thought when you tore it all out. It will be worth it in the end, dear reader.
Stay tuned
Look in your inbox next week for an email with news on Badlands Born 2: Badlands Cursed, and a reading-group exclusive.
Happy Reading,
Wade
