Today I woke up and thought about how much time and effort goes in editing my writings, and I had to ask myself — isn’t there any other way for me to alleviate my editing struggles? Am I condemned to never be able to spot my own grammatical errors, word dispositions, and wrong display of sentences right from the start. Also, am I condemned to go through all of these re-writings and editings, and still never end up with a perfect display of what I want to convey.

What am I doing wrong? I know that editors are the ones that bring that final touch to the finished book, but still, as an independent writer I can’t afford to hire the services of a professional editor.

Thus, during these last four weeks of Nightmare On Editing Street I have been busy with editing a Halloween story, which by the way is a story that I wrote and supposedly edited last year, and that I haven’t been able to polish as to publish for today, and this, all the while also being busy struggling with editing my book of poems — where wrong words/sentences, grammatical errors, and non-sensical lines keep popping up in front of my eyes, and this, each time I go though re-reads.

They are like Freddy Kruger, or some other monstrous serial killer from a slasher movie that lurk in the dark, imperceptible. You look once, they are not there, you look a second time, they are there, you look again, they’ve now disappeared — which I guess is their favorite sadistic game to play, which is that of causing terror and horror in their chosen victims. And in me, it’s the terror of not being able to finish what I have started, and the horror, it comes through these mistakes that I discover after I thought that the piece was good to go.

It’s non-stop edit all the way😅.

Sometimes I even wonder whether it was me that has really written this and that, or even wonder paranoically whether someone around is messing with me, sabotaging my online work, because I never seem to remember about ever committing such aberrant errors, or even, committed such a degree of omission while editing. Thing that’s very odd, even creepy, if you deeply think about it. A Nightmare On Editing Street - a haunted machine.

Perhaps I should blame my daily self-affirmations, “I write beautiful sentences, I write beautiful sentences, I write beautiful sentences” for tricking my brain to believe that what I have written is beautiful, or even, perhaps these self-affirmations might have triggered a strange phenomenon that cause my subconscious, which is slower to react than my brain, but more precise and wiser, to filter and spot the errors each time I go through the text, so that I might really write beautiful sentences… who knows how these obscure rendering works, or not😅.

Why, why, why? Other artists, like painters or sculptors, don’t need editors to edit their art! So why can’t it be like that for creative writing? Is it because I am not a native English speaker that I struggle that much with editing my own work, or, have I not practiced or read enough. What have I been doing wrong in my process? That’s so frustrating for me to have not been able to develop a personal editing strategy that would help me gain time, and as well as to end on a high note.

Suffice that I practice more, and perhaps write slower than I actually write to develop this strategy of mine. Because this time, I don’t want to lose four and half years writing and editing like I did with Darcocyte. I know there has to be another way of discovering these errors right from the start of editing, or even drafting.

Or perhaps, I am putting too much pressure on myself, and I am dramatising for nothing. In the poem The Edit I wrote: This phase of edit makes my stomach churn; For it will soon be over, I confirm. Yes, I confirm that it is the truth.