Editing. And the pure, naked excitement of...no, sorry, actually just editing. Oh, and I coin the term 'Book-Pregnant' to excuse my bottom.

So. I am now In Editing.

This is an official term for when we writers lie down under the duvet, occasionally banging our heads against any firm object muttering 'no! NO!' and eating biscuits. It is a complicated time in a writer's life.  Imagine, if you will, that producing a book is like having a baby - this is an analogy much loved by writers because it makes us believe that we are not, in fact, getting fatter due to biscuit-consumption, we are 'book-pregnant'.  So, we slave for the obligatory months to gestate our book, then we send it off to be cooed over by our publishers.

Who promptly want us to shove it back in again and have a better looking one next time.

It is not exactly like this, of course, because I quite enjoy editing (knowing that I produced a big, ugly one which needs quite a lot of surgery to get presentable before I can, so to speak, wheel the pram down the road helps) and I most emphatically would not like the process of jamming any of my children back up my nethers. But it is similarly difficult and slightly off-putting.

picture courtesy of glowellness.blogger.

..only even bigger, because I am having a series. Editing is also a bit like unpicking a cardigan, carefully knitted in complicated cable-stitch, and re-knitting it into a sweater with a picture of the cast of The Simpson on the front - they are both the same garment, essentially, but the overall object is different.  Only with mine, I rather overknitted the first garment, so it wasn't just cable-stitched, it also had epaulets, frogging, military buttons and a rather nice forty-foot train, so now I need to go back and remove some of the more unnecessary decoration and make it a little more...wearable in public, so to speak.

Like this, only with more shiny on.

So bear with me, kind people, because I now have the rather confused impression that I have to go and knit myself a baby...