Muscles

Physical therapy has been a real b*tch lately. For those who are not long-time readers, I have Crohn's disease and auto-immune problems--and I've taken a turn for the much worse of late. And to make a long story short, I ruptured a tendon in my right calf back in late June/early July, which meant I spent the summer in a brace and unable to walk . . . and have been sent to physical therapy now. JUST when I think, "Hmm . . . I am getting around without much pain," they add a new exercise that hurts like heck, and the next day (or in this case all weekend), I hobble around in pain until . . . oh yay . . . I get to go back to my sadists tomorrow and go through it all over again.

But I know it's good for me.

I also know that when I get comfortable with an exercise, it's just my muscle readjusting to that new normal, getting a little stronger, and then it's time to make 'em work once again. I also have muscle wasting in my legs, which means my "normal" comes with a pretty severe handicap.

Which is quite a bit like writing, speaking in analogies. We each have a handicap--some blindness about our own work we don't see. So we have editors or betas or critique groups or writers' workshops to expose those weaknesses. And then the "fun" begins. Because we can get complacent or think we have mastered x or y, but there's ALWAYS ways to improve.

And the hard work isn't always fun. As an editor, I often wonder what authors think when they see a sea of red. It can't be a good feeling. Oh, wait . . . I AM an author, too, and when I see my editor's marks, I am delighted--because it means "she caught stuff"--and I also sometimes feel queasy because . . . well . . . it means getting in there and working hard.

Worse, sometimes before a work is even close to finished, I will see something really needing fixing, and that sometimes means deconstructing scenes, chapters, or who novels, word by word.

But like muscles, the end result is usually strength. Even those books that ostensibly "fail"--the ones I've abandoned for whatever reason--are teaching tools. There's a muscle in there somewhere that I exercised.

Thoughts? And happy Monday, all!