My latest book has an inseparable thread of artistry woven throughout. My main character is a sculptor, and as a writer, I know some of the madness of art. I’ve been inspired by many of the quotes I’ve found about sculpting

and art in general, a few of them even found their way into the novel. I found this one inspiring today.

I find myself often forgetting as I write which events have already taken place. Sometimes I am a week removed from what happened in the book, and 7,000 words later, I reintroduce a character everyone’s already met. In Iron Shards, the most egregious instance of this was when I killed the villain off on one day and then killed him off again on the next. I don’t read my work for coherence when I write, I just get the story out and worry about logic and coherence later. So, I found out during editing that I’d killed a character twice.

The editing process takes much longer than writing the novel. Dwelling on every painstaking detail, trying to find my own mistakes, and acting as my own sanity check is grueling. I lose sight of the whole work again as I perfect fragments, and I begin nitpicking my choices. I doubt myself and wonder why I thought I could publish something I wrote “a lot” in.

But I have stubbornness issues. I think all novelists must to persist. And we have an obsession with the stories spilling out of us. I don’t know how to stop, even when my words are inadequate, even when rejections roll in. As I have begun my final round of checks on the latest novel before it goes to my beta readers, I read lines that sound so amazing that my eyes jerk back to the beginning. Did I write that? That description rocks! And I remember why I push forward. All of the affirmation I need is here. All 98, 069 words of it.