Moving on...

I've had a bit more feedback on Your Dog as Philosopher. Stan duly sent me back the shredded tatters, with all the story elements trimmed out. It ran to about 29k words. The original was 80k. The new version reads very badly, as you might expect, and would need a lot of work doing to make it acceptable, never mind lively and engaging.

In fact, the prospect was a bit depressing, and not remotely as 'challenging' as I was hoping. So I did the obvious thing and asked Anne (She Who Understands Things) to do her own version of the edit, with a view to comparing hers and Stan's. Anne has always been an excellent critic. If she and Stan agreed, I thought, well that would give me more confidence.
But it didn't work like that. For a start, Anne's version came out at 40+k: nearly 50% longer than Stan's. Never mind. I did now have two texts to compare and work on. But then the unexpected happened… I found that it hurt.

I really wasn't expecting that. But I couldn't deny that every time I chopped out a chunk that referred to Fiona (Dave's wife) or Lucy (their child), or one of Dave's friends and colleagues, I felt I was damaging the text. It didn't feel at all as though I was condensing or clarifying or focussing. It just felt like damage.
This was something new for me, perhaps because I'm not very experienced in editing. Why's that? Because I hate it.

This is not because I regard my writing as so precious that not a single jot or syllable may be moved, but because I find it a hopelessly confusing exercise. And why's that? It's because literary editing isn't much like ordinary journalistic or essay editing. A good piece of journalism is constructed in such a way that whole paragraphs can be chopped off, from the bottom up, and the story will still read well. An essay is broadly similar. A good piece of literature, however, is not so straightforward. Characters crop up in dozens of chapters, relate to other characters, and influence the plot, in scores of places throughout the whole book. A good novel is a mesh of networks. So if you want to cut out mad old Uncle Beatrice from the story it's a matter of major surgery: you need to be very clear about what you need to cut out and why, then isolate the major areas for excision; then you have to tie off all the ligatures and veins and little stringy bits and nerves and so on. Miss one and the patient is in real trouble.
Cut a character, and you may find you need to re-write, sometimes at length, a couple of hundred paragraphs. It's a nightmare. You need a memory the size of a minor galaxy (which I don't have), endless stamina (ditto), and a sort of gleeful ruthlessness, of the sort made popular by Nero (also ditto).

It's because of this that I've gradually come to write in a way that reduces the need for editing to a minimum.
The way I work now is to spend ages gawping out of windows, plotting and pondering over the deepest principles of a project, then more endless hours working out how best to present it, then more and more on what you might call 'chapter headings' or 'broad detail'. I make reams of notes (most of which I can't actually read, never mind understand, a year later) and set up a dozen computer files on 'characters', 'plot', 'useful phrases', 'telling lines', 'relationships', 'situations', and so on. Then I make sure I have a good idea of the Opening and Closing scenes and what they must establish. Sometimes I make notes on the weather and season during which the action takes place, and where each person's dwelling is relative to the others'. This is because I'm irritated when I read elsewhere such stuff as 'Mandy hurled off her filmy 'Twin Peaks' underwear, sighed deeply, and pulled the fresh spring morning air deep into her lungs. "He loves me!" she shouted to the sun. "He loves me!" and ran off through the field of ripening corn towards the glowing orb in the west.'
Boy, when we were farming we'd have loved to have corn that ripened in the spring. (Incidentally, Mandy lived in Australia, so it's OK for her to run towards the sun rising in the west. Or should that be the north? See how confusing it can be to get these little things right?)

Anyway… when I've got the whole thing running in my head, in the form of what you might call a vaguely-detailed-web, then I start writing. If I'm lucky, things go more or less as expected. If I'm unlucky, I soon discover a major flaw in my original broad plan (Uncle Beatrice is vital to understanding Cousin Beyonce's relationship with Mr Darcy) and more gawping and illegible note-taking is called for. If I'm really lucky, the story and characters begin to flow with a sort of inevitability, and will themselves suggest little links and diversions en route. I've heard many writers comment on 'the characters taking over' and I know what they mean now.

So that's why trying to edit Your Dog as Philosopher is such a gross headache for me. After all those hours of planning and plotting I have all the characters and events in the story very clearly in my mind. To cut them out is like removing several vital organs with a rusty spoon. It leaves an awful, lifeless mess.
And what's more, it's like cutting old friends out of your life. That's why it hurts.

So what is to be done?
Well for a start, I can put the whole project on hold, and come back to it one day when I'm feeling braver. Or forget it altogether.
Or maybe something else will turn up? You never know; it's a mysterious universe. (And I've gradually come to believe that if you have something that is genuinely worth saying, then somehow, somewhen, the road ahead will clear itself…)

There is one glimmer of hope. I sent Stan something else I've been working on and he (so far) seems to like it. Apparently, though, he can't approach a publisher just at the moment, as they are all on holiday for the entire summer (has anybody ever met a poor publisher?), but one day soon, he'll see what he can do.
More details, when and as.

***

Meanwhile, we've just had our old bathroom replaced. This was not a consumerist whim, but an act of considered wisdom, as the lavatory cistern had gradually developed a number of hairline cracks, and we know enough about water to be sure that hairline cracks soon develop into fissures and hence into streaming torrents, usually in the middle of the night, discovered only hours later, when the granite sarcophagus we keep in the hall as a memento mori, can be seen floating around at the bottom of the stairs, gently bumping into the supporting wall in a nuzzly but forceful sort of way.
What's more, the flush mechanism was so old and knackered that it would only work at all if supported by a network of elastic bands which allowed the ballcock to rise and/or fall. After flushing, one had to force the arm down to start the refill. As we are on spring water, the pressure is very low, so refilling the tank took several minutes. Unfortunately, it didn't stop re-filling until you forced the arm back up, and then jammed it with a bit of old umbrella that seemed to just fit the gap between three of the rubber bands and then locked under a notch in the cistern rim. A switchover to mains water, for washing-machine duties for example, required complex adjustments to this rubbery cat's-cradle, and the assistance of a large twig.

We needed to stop it re-filling (ie, 'overflowing') because the spring water now comes though a complicated system of filters, one of which 'hardens' the water to stop it dissolving holes clean through the copper pipes. Don't laugh. It's previously done it in several places, alarmingly, wetly, and closely followed by expensively. The filters are a step forward.
The carbonate 'hardener' in the Big Filter is also expensive, and a pig to replace, but it does cut down on swearing at plumbers who quote astronomical prices at you to fix yet another hole in the pipes, then don't turn up.
But I digress…

To be sure of remembering to force the mechanism to 'Stop' we had taken to engaging the services of a large decorative metal fish, given to us by our daughter, which normally resides on top of the cistern. This big blue tin-fish would be taken from its normal place and be placed immediately in front of us, on the coffee table, as a reminder that within, say, five minutes, one of us should go out and jam the cistern into 'Stop' mode.
But usually, we forgot anyway, and our expensive carbonate would gently be eroded away a little more, to nobody's benefit, except the manufacturer of water hardening carbonates.

But now! Now we have a loo that flushes! Properly! And doesn't require the services of a big daft fish, or a large twig, or a piece of broken umbrella.
What's more, it seems to use only about a third of the water that the old cistern needed.
Which leads me to the question: why on earth did the old cistern need three times as much water to do the same job? Is modern water more fluid than 1970's water, or something? Is there somethng we should be told?