editing Cicero clips of kimonos and some without the wearer-not the wearer of my soul soft skin in comfort(er) sliding silkily across my skin igniting my blood sideways and upways until I'm a raging inferno of passion aching to disappear the other eyes who hinder my hands in their goal. bear skin is her best color - the bed her best shirt. for in both she is angelic, perfect and heavenly like the stars illuminating her perfect chin. 030116 ... Isaou Oh dear. Now what am I supposed to do with my life? Editing, you were so much fun today. 090726 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Right now it's mostly adding or subtracting commas. Proofreading for good writers is no fun; there are no "sea enemas." 150807 ... e_o_i Editing my own work for consistency involves odd "corrections" when it's a kid's voice I'm writing in. Specificially, this kid's voice. And the specific correction is changing "mosque" to "Muslim church." 220402 ... e_o_i this kid's = Carol Winter's, she with the dreaded essay 220402 ... e_o_i Doing this with a tired mind gets me sentences like "My fingers were getting angry" and "she was born when she was forty-two." 220409 ... e_o_i Editing can be exhausting, particularly if it involves some sort of response to others' comments on your writing. Two separate things today. One was comments from a former classmate on the first 1/3 of my novel-in-progress. The other was a collaborative Google Doc for editing the poetry chapbook - the two editors already wrote comments and made suggestions. Thing 1: Good news: he said the writing flowed well. Then there were a few general critiques and suggestions but no specific text edits (after all, he isn't an editor or publisher). One thing: I need to bring out Carol's motivations for acting out violently or otherwise destructively. I don't need to make this behaviour seem rational, because it isn't, but I should put in other hints of her acting like that. The only comment I pushed back on a little was the one about putting more stress on Carol's "confusion with her sexuality"; I doubt he means this in any homophobic way; Carol *is* confused because she doesn't realize or admit to herself that she can have crushes on girls yet. Then again, I don't want to make a big deal of her being bi because it's not mainly a coming-out story. It only becomes an issue when she realizes it and thinks that *this* is something that makes her bad rather than the bad behaviour. (That part is at least slightly_autobiographical.) Thing 2: One thing I love about the principal editor, besides the fact that I have a crush on her voice (she has a boyfriend - I just have a crush on her voice), is that she'll point out things she likes and not just things that are ungainly or potentially confusing. Even the critical comments are enlightening because I get to see what someone might find confusing. I worked on that at the library. Air-conditioned into being slightly chiller, I blundered around Google Doc's editing, commenting, and replying formats, hoping my gaps of knowledge weren't annoying. Gaps in the fabric of the forest floor, causing me to get my poetry feet stuck. Commas I added or removed without comment, but some things required explanation, like, "I agree this is confusing, but I'll change it a different way than what you suggested. See if it works." Not exactly that wording, but something like it. Also, some of my poems might have been playing hard to get. As in difficult to understand. I've moved away from the times where I wanted to write like James Joyce (not to armchair diagnose, but how did he *not* have ADHD?) True, I like the surreal and avant-garde sometimes, but I'm not in this very profitable business to be confusing...screen name notwithstanding. And then what other people find confusing isn't the same as what I find confusing. W. didn't get that a poem titled "A Child's Garden of Verses" had two flower references in every stanza. Come to think of it, why does it? ...For the pun, I guess. But the fact that she found it unclear prompted me to change some things around: the title is, provisionally, "A Bouquet," I write about picking flowers, and it's more from the perspective of a teenager looking back on childhood. Maybe. Maybe she'll find it too random and just want me to cut it out. Cut it out. Early AND later childhood memories: Mother: Cut it out! Kirsten: What? Mother: Talking back! Kirsten: But if no one talked back, how would anyone have a conversation? Something like that. Anyway, the process of finding every comment and doing something about them or finding a reason not to (or even "I'll come back to this later") would be exhauuuuusting even if it weren't so hot. Pray for me. 250811 ... e_o_i (what I wrote above is NOT very edited, so forgive the word repetitions and grammar errors) 250811 ... raze this has always been such a strange, delicate wire to walk for me. i want a thing to be as good and true as it can be. but if i sit with it for too long, i might start overthinking it and eventually lose sight of what i wanted to say, missing the forest for the foliage. it's tricky to know when to walk away. the permanence blather imposes on everything has helped. which doesn't seem to make any sense on the surface. but something about the urgency of knowing every word i gouge into one of these red walls is something i'm going to have to live with forever (or so i hope) — that seems to focus me in a way few things ever have. i guess what i've learned is that i'm better with a knife in my hand than a pen. proverbially speaking. 250811 what's it to you? who go blather from