Perfect Is For Suckers

I spent a hard three hours revising on Tuesday. Doesn't sound like much, I know, but it turns out that Stephen King only spends three hours a day writing. Eight? Forget it. Although you could convincingly argue that his three hours are more efficient than mine, I'm not worried. He has a few years on me. I am where I am.

I probably started my editing today somewhere around page 185, so I got through close to 50 pages. Out to Page 229 of a total 347. You could say I'm a woman on a mission. Something about gnawing my way through retail the past two weeks has put an edge on me.

Wednesday I will get myself to Page 275. The nice thing about being in Draft 4 is that I know the story like (yes, I know, this is a cliche) the back of my hand. I know what needs fixing and where. At least to the extent I'm capable as a novice novel writer.

My motto for this week has become: Perfect is for suckers. I might make a button out of it. I've been quite hung up with being "perfect" or at least "very, very good" as I get closer to finishing the novel. As if my brain is trying to say: now it's time for the rock 'em, sock 'em. But I'm realizing now that locking into that state of mind has been slowing me down. I took the bar and not only raised it, but loaded it onto the the space shuttle and sent it on a Mars mission. Enough of that.

Oh, and that narrator thing. I did go back to Page 1 today and started to write her in. The woman on the Finnair flight. Honestly, I really like her. But after three new paragraphs, I realized how sick I was of being on Page 1 (I spent a lot of time there back in November). I saved her material and tucked it away in the event I need her later (read: in the event I am rejected wholesale by the industry and need to rethink my opener). For now, I'm going to smooth out the flashback and present-day voice and keep moving. I will probably clean up each flashback to put it into the point-of-view of different women in the story, to have some point-of-view synergy with Agnes's in the present day. But that's, as my mother is fond of saying, "good enough for government work."

Keep moving. Keep moving. Keep moving.

And remember: Perfect is for suckers.

(I just proofread and can hear the literary agents saying "then good luck getting me to read past the first two sentences... ha ha." The corollary to my motto might be: Perfect is for published authors, but I'm going to ignore that I just wrote that.)