Last weekend, I took two days for myself. I checked into a nice hotel downtown–
I wandered through the market, in and out of oddity shops. I looked at teapots. I explored a rooftop garden. I stopped in an Irish pub and ordered a pasty. I bought a tiny bottle of pink champagne and took a bath in the hotel with soap that was shaped like a leaf.
I thought a lot about my book.
There has been a part of the book that just hasn’t been working. It’s hard to admit to yourself sometimes that something needs a severe edit. That you need to take out the scalpel and make an incision, and remove a piece of the story that has been stifling the entire body of work. It’s especially hard when it is coupled with an illustration that, although I love, just isn’t working with the rest of the book.
Sometimes you just have to break through what you thought was good in order to move on to something better.
You have to take it, hold it, hug it, and then let it go. Put it away in a drawer where you can’t see it and it can’t call to you. With the blank space that remains, something new will come to you, and it will be better, because you have allowed that space to open up to new possibilities.
It feels strange working on such a familiar project in a new place; Not sitting at my desk in the corner of the dining room, but on the starchy white bed on the 23rd floor of the Westin looking out over the city. It definitely did something. I fully realized what needed to be done, and I did it. And the moment I took out the section that needed to be removed, a new idea came to me.
Editing is a brutal process. But it also gives life, in this case to a butterfly nursery.
Another day; another page closer.
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