August 27, 2025

Look 119: A taste of honey

Fellow angler,

I missed my regular post date last Wednesday, and I trust you were properly torn up about it.

I took last week off work for a staycation. I needed the time off to avoid burning out, and I do feel properly rejuvenated, though I had an ulterior motive for that time off. I’ve been saving vacation days so I could make a week-long, concerted effort to start editing the first draft of my novel.

Why I needed a week to edit

Last year, I was able to write the first draft by dedicating enough time each night such that I could get through at least 500 words. Sometimes I wrote more. There were days when I wrote less or nothing at all. Sometimes hitting my word count was alarmingly fast. Other times it was painstakingly slow.

My setup wasn’t the strictest or most structured, but the best routine is the one you’ll stick to, and I was able to stick to this one: I spit out a draft of about 80,000 words relatively quickly.

Quick aside: I know that non-writers never think in word counts and instead think in pages. It’s a constant struggle I face when people ask me how much I’ve written or how much I write each day. They anticipate a time limit or page number, but I can’t reliably provide either. I recently heard a writer say that 500 words is just under two pages of a standard book, so there you go. It’s an imperfect measure, but now we all have a ballpark estimate for what I’ve been doing.)

The challenge was that the same setup wasn’t working for editing. I had a hard time conceptualizing how my words would fit into the larger narrative just by thinking in short daily editing periods. I also didn’t write the draft linearly. I jumped around a lot based on what ideas I had or what interested me most on a given day. That worked for writing. It didn’t work for editing. I had a tough time both editing non-linearly and editing linearly for a massive text document that was written non-linearly.

After multiple false starts, I decided the best option was to take time off work so I could focus on editing by itself. I know other writers talk about getting a cabin in the woods just to write or edit. I’ve also heard it’s basically the only way Barack Obama can edit his book drafts; otherwise he gets distracted and procrastinates until his deadlines are too close to actually meet. So I decided to act presidential and take a week to edit.¹

My novel is finished…

My novel is very much is NOT finished. I hoped to edit the whole draft, which I now see was ambitious. In the end, I took the first half of the week to recover from a busy and stressful 2+ months of work. It felt bad not getting more editing done, but I needed that time.

It’s the second half of my editing week that serves as inspiration for this post. I got through editing about 10% of my first draft. In and of itself, I’m happy about that. However, that time also included important work to figure out what the hell this book is about. Now that I could look at the first draft holistically, who were my characters actually? What did they want and need? What needed to happen to and for them in order to tell the story that I was trying to tell?

Aside 2: This is one of those things I will write more about one day, but I don’t think most people understand the sorry state of this first draft. I don’t say that because it’s bad. I mean, it might be bad. I personally don’t think it’s bad. It’s just that people often ask me if they can read the first draft and don’t understand that it isn’t a book yet. The first draft is really a collection of ideas. It’s the bones of a story featuring characters who aren’t fully fleshed out and who change throughout the book in confusing or annoying ways because I didn’t yet understand who they truly were or what they needed as I was first writing. Plus there is some objectively bad writing. Imagine all those 11pm sessions where I was struggling at 200 words but forcing myself to put more on the page so I could keep the appearance of momentum.

Aside 3: It’s also worth saying that I am a heavier editor than some writers. I know some people like to write everything in one go and then hand it off to someone else to look at. My personal process involves multiple rounds of editing as I fine-tune my ideas. That’s true for everything I write, from emails to standup comedy sets to blog posts; I need multiple passes to properly think through something.

The point of all this is to say that there was serious thinking and planning work that needed to happen before I could even start editing in earnest. I did that work last week. Then I got through the first 10% of the actual story.

I had to add text in some places and excise multiple pages’ worth of content in other places. I rewrote, reorganized, cut some bad jokes, and added some even badder jokes. But the result was something that felt like it was coming out as an actual novel that won’t suck.

It was encouraging how things seemed to come together. It felt beautiful in the way I imagine a first-time parent feels when they see their newborn child for the first time: This is the most beautiful thing I’ve created so far in my life. I have created life and I am (temporarily) invincible.

My favorite part

The best part was a result of the rhythm I’d developed by the end of the week. I was doing 2-3 hours of solid work each morning. I could potentially have done another shift in the evening, but this was my vacation and I still needed recovery time. (I’m also convinced that a few hours of heads-down, focused work is as much as a person should be expected to do every day for any job.)

In addition to the editing schedule, I was sleeping well, eating well, exercising, and reading more consistently than I have since January. That’s while doing all the normal life tasks and chores. I felt lighter, freer, and happier than I had in I don’t know how long.

It was like I had gotten a glimpse of what life could be like for me if my full-time job was Novelist. Like that Exodus fellow said, I had been brought “out of the wilderness, and into a land flowing with milk and honey.”²

So while writing won’t become my full-time job for the foreseeable future, I have been shown a vision of an ideal life that I will work toward.

Future editing

Since some of you probably care about this, I will close by confirming that I will continue editing. I used my week off to reach a point where I think I can now do a little editing each day without sacrificing quality. We’ll see if that holds up, but I’m confident and hope to have a finished second draft by the end of this year (hopefully sooner, but life is busy and one has to stay realistic). At that point, someone will be allowed to read it before I start sending it to agents who will beg publishers to make this a real book.

Title song

Today’s post is brought to you by a small English band called The Beatles. A Taste of Honey is far from their most popular or successful song. They didn’t even write it. It’s from their first album, Please Please Me, which came out before they started releasing albums of purely original songs. Nonetheless, I enjoy this song. The vocals have a certain haunting quality. That creates an interesting juxtaposition with lyrics about getting the taste of something sweet and beautiful. There are also nice harmonies from the lads.

I’m not usually a fan of slow songs. I’d rather the band keep things fun and bring the energy. That’s a big reason AC/DC is my favorite band. But this slower Beatles song simply works.

Also I share a mono recording of the song here because I am a firm believer that it is the best way to listen to The Beatles. It’s how they recorded and produced every album, so it’s how we should listen to every album (except Let It Be).³

Until next time,

Happy fishing!