E. Lockhart gave me a copy of The Boy Book the other week. Lucky me, right? So here I am, wandering around my apartment reading about what actually happened to Ruby Oliver and Jackson (Jackson is one of the best depictions of a skeevy guy I’ve ever read). In my other hand, I had a mug.

But I was also generally distracted, because my brain was full of Girl At Sea edits. So when I got to the kitchen, I put The Boy Book in the sink. Not only into the sink—but into a sink FULL OF WATER.

I did not mean to put The Boy Book into a sink full of water. I meant to set it on the bookcase. But that’s where I left the mug. It was next to the drill.

What drill? Oh, that would be the drill I ended up buying when I went out looking for jeans. I really needed those jeans, too. “Maureen,” I said to myself. “Do not come home without them.”

But like I said. Drill. Not even a big, impressive drill. A mini-drill. For my mini-drilling needs. And I do need the drill, because I managed to knock down a shelf.

“What is wrong with you?” you must surely be asking.

It’s a good question. I have Author Edit Head. This is a common ailment among writers.

Many of us would freely admit that even on the best of days, we’re not brain surgeons. But when we get deeply into the very, very last days of our books, we get very, very focused on writing and fixing, and very, very bad at everything else. Our entire world is colored by whatever we are working on. We’re overrun with details. The red scarf on page 81 that accidentally became a blue scarf on page 167. The number of times we repeated a certain word in a single paragraph. That clanking paragraph. The chapter that still makes no sense. An overuse of commas.

So we may not immediately notice that we’re on the wrong train, or that sandwich we have been eating is actually just a piece of bread with mustard on it, or that our sleeve is smoldering, but not yet on fire.

Now, it’s possible that this is just me, and that I’m always like this and Author Edit Head is something I just made up to cover for my general soft-headedness, but I do not think so.

Charles Dickens is said to have walked twenty-five miles a day or something like that. My suspicion? He was always working on a massive book and was in a constant state of Author Edit Head and forgot to stop.

Agatha Christie once left her car abandoned in a pit and disappeared for a week. It was said to have been a mysterious disappearance, or a stunt. Again, I suspect Author Edit Head.

So, while I sit here with the pages of Girl At Sea, Oscar Gingersnort has kept me from hurting myself on the furniture. I just sharpen my pencils and work.

Notice, also, that Oscar has enabled all of these wonderful things on the blog! Comments! Post e-mailing! He does not have Author Edit Head. Please take advantage of these new joys. Are you a writer? Do you suffer from AEH? Tell us all about it.

Posted: Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 @ 1:40 pm
Categories: Uncategorized.
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