These Are the Things a Second Draft is Made of…

Sometimes the second draft is where I go back in and make the intention of it clear from the mess of words I threw at the page the first time.

Sometimes I write things and I have no idea what I’m doing and the second draft is me finding something in the text I had no intention of putting there, polishing it up and making it look like I planned it all along.

Sometimes the second draft is me cutting everything I can’t fathom why I included in the first place.

Most often though, the second draft is me laughing myself silly. Because I made an egregious typo. Because I stumbled over a joke I don’t remember writing. Because I managed to use the same word six times in a chapter or repeat myself entirely on the next page. Because I made a plot clue so subtle I forgot it was there.

If I am ever tempted to take myself seriously… yeah, no. That’s just never going to happen. I simply cannot take myself seriously when I find myself laughing so hard at something I accidentally wrote that I fall off the couch.

So if you’ll excuse me I have to go figure out a way to rewrite that to remove the really inappropriate double meaning.