Lovely readers, guess who is editing and crying and hitting the ‘delete’ button allllll over her brightly painted world of words?? Yup, me. It’s terrible. The figurative worst. (The literal worst is taxes.) And yet, here I am, chugging through and changing all these things I once held so dear.
In this, the hardest of creative endeavors, I struggle. Probably for the same reason I struggle to throw away any material possession: I am a hoarder. Clearly, this term applies to all aspects of my being. It’s a battle. Mostly in my own head, like most of my ‘battles’ if I’m being real honest.
Alas, I do not talk about this often. Much to Stevie’s dissatisfaction, given that I should strive to promote my book in some fashion. I ‘soft revealed’ the title of my manuscript, almost never discuss progress, lack of progress, or character development on the site. Or in real life. Or at all. I’m a private person who likes to hoard things, okay?
I apologize. But like, only a little and I don’t totally mean it.

This has veered dramatically off course. That course, of course, being an offering to the editing gods of yore aka the muses. Ladies, if you’re reading, this one is for you, please inspire me to finish up the last oooooooooh say twenty percent of my book editing. Thank you.

This ‘offering’ is actually the now deleted prologue to my book. It’s from my main female protagonist’s perspective. I love the first sentence. I wish it could stay. I may try to find another use for this passage. But for now, it will lie here for safe keeping.

Of all the ways love colored me, the most prominent had to be black and blue. Inside and out. Bruised, broken, destroyed by what wasn’t, scarred by what was. It always comes back to love, that intangible, terrible driving force in everyone’s life. Whether you acknowledge it or not, every step you take is made in love. Made by love. And I’m no different. I was a rebellious teenager shaped by a lack of love and an urgent need to be more. More than the insultingly mediocre that was expected of me. It was really too bad then, that what I thought was more was strikingly and irrevocably illegal, and had been for my entire existence. But you’ll find out the details on that later.
Back to Love.
The first person I could ever recall caring about was Rodrigo Del Castillo. I drew the short straw when it came to parents, but who needs blood when you can be bound by love? Placing his well being before my own – my first real act of love – is what started this mess, but it’s not where I’ll start this story. The beginning, the real beginning, my real beginning, was a few weeks after the day they released my cell block as a group of newly rehabilitated, genetically unreceptive, and thus experimentally useless felons back into the general populace. We were tagged in case we slid back into sin, damaged beyond my ability to tell of it, and scared. At least I was. Am.

-Ace Nikolai Lykaios

As in my Creativity Session post , you can see that Ace and Rigo’s bond is central to the story from beginning to end. But it’s not the whole of it. And this mini prologue didn’t do all the work it needed to do. So now it’s cut, replaced by a six thousand word prologue of proper proportions. Hurray. But actually, hurray, ’cause I do dig where it ended up. Erasing something you worked on is scary. But sometimes, I’m learning, it is worth it epically, because it clears the way for something that carries its own weight.
Of Suits & Sirens, my science fiction fledging novel, is not done yet. And already, it looks so different than when it began life as an untitled series of word documents and a dozen scribbles on a white board. That’s mostly thanks to rewrites and erasures.
Now, if only I could convince my hoarder instincts of that.

Well then! Thank you for listening to me ramble, no promises of when this may happen again.

-Jessie Gutierrez