all the pandemonium and all the madness

I'm having trouble typing, which is a sign of how v. exhausted I am; my typing skill is usually one of the last things to go, long after I've reached the vomit stage when drinking or the fever and chills stage of an illness. However, I haven't had anything alcoholic in over a week, and I'm not sick -- unless the burning need to write is an illness, in which case I'm totally screwed. And I just tried to spell 'screwed' with a 'k', if that's any proof of the disconnect between my brain's language center and my fingers.

The reason I'm having trouble typing, and the underlying issue of why my language center is burned out, is that I spent the last fourteen hours editing zee romance novel, with a brief, uplifting break to read about concentration camps on Wikipedia (I need to write a dystopian young adult series someday, if only so that all the expertise I developed on totalitarian regimes and resistance movements in college can be put to some use beyond that honors thesis I knocked out in three days). The editing is deep and far-reaching, both line-by-line and chapter-by-chapter, which means that I've been analyzing every word and making minor changes while also deciding where to add/delete paragraphs or write entirely new sections. So, over the course of about twelve hours of work, I edited 150 pages -- approximately half the book, in the font and formatting that it's currently printed in. Unfortunately, that's the half of the book that I've edited before. In other words, while I'm happy with the changes I've made and glad that I took the time to revisit these pages, the second 150 pages are rougher and are thus going to take longer to edit.

But, I'll take the progress I made and be pleased with it. I did nothing else today; I walked a couple of blocks away to get a bagel for breakfast/lunch, did some of my editing at Peet's, did some more editing in the lobby of the hotel, and eventually returned there for dinner (which I edited through). Needless to say, I saw nothing new of Monterey, but I'm sure I'll be back someday, so that's just fine with me.

And now, I should really go to sleep; I need to get up in time to pack all my notebooks and toiletries so that I can check out and drive home, where I intend to edit again (or perhaps enter all these massive edits into my computer while watching the Academy Awards, since I can't do edits while watching television but I should be able to type again by then). Goodnight!