Editing

45 Marbles
More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.
John Irving

    I’m working on another rewrite of Burlesque Palace. The editor who I've hired says that I have to make the series more edgy, take it into the dark side, let the characters scrape their knees.  I thought I was doing that but she returned it to me with the comment that I was still playing it too safe.  
    Before I started my next rewrite, I sat in my bath and had a good cry.  I apologized to the characters and told them that I was sorry that their lives were about to get difficult.  I was sorry that s*** was going to hit the fan but that they would be okay in the end - actually, I couldn’t even guarantee that.  When I told the editor about my sadness and reluctance, she told me that it was a good sign that I was not only writing the story but I was feeling it.  As Robert Frost wrote, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”
    The editor asked me, “You do know that your main character can be flawed and still be loveable, don’t you?” I stopped before I answered.  It was a tough question.  Sure, logically I knew that flawed characters could be loveable, but heck, I’m a Canadian.  We pride ourselves in being nice.  
    I thought about my relationship with Ex-man.  It felt to me that his x-ray vision was often focused on my faults - my whole self was never celebrated. It felt like because I wasn’t perfect, I wasn’t completely likeable to him (and perhaps he felt the same).  
     Where those seeds germinated within myself? Where did I get the idea that you have to be perfect to be loved?  I was baptized and apparently cleansed from my “original” sin.  But this rite of passage focuses on sin.  What if I was completely whole, likeable, and loveable from the moment I was born? What if I was before I was born?
    Then I thought of dude from New Orleans – in many ways flawed but also completely loveable.  Maybe that was one of his lessons to me.  You don’t need to be “good” to be loved.  You don’t need to be perfect to be loved.   In fact, maybe this was one of the lessons of the 365 marbles was really about.  We’re all human and we’re all imperfectly perfectly loveable.

Do you know that you are completely loveable?