Every Bump is a Road Block

My fragility is thrown in my face this week.  I run into this shit more often than I like, and it shames me into silence.  Maybe if I talk about it -- here, on my lonely blog, my cheap therapy place -- I'll bring something into the light.

Ok, the simple version.  I attended a webinar recently on using a self published book to interest an agent, and in that the idea of hiring a freelance editor to polish the manuscript came up.  Now, I'm a big believer in editing, so I talked it over with a few folks.  I know someone who does freelance editing for a legal books company (lawyers have their own publications), and I did some work myself as a proofer, so I felt I had a rough idea what I'd have to spend.  I asked for a referral from someone who should know, contacted a person, and made my pitch.

A day later, while reading over the notes from the webinar (stuff that wasn't in the webinar but was answered later) the presenter said that freelance line editors ask between $75 to $125 PER HOUR.  Who are these people and who the hell do they find to pay them?  I know that small press editors, who spend hours and hours nursing manuscripts, do not get NEARLY this much money for their efforts, and they are essentially freelance. If they should be pulling down $75 per hour, considering  a manuscript can easily swallow up 20 to 30 hours, that is a, shall we say, lot of money -- far more than I can afford to pay, far more than anyone I know who writes can afford to pay.  That's very likely more than someone working for a publisher makes (at least from what I'm told by those who work for publishers.)

But me, I will take this as gospel and suddenly I realize perhaps why I have not heard back from this freelance editor and (here comes the spiral) I'd practically insulted her, which would eventually work back to the person who gave me her name, and how in hell could I afford an editor, why was I even trying to do this, I and the story I just re-read that I liked a lot last week really sucks this week and I"m no writer I'm an idiot...

You can, of course, see where this ends up.  This ends up in the usual place with me hating the world and myself in particular and considering the idea of dying and going into a separate circle about how I wouldn't know I wasn't around to love any of the things and people I love now and how that loss which hasn't happened yet makes me incredibly sad for its potential being and blah blah blah blah blah...yeah, right down to bottom because of a little bump. 

Positive?  I'm climbing back up a little faster than usual.  In the past -- the very recent past -- such a bump could derail me for months.  HAS derailed me.  My psyche doesn't always tell me when I've suffered some kind of trauma that has screwed up my brain.  I find out much later as I'm sorting through the pieces and wondering how the hell this happened.  Yay, mental illness.  I hate those words and I hate having a brain with these problems.

I want to write.  My brain won't stop with stories, but the pipeline, the conduit, the way I once had of communicating these stories to the world -- that's damaged.  Repair work is tough.  Streets torn up in every direction, no body getting anywhere.  So there's nothing else to do but get back on the job patching pipes and watching for leaks and stoppages.  I have to learn the skills of clearing them faster, of not getting derailed for a pebble on my path.

This was hard to write, too.  But I got it out.  Damn.