The thing they don’t tell you about revising a novel is that it totally sucks.

I think it will be fun to really polish this piece — to make the sentences nice and neat, to come up with more descriptive phrases and evocative imagery, to make the humor sharper — but this current stage of revision is a lot clunkier than that. This week, I deleted twenty pages. That was brutal. I have to rewrite the ending, and there are about ten pages at the bottom of the document under the header: “NO HOME.” So I have to find a home for those pages, or else delete them.

And when I’m finally through, when I’ve finally made it through the entire book and made all of the changes I thought I needed to make, I’ll go back to page one and start revising all over again.

Sometimes I feel like the only thing worse than writing is not writing.