I’ve been spending a lot of time lately, thinking of things to do with my time off on Thursday and Friday. I took time off with no particular vacation hot spot in mind; just wanted to be free to do Hellion Happy Things. Incidentally refining the list of Hellion Happy Things has been quite entertaining for several evenings, as I prioritize what I really want to do.

Most of the list involves girl stuff. Hair cut, eyebrow grooming, hair dying, and a pedicure. And some wine drinking. Just basic: “I want to loll around all day, pretending I’m a New Jersey housewife.” Minus the tanning. (And no vajazzling, so don’t bother asking.) If you saw me right now, you’d realize why all these activities made my list. Spring is coming, by God. And before Spring gets here, I need to make a half effort to actually not frighten strangers with what I look like now. It’s bad. Kathy Bates from Misery bad.

My hair style’s grown out; my eyebrows are crazy; my toenails look boring; and I’ve got a general malaise where Winter is concerned that I’m hoping some laughter with girlfriends and a bottle of wine will cure. The problems are plain and obvious and they’re things I can fix. Or more honestly, my checkbook can fix.

Then as I was making my list, I had a mini-epiphany: when you leave things alone for three months, it’s a lot easier to see what needs to be fixed.

Consider a finished manuscript. Once I finished my first manuscript, all I saw were articles constantly harping to leave your manuscript alone for at least 6 weeks (better three months) before you do revisions. But no one ever wants to do that, do they? No. They want to do it now. They want to polish and polish and then send it out in the world (which of course I did) for everyone to love it.  And which of course nobody did. At the time, I was dejected by this global rejection, but now I can see the point.

I realize now a lot of our efforts to polish and polish newly finished manuscripts is like sending Joan Rivers New Jersey Housewives out to find husbands when they’ve spent the last month in a spa. They’re too tanned, too false, too plucked, and too alike. There is nothing natural anymore because they spent all their time looking in one of those mirrors that magnifies your pores by ten times. They fix the molehills instead of the mountains. They lose their inner sparkle. They’re husks of their real selves.

I beg you: learn from Joan Rivers. Don’t start cutting right away! Let your natural beauty rest and shine for a while, then carefully and prudently correct where correction is needed. And don’t overpluck. Do not turn your manuscript into a husk of its former glory because you can’t step away long enough to look at it objectively.

I realize a lot of us like to write cleanly, edit as we go—and I’m not trying to change that. That works for a lot of writers; and if it works, don’t tinker with it. (Bull Durham: don’t fuck with a winning streak. I get that.) But once you’ve written your first clean draft; once you’ve finally gotten to the end—let the damned thing sit the Winter in a drawer before you run it through its final polish. It’s a lot easier to see the obvious when you do.

Have you ever overplucked one of your manuscripts? How do you keep yourself from editing too soon? How do you feel about eyebrows? What things do you like to do to get ready for Spring and chase away the blues of a long Winter? And if you had a day off to do whatever you wanted, what would you do? (You don’t get extra brownie points if you virtuously say: “I’d write all day.” I won’t believe you.)
P.S. SPECIAL SHOUT OUT TO WACKIE JACKIE, WHO IS CELEBRATING HER BIRTHDAY TODAY! DRINK UP A CELEBRATORY DRINK FOR MY DEAR FRIEND, JACK!