Editing

Strange that the first manifestation of the research that I've been doing for the past four years is to be a chapter in a book about music entrepreneurship! It has been quite a pressurised experience writing it because of what was happening earlier in the year and I'm now re-editing it after the editors' comments (it's actually been more of a re-write). Every morning I print it out, every afternoon I re-read it, and every evening I make corrections. Really, there's only one more day to go and it's winging it's way over to my work computer as I write this, to be printed out tomorrow and read tomorrow afternoon.
I have become a ruthless slash-and-burn reader of my own work, all the more so because of the lack of time. 'What's this rubbish?' I bellow at myself (well, silently in my head), and I press the delete button, or the copy-and-paste as large chunks of text vanish from one part of it and reappear in the next.
The pink fluorescent marker pen has run out of ink and the Editor's Pencil has travelled back and forth many times between my fingers and the convenient slot behind my ear. Nearly 7000 words have swirled and swarmed like a murmuration of starlings and landed in line on the screen in front of my bespectacled eyes.
On Friday morning, the chapter will fly off into the sunset, and on Saturday I'll go out to play.