How to edit a manuscript without childcare

You might be wondering where I’ve been?

(No you haven’t! I talk to all three of you every week at least. You know where I’ve been. But anyway.)

So! Our babysitter quit! THE MORNING AFTER THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL! Life sure is funny!!!!

It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine. She took wonderful part-time care of our kids for several years, rolling elegantly along with us through numerous changes both inside and outside our home. We were lucky to have her for as long as we did, particularly when I went back to work with twinfants and then when all the kids were in school and our needs evolved every few weeks. She tolerated our uptight Covid precautions and our messy house, taught our kids Spanish. She had committed to sticking with us through September, when the twins will be in five-day pre-K, and so we were quite shocked when she told us in early June that she’d gotten a better job offer and wouldn’t be coming in on Monday—but we do understand. The childcare realm is a seller’s market right now, and we don’t blame her for taking a good offer (single baby, great pay) before it evaporated. My stung feelings aren’t rational; work is work, and she did everything she promised she would do for us.

However, June is, like…five months too late to make summer plans for school-age children in the DMV. I did the 5 am fire drills in January, plunked down all my deposits, blocked out our calendar. I had been planning around having 32 weekly hours of babysitting throughout July and August. Fuck my life I guess!!!!

More importantly, as of the day the Quitting happened, I was midway through first-pass edits to THE GREAT WHEREVER, and so, seriously, fuck my life. I have done first-pass edits before, for Company, but it was a very different experience. Different editor, for one thing (though both editors, Yuka at Graywolf and Emily at Holt, are lovely and brilliant); and then most of the short stories had already been published in journals and magazines, so there wasn’t such a rawness to them.

A novel is just a different beast. This one sprawls across time and centers on a particular midcentury incident that shatters a close-knit family, and the way I had drafted it wasn’t serving the book as a whole. It felt good to draft it the way I originally did, it felt artful and comfortable, but Emily was right to flag it and suggest reworking it. I promised to get a draft back to her by June 2 and I breezed through most of her edits, but still had that big one to tackle by the end of May. I had been stewing over how to redo it (without totally unraveling the rest of the book) for weeks, and had just figured it out when the sitter quit.

You’re thinking, So what? What does it matter that the sitter quit? You write at night after the kids go to bed. And no, yes, totally, you’re right. School and the sitter only ever covered the daytime hours dedicated to my day job. But this is the thing. This is the WHOLE thing. The kids/day-job/writing balance is delicate. When one is in even mild disrepair, the others fall like dominoes. To say nothing of trying to maintain a modicum of self-care or, God help us, marital harmony. It’s truly a fucking tightrope. On a PERFECT day, I go to work; and on breaks I conduct household admin (grocery shopping, any needed correspondence with schools, meal planning, tossing kids’ clothes with holey knees, maintaining relations with the kids’ friends parents); and then I cook dinner and turn my attention entirely to the kids when we’re home together; and after they’re asleep, I exhale extremely loudly and then start lassoing my two waking brain cells to try to write or edit.

If there is no sitter, there are no breaks, and the household admin bleeds into the family time. Or else my day job spreads like plasma over everything and makes my entire family miserable. Or the kids sense the disruption and won’t go to sleep, and there is no after they’re asleep. Or the stress erodes my immune system, and the next time a kid comes home with a runny nose I wind up in bed with chills and muscle aches for 12 hours or however long I can spare before I use up all goodwill with my husband. All of these things and then some happened in the final days I had allocated for my first-pass edits.

The sick part happened at the very end, and it sucked very badly. (Seemingly not Covid nor flu, but a secret and similarly shitty third thing.) The silver lining was that when it finally passed, I had had a teeny bit of time to think through how to fix the book’s problem section. I opened up a clean document and did a fresh pass, and—actually, I don’t want to say too much here, because Emily has the draft right now, and I don’t know yet how well my second attempt works for a reader who’s not me. But I will say that I felt good about it. Killing our darlings is hard. I was proud of being able to slice the draft open and write something completely new without feeling like I had broken something.

If I can get sort of…shmoopy about this for a second, this is where loving the process comes into play. I am extremely noisily on record with my feelings about genAI in creative writing (TL;DR—I’m anti-); and as I struggled through my draft while busy and tired and sick, of course I had the thought at least a dozen times: This is why people cheat. I had that thought over and over when my muscles were too achey to type. But first of all, fuck AI. (Let me be crystal clear about that.) And more importantly, what a surreal triumph it was to rise up from a very poorly timed fever and get to work on a new idea that (as far as I know) has improved the book. And sometime soon (around a year from now, I hope), what a joy it will be to be sitting in a bookstore, in conversation with some other author I love, talking about the revised section and having a clue what I’m talking about because I actually wrote it.

I got the draft turned in. And then right after that, I had to judge a contest—short-story collections—and that was quite a lot of fun but sucked up still more of my June evenings. My husband wanted to watch Only Murders in the Building together (I’ve seen it; he hasn’t), and I had to make him wait until July. Now, though, we are deep into finding out Who Is Tim Kono? (Again, I already know; he doesn’t.)

Anyway, here I am. And now I don’t have a draft to edit or a contest to judge, so I’ll try to do this on Tuesdays for the time being.