It’s amazing how many times I can edit the same piece of writing. For the last five days, I’ve hunkered over Ganesh Ascends to Heaven, about a woman who kills an Indian pedestrian in the U.S. and goes to India to try to make sense of the man’s paintings and her own life. 
It’s one of the stories in my forthcoming collection, Immigrants (Creators Press, Fall 2023).
So I’ve started every morning re-reading the same 14 pages, shifting pieces of paragraphs back and forth–up and down the page, deleting words and putting them back in; deleting commas and putting them back in; going back to a file of an earlier draft to splice in a sentence I’d eliminated, all in the quest of trying to make the story sail more smoothly.
And the dirty truth: I couldn’t tell you with certainty whether what I’ve come up with is better than what I had before. But I think it is! At least–today–I like it a whole lot better!
I will say this: it absolutely helps me to take breaks from my writing, long breaks, where I can return to what I’ve written with my mind in a totally different place and assess the story as if I’m reading it, rather than writing it. I just have to hope that I don’t have too many “What Was I Thinking” moments that Christine Lavin totally nails in her very funny song.
The important thing to remember is that everything is changeable, but also to take care not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
What I noticed on the initial read this round, having not looked at the story for a couple of months was a clunkiness to the writing–details that didn’t need to be there that slowed the story down. So, I was able to chop out 300 words, shortening the story by an entire page, with no essence lost.
And I noticed more sloppiness–places where I used the same verb or a weak verb, or too many instances of words like “that” or “just.” (And this was after spending a month last year on micro-editing the entire collection, focusing entirely on sentence structure and word choices.)
And it’s also after two rounds of editing by my publisher, who has been great at flagging larger contextual/developmental questions as well as clunky and ungrammatical phrases.
So the underlying moral of this story–perfection is elusive, like the graph going toward infinity. Yet, I feel energized pursuing it, getting closer and closer to that unreachable axis.
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As the night broke into the beginnings of a cloud-covered day, we watched a bus pull up. A man held up his shackled wrists to the window. We stood in front of the bus, holding up hearts, and for a moment, we held up “business as usual” as the bus came to standstill. We surrounded the bus, shouting “I love you,” to the shadowy faces in the windows. And “No están solos. Estamos con ustedes.” (You are not alone. We are with you.) 
Then, the police came and since we had not planned for a civil disobedience action that would end in arrest, we let the bus pass through the gate to the plane. They parked a truck in front of the stairway, so we couldn’t see the people limping with their shackles up the stairs into the plane’s belly, but that image, along with other accounts of abuse, has been captured in 
Two days into my South Africa trip, I started getting cold symptoms. I tested for COVID and was relieved to be negative, so I went on a safari and for a walk with rifle-carrying naturalists in the wild bush, chalking up the fatigue I was feeling to two consecutive red eye flights followed by the eight hour bus ride to Kruger National Park. 
A few days later, when we arrived in Cape Town, my husband was also coughing and sneezing. Our symptoms felt like a typical cold, but just to make sure, we both tested again. BINGO! For both of us, a flaming red line.
I’ll just have to be patient, put on my mask and be happy enough to sit on an uncrowded beach and watch the sunset.