Thursday, August 25, 2011

Bad Hair Lessons

by Cheri Chesley

(this is not a recent picture--her hair is much longer now)
A few weeks ago, I spent over $30 on hair repair items for my daughter. She spent an extra couple of weeks in OK with her Papa, and swam almost every day--and ran out of conditioner and didn't tell him she needed more. So she spent most of that time without conditioning her hair.

It came back the texture of straw. Seriously.

Because she's been working so hard to grow her hair out, I opted for helping her fix her hair rather than going and getting it cut short. Although, you have to admit, she looks pretty darn good in an A-line. See?

As I spend day after day obsessing over when to give her the next conditioning treatment, having her wash and condition her hair with products I don't usually buy for myself, I'm reminded of the editing process. I know--I'm such a WRITER! lol

See, many of us--and I'm one of them--want to go through our manuscript 2 or 3 times before pronouncing it perfect! Done! As good as we can make it! But, like these conditioning treatments my daughter and I are doing, it can take a dozen or more work-throughs before we're really done with a project.

I'm slowly learning this. I submitted my sequel to Cedar Fort, happy that it was as good as I can make it, until I heard back from them with suggestions that I make some changes and resubmit before they'll consider offering me a contract. See, they knew it wasn't up to par. And, looking back, I know it too--now. :) After letting the project sit for a month, I realized many holes I'd missed and lots of ways to make the story deeper, more compelling and overall more interesting. I'd gotten the bare bones of the story down, but I needed to embellish.

That has to wait until the summer is over. And, now, after we move.

I want to be a better writer than I am. This will take patience. Like my daughter's hair will also take patience, time and effort to get it back to a semblance of normal. I'm still learning; I'll probably always be learning. But that isn't really a bad thing.

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