I am currently editing Deliberately Lost.
This is the part where I tell you what Deliberately Lost is about, because presumably that is why you are here and not because you have somehow wandered onto my blog by accident.
Although, honestly, that would be on brand.
Deliberately Lost is about Maxine Farrow, a woman who hasn’t finished a manuscript in six years and, more importantly, hasn’t really started much of anything else either. She works at a library in a small Virginia town, writes a wildly successful blog about living a bigger life, and has become extremely good at making her relatively quiet existence sound like an adventure.
Then she finds an old journal.
Then her ex gets engaged.
Then she buys a one-way ticket to Paris.
And then, because apparently one impulsive decision wasn’t enough, she discovers that her grandmother did something remarkably similar sixty years earlier and left behind a box of letters and an unfinished journal. Maxine decides to follow the trail and see where it takes her.
Which is where the book actually gets interesting, because getting lost turns out to be considerably more complicated than simply not knowing where you’re going.
Also, there are books that bite.
Obviously.
I’m currently going through the manuscript chapter by chapter, which sounds very organized and responsible when I say it that way.
It is not always organized and responsible.
There is a particular experience that comes with trying to edit a book while possessing a brain that occasionally looks at the task in front of it and says, Absolutely. We should do that.
And then immediately wanders into the kitchen.
Why are we in the kitchen?
We don’t know.
We live here.
While I’m there, apparently I should check the refrigerator.
There is nothing in the refrigerator.
Perhaps I should make coffee.
This is not why we came into the kitchen.
At some point I remember that I am editing a book.
So I go back to the computer.
I read the sentence I was working on.
It is fine.
I change one word.
This feels productive.
Then I notice something else.
Three hours later I have reorganized a folder, looked up something completely unrelated, read an article I did not need, remembered a thing I was supposed to do yesterday, answered an email I had forgotten existed, and developed a very strong opinion about whether a fictional character would realistically own the particular kind of coat I gave her on page 214.
The coat, incidentally, is staying.
This is the general plight of the mentally ill writer, I think. Not necessarily the dramatic version people imagine. Not the cinematic breakdown, not the tortured genius staring meaningfully out a rainy window.
Just this:
You are sitting at your desk.
You have a job to do.
You know exactly what the job is.
Your brain has been informed.
Your brain has acknowledged receipt of the assignment.
Your brain has chosen instead to think about something that happened in 1997.
There is no appeal process.
So I am editing this book.
Chapter by chapter.
Slowly.
Sometimes painfully slowly.
But I am doing it.
And maybe that makes the process particularly appropriate for Deliberately Lost, because this is a book about a woman who has spent a long time being very good at almost doing things.
Maxine has spent years writing about the life she might someday live. She has travel guides she hasn’t used, a blog about a world she hasn’t quite entered, and a younger version of herself who was considerably more confident that she was going to get around to all of it. When she finally buys that one-way ticket, she has no idea what comes next.
And now I’m sitting here with the manuscript open, trying to make sure the story gets where it needs to go while my own brain occasionally suggests that perhaps now would be an excellent time to learn everything there is to know about something completely irrelevant.
There is a certain poetry to it.
Or irony.
Possibly both.
So here we are.
Me, editing a book about a woman who gets deliberately lost.
One chapter at a time.
With varying degrees of success.
At least I’m not in the kitchen anymore.
