Writer's Panic

HOw does a writer save her work - from herself. That seems to be the question tonight. Everything I read needs substantial changes, monumental editing. I have tweaked whole paragraphs down to five word sentence only to become frustrated and erase the whole thing. Only to find that I liked it best before I started fooling with it in the first place.

How does an author back away and let go? The word is definite. Forever recorded. MY meaning so different from how someone read it. I have to make it read the way I intended, the way I had in mind. I have to keep tweaking, editing, searching the thesaurus, pluggin in different ideas until exhaustion sets in. Im beoming obsessive, which means I need to either take a match to the entire thing or walk away.

Two years ago I wrote a Young adult fiction character. The story was ingenius, or so I thought. When I began shipping it to puiblsiher I received a high amount of interest from mainstream publishers (insert: white) and completely lack of enthusiasm from black folks. Never mind, it didn't phase me, I knew the book was good. I shopped it - got terrific response (in hindsight), but it needed editing , finalizing, something a little more. Well, someone has asked me for the manuscript again. A possible agent. I need it shopped to scholastic or someother major. In my excitement I began reading, and my doubt turned every page into a catastrophy. Where was my beautiful story? Before me was just a group of boring garbled words. Thus began my breakdown.

I am signing off and going to bed. That may be the only way to preserve what is left of my sanity. Then I will try my hardest to return all the peices to the story that I slashed away in a true moment of writer's panic.