Working in 3D environments allows me to have a lot more latitude in how I create my projects, but it actually creates a much harder editing process. Since entire scenes are scripted and key-framed you can endlessly revisit and modify everything. In a sort of post-photographic sense, it’s like having a perpetual decisive moment. I’m working with virtual cameras and lighting quite often, and it is a major challenge to pare down the process to best fit the goals of the project.

I love editing probably more than I love writing. Writing does feel in many ways like I’m making mud or making clay, material that I then, in the editing process, can shape and make into whatever I want it to be. But, until I make that mud or whatever, there’s nothing else I can make. After finishing a rough draft, I go back and start rewriting oftentimes within the draft, which is kind of a bad habit because it means that I’ll take more shortcuts. With the first novel, I started to do something that I think I’ll do forever because I love it so much, which is reading out loud. I probably read my novel out loud like six to 10 times.

It was devastating. That’s really the only word. I was looking for another one. It was devastating on a number of levels, but mostly because I had to confront the fact that I had hurt this person so much that they would say that to me. That was the devastating thing. The rewriting was … once again, I’m not sure if “therapeutic” is the word, but it did feel something like a penance.

I don’t know if this says something about my attachment style, but whenever I start writing a book, I love it and think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. Then, as time passes, I hate it more and more. It makes promoting a book difficult because by that point, I really hate it. I tend to find more and more flaws as time goes on. I never feel like it’s done or ready.

Usually I’m overcome with sadness and fear, actually. And when I have that feeling where the bottom drops out of things, I know that it’s done.