Sh!thouse: A Memoir

by Lauren Dollie Duke

“Someone once told me that you know your manuscript is done when it doesn’t even look like you wrote it anymore. I had that exact experience.
The revision process is grueling. You look at something so many times— your eyes feel like they might just burst— or fall out of your face altogether. And no one gets it—except for another writer who’s been through it.

And meanwhile—all your friends make jokes about the ‘book project’ you’ve been working on for five years because they don’t believe you that at some point it will be finished—and they incessantly ask you two very annoying questions: 1. ‘When’s your book going to be finished?’ And 2. ‘Why is it taking so long?’ Which are the two things no writer in the midst of revisions ever wants to be asked—because at that point the answer to those questions might as well be Mars—it feels so far away—it’s hard to even wrap your brain around a completed project.

But then you slow down—and eliminate the timeline. You look at the piece every day for years. You get somewhere close. You work with your editors. They tell you, ‘No, not yet. Keep going.’ You cry but you keep going anyway.

Bla bla bla—this is how the process goes for-fucking-ever—and then, down the road, just when you feel like you never want to see the manuscript again, a magical fairy copyediting godmother named Laura Brittain appears. She swoops your manuscript up into her magical laptop bag and gives it back to you a few weeks later—clean as a whistle. Sure she asks a few questions along the way—but mostly she just does what you wanted to do in the first place but were so busy overanalyzing the damn thing, and your eyes were going to fall out—so you missed a million commas, and another million mistakes.

She’s the finisher you see in one of those crime movies where the guy comes in after the horror show and cleans up the mess you’ve made. That’s a copyeditor’s job.

Anyhow thank you to my very own @brittainediting for your help, your honest feedback, and for really making me see what I couldn’t. Nothing feels better than a completed manuscript.

Ahhhhh, I can relax now.”