Editing the next manuscript

I got the edit copy back from my editor yesterday, in preparation for publication this fall, and now I'm plunged into the maelstrom once again. It's like this every time -- having to leave what I'm currently writing and immerse myself back into a story I finished seven months ago. Sincerely, I don't remember the old story once I am deep into the new one. It's like being plucked from a nice warm bath and dropped into icy Lake Ontario and then told to dive for pennies at the bottom.

It's funny how I can work an eight-hour day in my cubicle and it feels like it's going to drag on forever, but I can sit down to write fiction and when I next blink, it has been nine hours. And I don't even remember time going by. I rise up out of the story gasping for oxygen and gape like a fish, completely disoriented. Fiction is always more real to me than reality.

I'm sure it makes me difficult to live with.