Digging through the fresh rubble that is my July draft, I find I have a lot of soul-searching to do. Most writers who edit their own work seem to. In the wake of the Nano writing bender, I offer you the frank confessions of a haggard writer-in-editing.

• Occasionally, you will have to sit back, look at your own work in perplexity, and realize, my brain made this. It is not always a nice realization, but then, it’s not always a bad one.

• I take all my own photos, excepting only a few which are donated by friends (including this one!), unless explicitly credited otherwise. I just edit them, like an angsty teenager with a Snaphchat filter and a celebrity crush, to make them look like I didn’t. This ain’t a photography blog.

• Having a stranger read your writing in a day workshop has the same flavor as a one-night stand. You aren’t really friends afterwards, but aren’t really strangers. You know things about each other, but it feels sort of awkward to bring out intimate details like writing style or choice diction–which are basically all you know about each other.

• Every time I invent a name for story locations or concepts, I immediately type it into a search engine to make sure there’s nothing with the same name–or, at least, nothing too specific.

• Sometimes the only way to patch a plot hole is to…dig two more. Damn it.

• Embarrassingly often, I blow my own mind with staggering single-sentence plot reveals I noted to myself in margins and then completely forgot about. “What do you mean, the ghost was his father?!”