Will I ever learn?

I was born in the year that Nixon announced that “the end is in sight” in reference to the Vietnam War. And, since it lasted another four years, I have a vivid memory of my dad singing the antiwar folk songs… he actually sang them quite awhile after the war was over, and that’s probably why I remember them so vividly, but let me not lose focus. “Where have all the flowers gone?” was my all-time favorite. Dad put his flaming heart and tormented soul into the “When will they ever learn?” chorus, so much so that I can still hear him singing it inside my head when the words apply to circumstances in my very own life. Except that 90% of the time I have to exchange the word THEY with the word I. Maybe even 95% of the time, but what's five percentage points among friends?

My most recent example of error repeat concerns the editing of novel #1. I have read this thing so many times that I can practically recite all 57,121 words of it to you, yelling and crying and laughing in the all appropriate places… and maybe that’s the problem. After so many times reading it, it’s become like the Lord’s Prayer or The Pledge of Allegiance or “Hi, how are you? Good, how are YOU??” My novel is etched into my mind like the outline of a happy sunset on my screen when I turn the TV off at the end of Teletubbies. And so I have become BLIND to the melodrama that I inoculated into this story back when I first started writing it. Because, surely, it had to be something I wrote eight years ago when I was all of 26…as opposed to the stuff I put in, say, when I was 28, 29, even 30. RIGHT??

But you would think after so many edits, so many that it hurts my delicate brain to try remembering how many edits, I would have seen the blaring parts where MY voice is speaking, as opposed to Sonny or Joey, or the totally-not-me-Mr. Tough Guy Javen who should NEVER EVER EEEVVVVEEERR say something like, “…those sad eyes like pearls cast away from their mother oyster.”

So, anyway, to answer my own question: YES, even if takes eight years and somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,839 edits AND a make-believe, baritone God-like voice booming in my head: TAKE THE MELO OUT OF MELODRAMA FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!!! Big, weighty pronouncement: I WILL learn.