Food is all about the presentation, right? So on a lazy Saturday morning, you decide to surprise your Significant Other with a wonderful, beautiful breakfast. Maybe it will make up for the misunderstanding the night before. It totally wasn't your fault, but as always, you'll be the one to offer the olive branch.
Olives. That's what the omelet needs. She loves those, and they'll go great with some feta cheese, fresh tomatoes, a sprinkling of chives. Pour the juice, clip a flower from the garden for the slim vase, and oh, turn off the burner before the eggs burn! You slowly f-l-i-p the main course onto a plate, one of the good ones, and for a wonder it doesn't fall apart. It looks good enough to eat.
Still needs something, though. A little color. The slice of orange you carefully arrange beside the omelet isn't enough. Nor do the two lightly toasted slices of sundried-tomato bread really set off the yellow in the right way. Parsley is what you need. The little bottle of flakes on the spice rack won't do, it'll have to be fresh. You pull on your jacket for a quick run to the market.
Mere moments later, jacket in a heap on the floor, you carefully place the beautiful, deep green leaves atop the dish, and it's truly a work of art. You know she'll be pleased.
Picking olives from the carpet, you try to work out what exactly happened. All right, perhaps the food did get cold. But wasn't it gorgeous? How could she react that way? And the day's misunderstandings begin...
Does prose go bad if it's edited for too long? I so love arranging the words just so, maximizing their impact. And some amount of editing is always necessary. But sometimes I wonder if I lose something in not going with the immediacy of my first output. Or at least the second or third. Further, excessive editing detracts from the time I have available to produce new material.
For the last couple of months, I've been engaged in editing the half-novel I wrote during NaNoWriMo 2008. Just last night, I finally finished updating my outline to match everything in my draft, including that last, frantically conceived text necessary to meet the 50K word count. Of course, I did edit the prose as I went along. But now I'm at the point where I can begin adding plot again. Switch from arranging mode to cooking mode, and try to stay focused on the flavor, not the flower. Here I go...