About a year or so ago, my approach to writing started changing. I stopped being so obsessed with getting every single syllable exactly right. It occurred to me that while God, the Almighty Creator of the Possible, Impossible and Everything In Between, might be inviolate and perfect, I was not.

I was so not. 

And yet I kept grinding away and grinding away on stories, poems and novels, working myself into an early grave, expending a whole lot of energy that I could have been devoting to, well, new projects. By loosening the editorial noose, I hope to increase my productivity, which would be a good thing because I've got a backlog of ideas and concepts waiting in the queue, clamoring for a hearing.

I don't think the quality of my prose will suffer much if I ease up a little. I have a feeling I've sometimes over-edited certain works. As a result, they lost some of their original spark, their edge blunted.

I am consciously and deliberately refusing to torture myself by toiling endlessly, trying to match the brilliance of Joyce, the peerless concision of Beckett. I'm going to tell my stories my way. 

With all the attendant warts and flaws of the human who made them and the readers for whom they are intended.