Editing Blues

Editing my own work is a very draining process.  Does anyone else feel the same way? I get exhausted rereading my own writing and in the end I'm never sure if my changes helped the piece or made it worse. I can spend an hour rewriting a sentence 13 different ways. To the point that it looses all meaning to me and every time I reread that sentence in the future I feel the old OCD creeping up, urging me to spend another hour or two to get it JUST right.

I have this assumption that "real" writers sit down at their computer (or a typewriter for those authors above 60 or with hipster pretensions) and bang out their stories in a flurry of artistic brilliance. Wholly formed in their minds like a Mozart symphony then transcribed onto paper with nary a correction to be made. Meanwhile I am writing a first draft that reads like a mentally challenged 4yr old wrote it. Then revising and revising until I feel my eyes bleeding. Once its been worked over for a while I set it aside, confident that I have some good writing saved. Only to come back to it a few weeks later and find my editing job isn't nearly complete. I do all of this work with the knowledge over my head that I can never truly edit my own work either. That at some point an outside voice will be needed to tell me where I am not as clear as I thought I was, or that in trying not to be too descriptive I have failed to paint any kind of picture at all. Leaving the reader lost.

My writing partner Cordell has given me back 10 pages or so of a short story I am working on.  I hope to have the first chapter up as a sample this week. I hear the ding of the coffee pot so its back to work for me. Fare you well dear reader.