Rewriting the Novel: I Miss the Novel

Many nights for the past six months I went to bed guilty because I'd gone another day without working on the novel.

Now that I am supposed to let the book rest for a month, I want to pick at it and futz with it all day every single day. 

All I let myself do is to plan for another revision or take notes on what I want to change. And I can't even do those things at the end of the month. I have to begin with the Great Gutting, in which I pare my words down to the bone just as I did Jerry's.

I'm telling myself that this phase will be less difficult than the first. No doubt it will be just as painful in a new way.