Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, in space, the final frontier, life is like a box of chocolates, Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four privet drive said to the rosebud, and sang welcome them to the jungle.

Every story needs a good beginning, so the begging of this post should be the greatest beginning of all time. A story actually needs a middle and end, so I guess I’ll still need to keep typing. More importantly though, a story needs an editor. As a self-proclaimed writer and blogger, I’ve become my family’s designated editor. I’m constantly being asked by my family to write/edit papers, taking large amount of garbage and whittling them down a few good sentences. The life a writer is the life of an editor. I’ve written more words than I can count, but I’ve edited more words than the galaxy far, far away could count.

I wasn’t always the best writer in the family. When I first started my writing career, I wasn’t very good at writing, because I hadn’t even learned to talk yet. I was just in survival mode, trying to get my parents to feed me, but apparently I wasn’t very good at communicating. When I asked for a stuffed crust pizza, they just crammed my mouth with some really gross milk powder.

Clearly, I needed to work on my communication skills, so I started screaming really loud for pizza. To quiet me down, they kept feeding me the gross milk powder. Finally, I had to get really firm with them, so instead of wasting my first word on momma or daddy, I blurted out pizza. They thought it was really funny and just laughed at me every time I asked for pizza.

I knew if I wanted to get pizza, I would have to communicate with them better, so I started learning the alphabet. I started with A, then skipped to I, then P, and then went to the last letter, Z. It took a while, but after a bunch of tries, I put them all together, in the right order, and spelled piza to them. They still laughed at me, until I realized that I needed a little more pizzaz and added a double Z to spell out pizaz. That still wasn’t right, so I finally figured out how to put the z’s together, and spelled out pizza.

My parents clearly weren’t good at picking up on hints, so I had to hammer them on the head with more clues. They gave me my first set of crayons, so with just two crayons, red and yellow, I drew as clearly as I could, a slice of pizza with a stuffed crust, and melty, drippy cheese. Nothing. These people, I tell you.

I finally got old enough for a birthday party. I said as clearly as I could, that I wanted a pizza party with zero of my closest friends. Again, they were horrible at reading my not subtle request and invited a bunch of people I didn’t know or care about to my party with cake and ice cream with candles. I grabbed some bread, cheese, tomato sauce, pepperoni’s and some candles, and tried to bake them together, but my parents got mad at me because they thought I was using my candles to burn down the house. Wow, they didn’t get me.

When I was 14, my parents said I needed to pay rent, so my dad told me to “applicate” and get a job. I immediately applied to dozens of pizza places, and finally got my first job with Little Caesar’s pizza. Finally, I got to taste the amazing mixture of crusty bread, melty cheesy, zesty tomato and the spiciness of pepperoni. And that, my friends has nothing to do with how I learned how to write.

But, I realized that writing is all about flooding the zone with every possible idea you’ve ever thought onto paper. Editing is about eliminating almost everything. In other words, it’s building a house, burning it to the ground, and only keeping the ideas that survived the fire.

I’m not a classically trained writer, so I’m terrible at grammar, structure, and AMA citations. Yet, here I am, the family editor/writer, by way of that one time I said I liked writing a blog. My kids don’t care that I only like creative/fictional writing. Whenever they have papers, I have to write them (while pretending I’m a senior that hates it) and then I have to have figure out grammar, and google what the heck AMA citations are. I have to research what persuasive essays, critiques, and reflection essays are, because my style of writing requires no citations, or research.

I edit more than written words. People would be horrified if they were allowed entrance inside this bitter brain of mine. I have a few brilliant thoughts, but mostly of them are scary, boring or completely psychotic thoughts that shouldn’t be allowed in polite society. My mouth area would love to verbalize them, but if it did, I would be writing this from a prison more secure than Alcatraz. My internal editor does a really good job of not letting those things escape from the mental asylum that is my bitter brain.

Let’s just say for example, someone asks me, “How are you doing today?”. My string of thoughts would be: Well, let’s see, I had a dream about being a serial killer that went after all my mortal enemies, every single bone in my body aches, and I thought about going to a drug store to take a bunch of drugs that would drown out my pain, a deer jumped out in front of me, and almost caused me a heart attack because I wasn’t paying attention because I was on my phone, and I got to work and spent two hours playing games, until people got in and then pretended to work. What I would actually say? I’m fine.

Editing is absolutely necessary all the time. It’s a good thing, because if I didn’t, this blog post would have been much longer, had a lot of spelling errors, and it would have made no sense. Luckily, the Bitter Friday Giftures make up for all the poorly edited blog post, by just being Giftures that are worth ten thousand words…

Every story needs…

Like a long time ago…

Every great story needs a great beginning, middle…

But most importantly…

Since I’m a self-proclaimed writer and blogger…

I haven’t always been a good writer…

Which had nothing to do with…

Writing is about flooding the zone…

Whereas editing…

More important than editing written words…

Thank goodness for mind editing…

AAARRRGGHHHHHH

Bitter Family Editor Ben