Edit this.

Sigh. To edit or not to edit. No thought is safe. Every sentence will get rehashed, restructured, reimagined. This post has already been reworked twice and will most likely be stripped at least ten more times. And I haven’t even said anything yet. After posting, I’ll probably regret some part of this (like the way I used the word “masterful” in too many of my Goodreads reviews) and I’ll cringe at my lack of awareness.
Writing songs, I lose hours, days, weeks stressing over a single word or rhyme. And once released, that word haunts me indefinitely. As a novelist, the words are less exact, more strung like a necklace. Tone is my primary concern.
Both self-editing and professional editing are important, to varying degrees, and can make something good, great. But can editing make something bad, better? Um, you can’t really polish a turd, but the great thing about spending more time with a craft is that the self-editing function becomes more efficient. So, hopefully less turds. This statement is both obvious and crude, but I won’t edit it out because it injects a hint of jocularity. Should I though?
We’ll see when I read it back tomorrow. (eye roll)