"The Void"

    As I'm hoping to get down to some serious editing this month, I find myself in a huge lull. I sit at my desk most days trying to find anything to write, and it's driving me insane. I've done some new poems, a few short stories, but it's not the same. I'm learning that they don't fill the void in my heart like novel writing does.
    I honestly never thought that one day I would ever write a novel. I've done a lot of poetry, but never a story. It started when I was bored one night at my PC, and started writing anything. It began as a rant about how in an urban area was eerily quiet. Over the next week, I introduced the main characters, and started developing the main plot. I thought the initial rant would guide me towards a horror story, but my mind and keyboard guided me towards a romance story.
    As I began the fifth chapter, I decided I was going to finish the novel, and try to publish it one day. I kept pushing onward, excited as I kept adding another 10,000 words. The day I wrote the last word, I felt like I won the lottery. I completed something so many dream about, but never finish. I wrote a novel, and it was the best experience as a writer I felt so far.
    However, the editing stage began to wear me down. When I begin to edit, I feel like I'm cutting my own soul to shreds. I also began to think how I can improve the entire thing instead of focusing on what really needs to be fixed. I managed to struggle through my first edit, and send it to my editor.
    The second edit is when I really learned how to write. The first thing they notice is one of my lovely quirks. I had at least 800 mentions of the word "just", and was like nails on a chalkboard to them. I also learned why Spell Check is not a true editing tool when they found it replaced mascara with massacre. The more we pushed through the edit, the better I got as a writer and editor.
    That was seven years of hard work for the first one. I still haven't done anything with it besides put in on Kindle, but it was a start. I have plans to one day to see one of my books on the shelf at a major bookstore, but right now, I learned from a few reviewers there's still some fine-tuning needed to be done. So, as I get it polished, I kept writing. I finished the second novel's rough draft in less than two years. I figure I can finish the edits by 2016. Until then, I'll keep whatever comes to mind to fill the void novel writing as left.