something you learn fast and necessarily when you get into the habit of writing is that you are riddled with blind assumptions, prejudices, unpractised rhetoric and all kinds of unchallenged cicada shell thoughts that were left stuck to your mode of being when bad ideas fled you. most people get to move through the world behind a kind of modesty veil that divides their internal thoughts from their external observations, but you have to take that off when you write. you have to suddenly present the whole world to itself nakedly, without the kindness of someone who can stop you mid-sentence and say "hold on, I know you, you can't possibly mean that". people are often scared to show their work to an editor in case the editor points out what they look like without their modesty veil, but god, christ, hell and heaven, you have to be more afraid of what the whole world of strangers will see if you don't let someone pick the cicada shells off you first.