Writing is like strength training in this respect: if you’re doing it right, your personal best two years ago is considerably worse than your personal best today.

Writing is unlike strength training in this respect: even if you’re doing it right, you can’t reduce your skill to a single number.  Perhaps your sentences are stronger now than they were two years ago, perhaps your emotional through-line’s more clear.  Perhaps you’ve developed your vocabulary, or your sentence structure, or pacing.  A single glance is rarely enough to tell how you’ve changed.

Because of this, returning to an old project always makes my knees weak.  Maybe I’ve become worse in the intervening years!  For the last month or so, I’ve been re-working my thriller novel Sente, which I wrote back in 2005 or so and polished to the best of my abilities in 2007.  When I started to edit in May, I was terrified that I might find my work had fallen off since college.  After all, I remembered this book as a gem.

Three pages in, I found the first sentence I knew I could improve, and relaxed.

Then, a paragraph later, I found another two sentences to improve, and realized that this round of edits would take longer than I intended.

Two chapters in, I wanted to go back in time and kindly throttle my younger self.  “What are you doing with these weird verb tenses?  Why, oh why, did you use that word 67 times in your manuscript?  Were you even paying attention?”

I was, I know.  I paid very close attention.  I’m just paying better attention now.