#121. Revisions (Friday, April 18, 2025)

What was your best day…of taking something good and making it even better?

In order to love writing as much as I claim to (#130), a person must also be able to enjoy, or at least tolerate, the boring, less creatively engaging side of the activity. Rewriting. Especially if their ultimate goal is to put that work out into the world—to inspire, educate, entertain, and face the harsh scrutiny of thousands or even millions (I’m optimistic) of anonymous souls.

Despite my own personal writing interests, I had taken a long hiatus from publishing papers as part of my policy work, with a seven-year gap between my last piece on the impact of government debt supply on bond liquidity in 2018 (#124), and the hedge fund paper at the center of this story.

It was my best friend and colleague Andrew Eckhart who got me out of this rut, when he found some interesting trends in the data for hedge fund bidding at government bond auctions; and after a few discussions, we deemed the result worthy of a wider audience. Andrew would focus on the technical heavy lifting and I’d focus on turning all of this into an engaging narrative for a general policy and market audience.¹

And this paper turned into a bigger deal than either of us expected. Because our colleague Taylor, who coordinated one of the institution’s flagship annual reports coming out in May, wanted to cite our paper—and specifically, include one of its key charts—in that report. But in order for that to happen, our paper had to already be published. That meant accelerating our editing timeline by several weeks.

The editing process run by our institution’s communications team is quite rigorous. But Andrew and I commit to doing whatever we can to make this happen, and our enthusiasm and responsiveness seem to bring out the same in our assigned editor, Melissa. We make record progress the first week, culminating in a highly productive meeting this Thursday. Andrew and I explain, precisely but non-technically, what we are trying to say in the dozen or so remaining ambiguous, jargon-heavy, or poorly written passages, and the three of us work together to come up with the best wording. All that remains is one final pass from Andrew and me over the long weekend before sending it to translation, still on track for concurrent publication with Taylor’s report.

But, coming out of the meeting, I receive an email on my phone. It’s from one of the literary agents who had, two days earlier, requested the full manuscript for my book—which was now on its fifth (and I hoped, final) revision. She had read the whole thing and liked the premise but felt the last quarter still wasn’t working in some areas, though she invited a future resubmission. Valuable feedback, since this is the first person who actually read the whole thing and had a real professional stake.²

So suddenly I have two revision tasks hanging over a long weekend I had planned as a badly needed three-day Toronto break.

I discuss all this with Andrew (who, like half my institution, knows all about my novel endeavors), and it’s pretty simple. Thanks to all our work already, the paper is effectively ninety-nine percent done; he’ll just make a final cleanup of the charts over the weekend, while I make two passes—a final pass on the train there, and a final, final pass on the train back. As for the manuscript? The agent’s comments leave me with a nagging sense that something fundamental is wrong with the ending, but I can’t yet identify what.

On the six-hour train to Toronto the next morning, I accomplish both tasks. A clean revised version of our paper incorporating Melissa’s edits, for Andrew; and, amid intermittent sitting naps, a deep psychological excavation of my novel’s ending. That’s when I realize that the last several chapters are structurally failing to capture the larger, more distinctive theme I want the book to be about. An earlier draft had simply carried me toward that ending, and by the time I fully understood the book’s larger purpose, too much architecture had already been built around it. I become convinced that the final quarter—and, to some extent, the whole book—needs a larger rewrite to reach its potential.

The weekend between train rides is a social extravaganza. Friday afternoon, I go to my university best friend Masato’s (#127, #122) new house in Burlington to see his newborn son, then I go to the Jays-Mariners game with good accountant friend Jerry Qing (#126) and his running buddy Neil³.

Saturday, I have brunch with Seung, my old foreign-reserves colleague,⁴ then spend a peaceful afternoon in High Park thinking through the book before replying to the agent that a larger rewrite may be coming. After another Jays game, I have five or six beers at the Amsterdam BrewHouse with Xavier, our summer student from the previous year, then stay out until 2 a.m. at Rebel for “I Luv R&B Night.”⁵

On Sunday, first in the Omni hotel lobby before the Jays game and then on the train home, Andrew and I make the final, final revisions. We make the extra effort because we know the paper is about to have a much larger audience than usual. Then we wrap up a highly satisfying four days.

N.B. The revised hedge fund paper is well received and generates substantial market and policymaker discussion in the months following. The revised manuscript takes much, much longer.

1. We did the same for the three subsequent papers we put out in 2025 (we went on a bit of a run).
2. All other agents had rejected at the query stage, and beta readers don’t tend to go as deep since all they’re getting is a flat fee.
3. They actually flew in from Montreal just for the day, which was worth it because Neil worked at Air Canada and the Mariners were Jerry’s favorite team from his time in Seattle.
4. Who’d left our Calgary office a month ago to move back to Toronto and take a private sector job.
5. Naturally, with each of Masato, Jerry, Neil, Seung, and Xavier—all of whom are at least partly in the industry—I do a shameless sell job of our upcoming paper.