Editing - Rinse, Spit, and Repeat

I’m in that ‘fun’ stage of editing where I open a chapter I wrote weeks ago and read the scene with fairly fresh eyes. Wait, what’s this? How did he get in this scene and what happened to Beth, my trusty sidekick? Where did she go? Crap (smack hand to forehead). Now it’s time to add and takeaway…it’s time to think of more witty lines for Beth’s dialog. Reread for flow. Recheck for overuse of passive verbs. Wait, who’s this talking? Double check my tags. Why is Jeremy smiling here? For Christ’s sake, somebody just got sucked dead by a nilas…there’s nothing funny about that—expression adjustment. Come on, Jeff, get rid of the ‘I saw’, ‘I heard’, ‘I smelled’, ‘I felt’, the reader already knows who the POV character is—let’s tighten it up! Is it passed or past? Further or farther? Lay or laid? Hell, I can never remember, let me look it up. Rinse, spit, and repeat. Yup, this is the ‘fun’ stage of editing…another chapter down.