Why use a metaphor?
Editing is not a roller coaster. It is a cold straight forward process, whereby someone reads your text and makes comments, suggests cuts and changes.
From an outsiders point of view it does not seem so terrible.
Not so terrible. This is what I thought.
I had heard my tutor, Catherine Fox, say that one of her book had been edited by 25%. A that time, I was shocked, because having a quarter of the pages you have written thrown down the gutter sounded terribly brutal. But I sort of discarded that because I knew in the end she had a great book out.
My first bite at editing came with the Timelines anthology.