Earlier this week I sent back the latest rewrite…and boy, should you be celebrating the fact that Editor held my feet to the fire and made me work the monster over again. It’s MUCH better now. (Editor may not think it’s enough better, as is Editor’s prerogative, but it’s definitely better.) Among other things, while Read More…
Category: the writing life
The Naming of People, Places, Things
Without looking up the source (bad scholar, but it’s that kind of day) I think it was Owen Barfield in an essay about language, corporations, and legal fictions who suggested that language itself is rooted in the ability to abstract and name a concept, and that is itself a form of fiction (or lie, if Read More…
Culture-building: Virtues & Vices
See, there’s a bonus to the previous post–today you get two new posts. Today’s topic is culture-building–some thoughts on creating cultures-not-like-ours-exactly (or at all) and specifically some thoughts on how cultures differentiate along the fault lines of, well, faults. What’s right. What’s wrong. What the people in that culture think about the “why” behind what’s Read More…
“Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition…”
Or hitting a wall across the road when the road appeared to be wide open except for that very distant wall. But I have. It’s not a fatal crash, and not a fatal wall, but it sure was a wake-up call. It had actually been there all along, but what I saw (thought I saw) Read More…
The New New Book
The new book is Cold Welcome. The new new book is the book after that, which presently is undergoing some restructuring…since its beginning is now the end of Cold Welcome. I’ve been doing some analytical thinking about it, because it should have a series of reveals, like the opening of a rose, and it would Read More…
Done Again, Dunnigan
This afternoon I mailed the manuscript back to Editor. It’s done. It’s done again for the umpteenth time. I thought it was done last week, but Editor was busy with something else and said “I’ll be ready for it in a week and a half. ” So I spent a week combing its mane and Read More…
The Characters Discuss Their Author
Conversations about the author–the characters being conceived almost as actors in a green room, let’s say–are not unknown in the writing world. (A thunderstorm just popped up on top of us. Blame all typos on my instinctive twitch when a close strike hits.) So here’s a conversation between characters from some of my stuff…all of Read More…
Done
Well, probably. Sortakinda done. At 1:30 this afternoon, I made my final staggering plunge through the muck and mire to the finish line, having untangled various tangles and discovered yet more typos. I’d been up until 2:30 am Friday morning (NOT, mutter mutter, going out to photograph peak bluebonnets and plains nipple cactus, mutter mutter) Read More…
Fossils
In the previous post I blithely announced that I was finished, done, absolutely and finally done with the structural revisions. This morning, working on temporal nits (the book has day-by-day notation in some places, and Editor had found some of them to be either confusing or obviously wrong–fossils of earlier drafts), I found a great Read More…
Step One + Snippet
Saturday, April 2, I finished the structural parts of the revisions. Now I’m going over the other comments. Stuff has been taken out. Stuff taken out was partly at the request of Editor and partly my initiative, as the changes in structure up to that point made the stuff taken out less organic to the Read More…