Tag Archives: editing

My Brain is a Border Collie

27 Sunday Oct 2019

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I have this freakish thing going on: Although I can be miserably incompetent at many things (like housework and math), I’m wicked good at decoding my native language–I can read really hard stuff (and really bad stuff), think about it, and then spit it back out in writing. I also write at least tolerably well myself, and I write a lot. (No, not here; I’m sorry, followers! I just don’t want to have a whineblog, so I try to post only when I have something to say.) But I’ve written a doctoral dissertation and ten novels, seven of which are finished. (My first book, which needed to be split into a trilogy, is currently up on a mechanic’s lift being taken apart. In my copious spare time.)

I can also write non-fiction, and I’m an excellent editor. If I didn’t enjoy my day job, I could probably manage as a free-lancer. (I’m on disability, thank God and my fellow taxpayers, which limits my income. So I’m not fantasizing about limitless wealth here.)

Putting it a different way, my brain is one of those amazing little Welsh border collies who can herd sheep into marching-band patterns: Neither of us is close to the unified field theory, but man, are we good at what we do! It took skilled training and the sort of hyperfocused attention that only dogs and ADHDers have. (All dogs have ADH–squirrel!)

I’ve spent twenty hours this month working on a huge grant which is vitally important to a bunch of people I love dearly. They have a spectrum of writing skills, and the first draft was sorting out their various snapshots of the same subject, so we wouldn’t make the nice folks at DHCD tear their hair out. It was sort of like the Hebrew Bible, where important stories in different versions are all just plopped in next to each other, leading bored children to try to figure out just how many animals Noah took with him anyway. Only I don’t just have the J and P authors, I have three social workers, an accountant, a grantwriter, an IT guy, and the entrepreneur heading the organization. Kind of crazy–and I love it!

Taking paragraphs apart, fixing sentences, and moving things around is fun for me. I am more than happy spending my prime creative time (3 a.m. to 8 a.m.) doing this. I would probably do this for free, but I crave an iPhone. (Hey, only a 6, and I found a good deal. I’m not that crazy.)

My border collie gets bored a lot. NaNoWriMo is sort of me buying a flock of sheep to keep it occupied. But that’s only once a year. Major grants like this one only happen once every decade or so. What to do?

So the answer occurred to me this morning at about 5 a.m.: Maybe I should try writing poetry. Truth impels me to say that I can change things up most by attempting to write good poetry. It will be interesting to see if the mutt can make the sheep tap dance. (I promise not to overwhelm you with the results of this cockamamie idea.)

Confession: I loathe most modern poetry (the sort you wrote in high school with lots of emotion on each line) so will probably pick some random classic format for structure. An extra lap or two around the flock, and a nice huddle of well-behaved words as a result. Sounds like–squirrel!

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A Confession

05 Friday Aug 2016

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I read self-help books. A lot of them; I think my average is about one a week. But here’s the thing: I am not the typical reader Looking for Answers. Instead, I’m looking for bad grammar, faulty spelling, and an inability to stay on topic–i.e., I style-edit them. (How’s that for a What’s My Line? job?)

Most of them say the same things: Stop negative self-talk. Get in touch with your spirituality. You can be happier–here’s how. (Many of the suggestions are solid, but then, some Harvard professor did a lecture course and wrote a book about it, so we already know this stuff.) In fact, I’m waiting for the book entitled We Already Know This Stuff. (But maybe that’s the subtitle of this blog entry.)

Every once in a while I run into one that borders on the toxic, like the followers of gurus who are considered really sketchy, or who tout pish coming from organizations under the disapproving eye of people like QuackWatch. Sometimes it’s really hard to smush down my opinions on the material, but we’re professionals here at Nova Terra, and even the unintentionally hilarious bits go no further than my kids. But none so far have been written by haters, although there’s some unconscious naivete now and again that I squash like a bug. (It’s the 21st century–for the love of Mike, don’t have your bad guys dressed in black and your good guys in white! *facepalm*)

But most of it is a cheerful treacle of love, joy, and unconditional good stuff, and you know what? It kinda works, in that I am more conscious of the good things in my own life. I’m not so sure it’s because of the soundness of the philosophies in the texts; rather I think it’s because I’m spending time with upbeat people. You know, sorta like how you get on a bus full of Jesus freaks headed cross-country and somewhere around Idaho you get drawn into a surly chorus of Kumbaya. And then they let you play with the tambourine, and you teach them a little bit about Neo-paganism or secular humanism, and you all get off the bus giggling and hugging.

Somewhere around here I have a couple of crystals and two Tarot decks, and I think my daughter has some essential oil. Maybe I should get it all together and play and then journal, especially since I’m at T-3 days for the surgery, and I have some sort of staph which already requires this purification ritual of putting stuff up my nose and showering with surgical scrub. Some silk scarves and candles and chanting with the Buddhist rosary might make it all more . . . fun. And fun, mah brethren and sistren, is what this vale of tears is all about.

Stuck Down Here Forever?

29 Friday Jan 2016

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I sorta believe in God; i.e., more than not believing in God. It seems reasonable to me that God does wacky Godlike things, even maybe becoming Jesus, whom I follow while doubting like a Thomas who has never gotten the icky part of putting my dirty fisherman’s paws into a still-fresh wound. Aiee! Good thing Jesus didn’t stick around too long, eh?

But for all I know it’s the Flying Spaghetti Monster all along. Whatever. My point here is that I’m not nailed down (pun intended) to any particular brand of spirituality. I know that Zen monk Cheri Huber’s There is Nothing Wrong with You moved me to hysterical tears, and I no longer have a copy because I gave it away, and have bought others for very special people.

Now, here’s the cruel irony: I style-edit self-help and spiritual books. After a while. they all sound the same, with some more readable than others. It seems to my jaundiced eye that enlightenment is saved for those wealthy enough to travel the country–the world!–kneeling at one or the other pair of sandaled feet. Where, I ask, is the ultimate truth revealed while washing dishes, while caring for children? What sorts of visions of angels are received while bagging groceries at Shaw’s? (At Whole Foods, maybe.) The great teachers gave what they had for food, clothing, and shelter that would make 21st century homo sap shudder. What’s up with all this “I started my own business healing and directing souls?”

According to many of these self-proclaimed sages, we are on the cusp of a Great Awakening. Where have we heard this before? I don’t feel any perkier than I did when the Mayans came through town.

Fear not; I keep my personal beliefs to myself unless some random scrap from my personal life will reassure and make somebody bigger, instead of smaller. Because they are all beginning writers, and in a way they are kneeling before my sandals. This makes me profoundly uncomfortable, but I muddle through. I find something to praise, even if it’s only “Congratulations on your enlightenment!” and I polish with a light hand, making it sound as if paying attention to commas and sentence fragments was dirty work to be laid upon that maid-of-all-work, the proofreader/copy editor, and not part of the writing craft at all. I feel bad about that part, but it’s the only way to keep people writing. Remember that teacher? The one who didn’t get it and whose scars you still bear? The one who couldn’t see past the lumpiness to the embryo writer? I don’t ever want to be that teacher.

After all, for all we know, we are stuck down here forever, and polishing one’s craft is something to do to pass the time.

 

 

 

 

Looking Back

30 Monday Nov 2015

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I started writing about my alien people almost eleven years ago. I also did other things during that time: wrote a doctoral dissertation, had a major breakdown, was homeless for seven months, spent three years being able to only deal with one major thing a day–and by major, I mean going to the doctor or doing my laundry. But I kept writing, and to my surprise when the story was DONE–it was the length of a trilogy: Moby Dick and a half.

I then found out that agents weren’t magickally falling out of trees, and began the almost as difficult process of finding somebody–anybody–to just read the sheeping thing. I found a few, and most of them gave up early. One said that I never used an adjective if two would do. As you might imagine, my iddle feelings were hurted, but then I got a sympathetic writing buddy who made me sit down with a couple of highlighters and underline all my adverbs and adjectives. Whoa Nelly! I gave up on the adjectives after a few pages, because the adverbs were bad enough. I then pounded hard on the first volume–only to give up after a year of pounding because I didn’t know how to sell a book that had only one third of a plot curve.

I turned my back on it for three years and wrote Max instead. Still no agents stalking me in dark alleys, but I discovered something tonight, when starting to go through the other book again. (I got bored, k?)

For over a year after the first draft of Max was done, I rewrote and polished and had it beta-commented and all kinds of stuff, until I said ENOUGH (babies were going out with bathwater with every new run-through). But–it seems to have taught me a lot about writing, at least compared to the trilogy, as I discovered to my dismay just now. Never one adjective if two would do, indeed! Mind you, Max has its flaws (all books do), but at least it’s readable.

As a prologue, I tacked on the short story which was the first thing I wrote on the topic, so I peeled it off and will beat it with a stick, then run it through here for your amusement. Once it’s, you know, better.

 

What Does It Feel Like?

21 Saturday Nov 2015

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As recent readers know, I finally just caved in and accepted the tattered hand-me-down mantle of Writing Person For Reals. I had the epiphany that it didn’t matter whether or not I’d found an agent for my current novel; what mattered is that real flesh and blood people had beaten it into me that I Had It–that my writing was what one beloved beta reader called “absorptive.” And that was all I ever wanted for the Reader’s experience–that for a little while, in even a little way, they could be Somewhere Else. That’s the first step, isn’t it?

So what does making something like that feel like? Well, to be honest, very rarely does the Inspiration Fairy drag you out of bed and make you write, and when she does (a friend in an APA once remarked that the Inspiration Fairy smokes cigars and wears hob-nailed boots) it’s often a tad on the self-indulgent side, screaming “Oh my GOD I’m NAKED over here editor PLEASE.” Instead, most of the world’s writing is done the old-fashioned way, which looks suspiciously like work.

As many have remarked, the first step is putting your butt in the chair. Then you open the file or the notebook. This is accompanied by a whiny sort of vagueness: You’d sort of rather be doing something else, and you may or may not know what it is, but right now there’s this blankness looking at you, tapping its foot.

For me, it is processed like mild pain: My fingers are clumsy and sluggish. I scrawl or tap out something inspired like, “Miranda rang the doorbell.” At that point, I don’t know why Miranda is dropping by, I just know that it’s at least remotely plausible that she might. And then I stare at it. Slog, slog, oh god I’m no sheeping good at this, another sentence. I stare at them and heave a sigh. Maybe two, remembering that I should practice good diaphragm breathing for choir anyway. My brain feels dull and far away, and the idea that this will ever be a novel is a possible symptom of incipient mania.

And that’s where the scariness starts to happen. Miranda, the wench, opens her mouth and says something–and Darjeeling says something snarky–and then they’re having a conversation, and the conversation is bringing new ideas into the piece of writing just like you thread a new piece of yarn into knitting–really; that’s the point of that metaphor: You watch your fingers as if they’re possessed of a sudden ability to type or make the pen work, and new colors appear before your eyes like magic.

Something way back in the distance snaps, and your hands start making words as fast as they can. You’re no longer at your desk or at Bucky’s, you’re in that crowded Victorian living room with Miranda, Darjeeling, and the intruder they turned into a garden gnome. Your deeply beloved child of your actual loins, who will care for you in your old age, stops by to say “Good morning,” and you grouse something curt at them, because dammit Darjeeling is saying something exciting, and you can’t wait to know what it is.

You feel sort of stoned. This is only aggravated by your caffeine intake. I exhort you to drink actual water for each cup of speed.

You take a break to obey Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice (“Fill what’s empty, empty what’s full, and scratch where it itches”) and hate your body for being so interrupty. Then you get back to it.

It is addictive.

For me, after about two-ish hours I can stop for at least a while; at that point, I admire my word count (especially for NaNoWriMo). Then I do at least a little of the other things in my life, knowing that again and again I’ll have that almost nauseating start-up, maybe in the same day.

Worth it–for me. Then after it’s DONE and I scream and do a bit of the hokey pokey, it’s time to edit. And that’s for you.

And Now, a Brief Moment of Despondency

30 Saturday May 2015

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OK, I thought re-doing Max would be fun and challenging. Instead it is Hard Work and Annoying and Bothering Me. I keep feeling that I’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater. What I need to wrap my head around is that this is essentially a whole different book. Right now it is also a very short book. (Chapter 13 is now Chapter 3, with more cuts to come.) I’m thinking I need a subplot, but don’t want to have to rewrite *every sheeping word*. There’s a big piece of me wanting to just walk away from the whole damn project and announce it as a Fail. What made me think I could be a writer, anyway?

It’s funny–all this time I’ve been thinking that my main goal in life was to get Max published. Now I think I’ll be pretty spiffed if he’s ever finished. I don’t write this way, where I tear things apart from the ground up, and I fear I will be killing much of what I and others have found charming about my style, such as it is. But . . . not getting to the main PLOT until half the book was all bathed in backstory is unforgivable, at least for a newbie needing to get and hold people’s attention. Why did it take me two years to figure this out? How embarrassing.

My only guess on that one is that I haven’t been working hard enough, which is also embarrassing. I am seriously thinking of just giving up the whole peer specialist gig, which is like a big hungry baby invading my boundaries and sucking me dry every week. I’m hoping that this two-week break will help me realign my head.

And That’s a Wrap!

29 Friday Nov 2013

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I hope you’ve enjoyed Eureka as much as I have. I didn’t want it to be over! Thanks for each like and follow–every one has made me go “Oh goody!” (Comments, though. Those would also make me happy. Just a hint, if you have the time.)

I am a NaNoWriMo 2013 WINNER!!! 51,743 is their count. I wasn’t at all sure I could do it, but I took a writing weekend in New Hampshire, where there was a hot tub (no, we didn’t bathe in it) and lots of quiet and a writing friend to nag. This made up for a work week during which I did next to nothing. I know it’s probably silly, but I have a real sense of accomplishment.

This taught me a lot about the writing process: First, of course, is that I could have theoretically written Max‘s 100K first draft in two months, instead of oh, a year and a halfish! Ouch! And Dark Crimson Corners could have been pounded out in six months instead of five years–and I really had a sense that I was writing hard for that one. (That said, both of those were almost entirely first-drafted in longhand, instead of Eureka, which was almost entirely composed at the keyboard.) Second, that I write a bit over a thousand words an hour. Thus, if I make myself actually sit down and write for a measly hour in the morning, instead of, say, just faffing around playing World of Warcraft, I can get an amazing amount of stuff done. I guess the trick is remembering that I’m a writer first.

But I’m a lot of things second and one of them is being the webmaster! I am being paid this week to revamp the site and do a brochure. And a lot of things have gotten in the way of that. Ouch! again. I’m way behind.

The biggest thing getting in the way is that we are moving this week, God help us. Still haven’t signed up the actual muscle, so wish me well.

After move and work are caught up, I’ll go through and give a lightning second draft to Eureka, with the goal of having her put up as an .epub on Amazon by Christmas. Just to see what happens. Thoughts?

A Quick Catchup and Mumbling About Things Bought Over the Internet

25 Sunday Aug 2013

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Yarrgghhh. Where did that stressball summer go?

Let’s see:

My son is still on the couch and we are still waiting to move. What had been conceptualized as a July 1 move to a three-bedroom apartment has been beaten down by the realities of market demand and people dallying about actually moving when they tell their landlords they are. We are now looking at a damn-near-sure-thing on October 1, which would have thrown us all into hysterics had we known at the outset of this adventure. The new apartment is supposed to be bigger than this (other than just adding a bedroom, smarty-pants) and we are crossing our fingers.

But it almost definitely lacks a ferret room, which is to say a chamber which is far too small to be a bedroom by modern building code standards (else it would be marked as one and we would be charged accordingly). So in preparation, we got a new ferret cage, which has about a 3′ square footprint instead of the 10′ square they’d been in for the past several years. Nobody has come right out and said it, but this has been an epic disaster; an unheralded mustelidean misery which we are now stuck with. I’ll just leave you with the phrase, “Oh come on, they’ll figure the slide out!” and we’ll move on. (We ended up making them little fake staircases out of unloved textbooks.) But it looked GREAT online!

To add to the furry fun, the cats have fleas. So after the flea bath was the usual waste of time, my daughter ordered them flea collars, as for some reason our local pet store is in denial about cats in fact suffering from fleas just like dogs. The picture on Amazon said “flea collar.” What came yesterday was a calming collar, all covered in copious powder smelling like everything but the lavender it claimed it was. I wish they’d invented these back when I had the cat who chewed all of his own fur off because he needed to be an only kitty–but I really wish they’d just sent us the flea collar they charged us for.

My daughter’s laptop is dying and she is now sharing mine pending the probably dim hope that the guy in Dudley Square will fix it, unlike Microcenter, which smugly told us that they were only told to put in the part–diagnostics as to whether they put the part in correctly would have cost extra. (Really. Literally. I am not making that up. Never go there.) I am spending big wisdom points on not going all banshee on they ass.

Stress, stress, stress. On top of everything else, we had a personnel shakeup at work and I ended up being the only person on the team with Web skills. Such as they are. True, I was out carving out niches in HTML back when pappy was a brat, but over the last ten years, we’ve moved to the CSS Internet. So I went out and got a book which spoonfed it to me, and everything was fine, until the site which looked awesome on the Mac was broken on the PC, meaning that once again I had to break out tabling and faking a lot. But in the end my new site looks one hell of a lot better than the old one, which was put together by a committee of mentally ill people–and looked like it. (I’m mentally ill. I can say this stuff. Sort of like the N word.)

I offered to do a similar redesign for somebody else on the team, but communications broke down because I wouldn’t let her hang on the phone with me while she supervised me making her changes live. This woman, known henceforth as The Client because she flashed me back to my early agency days, is unclear on what the big megilla is making PDFs so different from Word documents and was miffy because I couldn’t edit one of her pre-existing PDF bits. (They wouldn’t spring for the $30 CSS book [“We thought you already knew all that!”]; there’s no way they’re getting me Acrobat–I’m just glad that the Mac does basic PDFs natively.)

She also put up a downloadable document in Word. And I used my nice words and everything, but no dice. Webmonkeys are webflunkies, and as soon as she realized she couldn’t micromanage the entire rebuild, she faded off to a corner. This is swell with me, as Clients get charged Real Money, instead of the we’ll-pay-you-for-a-sick-day method we use around here, and I already have *ahem* a job. THAT at least has been going smoothly, which of course now has my paranoia radar blinking.

So there have been days I’ve been holding onto my recovery with all my fingernails, and I won’t deny that there has been crying. (Crying’s OK. It’s when I start walking around randomly singing all the time that it’s time for the men with the net.)

Writing: Well, you’ve already noticed the lack of blogging. But I did *drumroll* finish the epsilon draft of Max, meaning that as soon as the beta team does this one last crawl, it’s time to figure out what to do next. I was planning on sending it out the old-school way, but I have to talk to an expert on disability before I do that–heaven forbid it actually sell for too much money and I end up shot in the foot. I might end up self-publishing after all, who knows?

Meanwhile, I’ve been plodding along on Max Draconum and lazily wondering what to feed you nice people next. I think I might just rewrite the rest of the Damascus thread after all, seeing as I’ve decided to simplify the book it used to live in and focus instead on another of its plots.  We shall see, we shall see.

But for now I wanted to pop on, tell y’all I haven’t gone back to the hospital yet, and now consider myself poked about the blog thang. Peace, y’all!

Over and Over Again

14 Friday Jun 2013

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As my 300K word epic trilogy Dark Crimson Corners will never be published as such, I’ve started taking it apart for quilting. I’m serializing the biography of serial killer Damascus to run here. (Toria and Tristram had been tossed in as a prologue; I’m surprised that I didn’t find a way to work in my Bad High School Poetry.) This means going through the bio and adding and fixing a gazillion tiny things.

I caught at least one of my aphasic neologisms. (One of my mood stabilizers adds a tendency toward mild aphasia to my already-numerous middle-aged moments and poor ADHD memory.) Sometimes when I can’t think of the word I just (put stuff that means what I want into parentheses) and keep on writing. Or else out pops something not-quite-right, like the word, “contentness.” (Thank heaven for redlining; the problem with self-editing is always that you know what you meant!)

It was a toss-up between “contentEDness” and “contentment,” and I was amused and intrigued to see that the closer one, which I’d clearly been trying for, conveyed the right nuance of not-as-permanent-a-state as “contentment.” How interesting that my brain got it partly right after all.

Anyway, I’m now going over this piece of writing for at least the twentieth time, what with all the past hopeful editing and re-versioning back when I thought my white elephant was comprehensible, let alone saleable. I need to make sure there is just enough info about my aliens to not confuse the hell out of new readers, which means a lot of tucking in and darning together (the quilting metaphor really seems to be the best) — and, oh my dear sweet sheep-all, I’m tired of it.

I really like this piece of writing, and I have an occasional spasm of willingness, even eagerness, to work with it, but most of it is being done page by page in the sort of unhappiness one has when one is Working and just wants to go home.

Meanwhile, my son spent an hour this afternoon playing and re-playing the same four or five bars of music on his flute. He was trying to get four similar-but-not-mechanically-exact tracks of this tune (a bit of video game music) in order to remix it. So he played it over and over again, and was very polite the time my cake-consuming fork made an itty-bitty clink against the plate. Over and over and over. Just like me and Damascus.

Sometimes making art sucks. The disturbing part of it is, you can work your butt off–and it turns out to not be much good anyway. I’ll leave you with that cheerful thought, and go back to forcing out another page of at-least-a-little-better. Le sigh.