late summer check in
Time for writing has been a bit hard to come by of late, and the writing itself has been a bit strained when I finally get to it. Sustaining is hard. Work is hard. Finding time is hard. Getting all my shit done is impossible.
That said, I ran through several drafts of a light horror story titled “Every Leaf a Flower” for the redditwriters anthology. Some of the RWers read and redlined it, as did Liza, my editor-in-chief. Lessons learned from all these redline drafts:
- show, don’t tell.
- sometimes you’ll have to learn a lesson more than once.
- sometimes you’ll have to learn a lesson repeatedly throughout life.
- puns = no. just don’t. in any form, in any construct, for any purpose. no.
- listen to others’ feedback, but have some faith in your work too. 75/25 seems about the right ratio so far.
- despite all wisdom, intelligence, practice, and propriety, there will be times when revising means looking through a goddam thesaurus for another word for scrape. Accept it.
Now that the anthology piece is done– the deadline was actually today, 2017-09-17– I can refocus on the memoir/narrative works for my slowly-growing collection, and audio books, and narrating, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum, ad vomitum, ad mortem.
