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Existing (carried over from previous post) There was a tree, in our woods, that would send you to sleep. We learnt to cultivate it – my mother’s family – to crossbreed it with oaks so the trunks grow strong and knotted. The original we cut down decades ago. A mimeograph of it hangs in the front hall; my […]
As this short story develops, I’ll post edits. I imagine this will help regular readers see how I approach editing. Drafting There ‘s was a tree, in a our woods, tht that lets that will would send you to sleep. We learnt to grow cultivate it – my mother’s family – to cor crossbreed it with oaks so the trunks grow […]
You imagine what people will say, but they always say things you never expected, because word sludge is pulled through their sillystraw brains in an entirely different set of loops than through your neural spaghetti, right? Because each person is a universe, and Cosmo can’t tell you shit about what your man thinks. I brace myself, […]
I used to sneak frozen orange syrup. My mother liked her juice watered-down, so the only reason I got in trouble was because I couldn’t open those paper cans without making everything sticky; they had to be thrown away. Frozen orange concentrate tastes like stars. I can’t eat more than a spoonful. I was worried […]
Most authors should cut. They embed tiny fragments of complex, fragrant chocolate into warm bread dough so sparsely they can barely be tasted–then draw a line through the points with a butter knife to emphasise their effort. Here! Look! Here are the good bits. I meticulously fashion a mask of silver thread and beaten gold, jewels […]
I’m not. I can’t. Really. Thank you for the lovely words. Thank you for the things you told me. They’re not true. You told me it’s beautiful. I don’t know how that happened. I worked hard, yes, I did, but you. You said it was beautiful. I can’t have done this thing I’ve already done, because that […]
I’m going off-script now. I’m going to need you. Now we get up to our elbows in blood and bone, together. In a few days, I’m going to start a series of professionally relevant, deeply difficult edits. Publishing, so I gather, is a business that keeps its cards close to its chest; I don’t want […]
This is the second and final post that will cover flavours of editing that I inflict on my own manuscripts but that I don’t see referenced anywhere else. My previous post dealt with how our perceptions of words will change dependent on what physical medium they’re presented on; in that post I suggest an editing step that […]
Medium is not a petty concept to writers. Words are autonomous from the paper they haunt, but our experience of the words — a collection of phenomena that make up a work of writing — isn’t. We have a tendency to interpret stimuli differently in different contexts. In book design, a good font has financial […]
September 16, 2012 by Alice M.
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