Edits and Vash and Ethan...and a Common Thread!

My poor neglected blog.

First things first.  It is SO difficult to do damn near anything with a high-energy kitten who wants to play fetch with glittery balls every second that he's awake.  Thank God cats sleep 16 hours a day.  Glitter strands adorn my bed, my floor, and my keyboard...I think they even float in the air.  Sometimes he drops them into the water dish...other times they find themselves in my bubble bath...he carries them everywhere. 

Vash the Stampede--aptly named, even though he's not a humanoid typhoon.  The glitter ball brigade would gladly post a 60 billion double dollar reward to stop him.  If you don't get any of that, then Google "Trigun" less the glitter ball brigade part.  ^_^ 

Now onto the important stuff!  Earlier this year, Aprilish, another high-energy, exuberant "entity" entered my life - which I mean in the nicest way possible.  ^_^   I contracted with free-lance editor Ethan Vaughan whose editing page can be found here and whose blog can be found here.  If you doubt my description, then by all means check out his blog and find out for yourself.  I dare you not to laugh or smile.

I just received a sneak peak of my manuscript and am blown away.  I went to bed late with a face that hurt from smiling.

But before he made my face hurt this time, he did it the first time several months ago, after reading my ms and discussing its strengths and weaknesses in depth.  It was a fantastic experience.  I think I actually jumped up and down, I was so excited and happy.  Really.

I am so glad I embarked on this journey.  And I'm so glad I met Ethan.  Not only is he working wonders on my first manuscript, but this process and his insights are helping me independently edit my second manuscript - the sequel to the first.  (The third ms is completely on hold at the moment, although I'm still jotting notes as I think of things.  The whole thing flows as one story in my mind, broken into segments by the subplots.)

I have cut over 16000 words and more than 70 pages from ms #2.  What??  Yeah!

Oh, Vash just brought me a fuzzy ball and is now chewing on my laptop's cord wrap to protest my neglect.  How do you tell a kitten you can't play at the moment?

Now, I know I tend to ramble about random topics, but I can actually tie these two things together.  And not in a way anyone familiar with my stories might think (i.e. VaSH?).  Nope - we adopted Vash from a very nice woman (I'll call her Gretta - not at all her real name) who lives in the country about 30-minutes away.  His pregnant mama (Anastasia) had been abandoned in IN and Gretta's brother brought her to her farm.  Anastasia gave birth to three boys - the dominant one - strong orange stripes, the follower - lighter orange strips, and the shy one - black with black stripes (Vash).  Vash and the dominant one were both adopted - coincidentally into police dog homes - while the follower and mama stayed on the farm (despite my best efforts to convince my husband that Vash would love to have his brother around - we would have called him Butterscotch, Scotch for short).

Long story short (too late, heh heh), I've kept in contact with Gretta and recently learned that Vash's "bookish" yet high-energy brother has been named...Ethan.  There.  Tied.  To.  Gether.   And no, that's not correct grammar.

Romanticism of Discord

Today I lounge in the backyard, as aggravated as I am entranced by my neglected Victorian garden.  It has a certain romantic air about it, overrun with weeds, with the bird bath's basin turned on its side, and the Grecian stone bench and potters hidden by greenery where only rock should exist.  Nature's simplicity reigns alongside chaos...but perhaps that chaos is born from trying to tame Mother Nature.  Apparently she is not one for manicures or organization.

I adore natural beauty.  Perhaps it is the artist's eye, seeing the grace in the twist of branches and bramble, the sweeping lines in a dandelion stem or the fluffy softness of the flower's white seed cap, or the colors of tulips bathing in the sun.  Or maybe it's the artist's ear, delighting in the way wrens, sparrows, and cardinals sing to a backdrop of mourning doves like a church choir, the way mechanical rumblings of distant mowers and tillers, and the farmer patrolling a field yet to be seeded insist so strongly of melding with the organic that they not only succeed, but become common place and expected.  What would nature be if silent or barren?  Certainly not beautiful.

And why am I wondering this now?  Why...I believe I wonder about it all the time, but perhaps I've chosen to write about it because I admire Mother Nature's disorganization.  It's to be expected. 

It's the one place where such discord is in perfect harmony with the world.



 

And I'm Back! Changing the Writer's Perception

I have a whopping 6 1/2 minutes before my lunch hour is finished.  I recently paired up with (hired) a professional editor who works in the Publishing Industry.  (Since I haven't checked with him on blogging about him, I won't say much except that it has been awesome so far.)

Early on in our back-and-forth email fest, he said something that sparked my writing fire. 

To preface, it is said over and over, and over again, across nearly all writing resources, that less is more and it is better to show than tell.  But when writing, at least as a new writer, it can be difficult to tell when one is showing versus telling.  And one can grow attached to one's writing and not want to let it go.

He gave a quick critique of my opening sequence, something I've been nervous about for a variety of reasons.  To paraphrase, he said that I did well at narrating, but gave too much information, which  can be overwhelming to the reader.  Events within the story can show this playing out later.

Really cool information that widened and changed my perception.  I was so close to the material that I wasn't seeing the bigger picture like a reader would.  So, I've read the first MS again and made mental notes of where I saw this happening and where it plays out (and caught some errors, yikes, that I didn't know were there from when I fixed the auto-tabs, along with some typos - I swear, it doesn't matter how many times I read it...just when I think I've caught everything, I haven't.).

However, this truly helped with my writer's block because once I found that sweet spot in MS #3, I looked at the writing differently and saw exactly why I wasn't happy with it.  In my attempts to get notes down about the story, I was telling and then showing what had just been told - redundant as hell.  In what spans about eight pages now, I cut more than a thousand words, blended scenes together, and cut whole paragraphs that were unnecessary.

I look forward to working on it and getting it into a place where I can start making progress again.  My brain is no longer stuck on that last line, no longer able to plan ahead.  I know how this thing ends...and now I'm much better prepared to take it there.

This has been enlightening.

And just because I'm presently emailing a judge who agrees with me on the word...SHENANIGAN!

Yes, that was totally unrelated, and as always, please forgive any typos or whatnot!  In a hurry!  ^_^