Bloggity Continueth (with thoughts of revisions ahead)
Sat 2006-08-12 16:58:24 (in context)
- 5,000 words (if poetry, lines) long
Wearing my Metroblogging hat and back-filling my New Orleans visit, I've gotten as far as... Day 1 of the Habitat work week. But in my defense, it's a long damn post. So there. I think the rest of them will be somewhat shorter, having gotten some of the "how ESTHFH works" stuff out of the way.
[back of hand to forehead, eyes rolled heavenward] On I slog.
Meanwhile, rather than getting stuck in the past, I have put up a post at Denver Metblogs celebrating the annual corn harvest in Longmont. The recipe is tried and true as of early this afternoon, so if you are not averse to dairy products or foods with a high glycemic index (SugarBusters need not apply), have at it and enjoy.
Meanmeanwhile (is that a word?), thoughts are straying towards the inevitable revision of the soon-to-be-retitled "Putting Down Roots". As usual, I'm squeamish about reading all those comments everyone wrote in the margins. I don't think that ever gets any easier; pushing the fear aside and reading the critiques anyway, it only becomes habitual, not easy. But I can't put it off. A golden opportunity for an editorial audience opened up for me at the writing workshop, and I can neither run the risk of letting it go stale or submitting anything less than the best this story can be.
Some thoughts to incorporate in the revision, culled at random from my memory of the past weekend:
- People don't talk to bananas, at least not in a serious horror/SF story; and
- People don't go from worrying that their spouse might be deathly ill to pressuring said spouse for sex in the space of a paragraph; and
- If a character is going to be more ignorant than the reader, he needs a good excuse; and finally
- If you're going to have aliens in a story, you'd better damn well mean it.