Thought-Drive

Seems appropriate for this to be a Halloween post. Or is it? I realized last night at a party (if you knew me, you'd be shocked) how little I knew about the event. I know it comes from Hallow's Eve, and it happens at night, so I guess the real time to have done this would've been last night, among all the ghouls and goblins and such. Or maybe it's like Christmas and there's an eve, then an actual day. I digress. It turns out the blood wasn't real. I opened the file from the editor and actually guffawed at all the red and spiraled back to a time when I was small and when sitting in a desk my feet didn't touch the floor (again, if you knew me, you'd be shocked). But then, I took a closer look, allowed to me by a healthy amount of rejection and criticism over the years, and realized a few things. 1) Microsoft Word track changes randomly picked red; when I made my own changes later they were in blue, and when I re-opened the file the editor's changes w...

Timeliness is one of those things they teach us in school, but not really. There are penalties for being late after a certain age, and maybe someone will sit us down and explain in brief the importance of being on time. But there's no homework or essays or discussions about it. They just tell us, and some of us listen. In college, all of us at least once skip out on a professor who wasn't on time themselves. I got the edits of the novel back later than when I was initially told, but the editor was gracious about being late, and I reciprocated, because I've been late on at least a hundred occasions so far in my life. I got them today, and they came with a stipulation to have my feedback back to her in ten days (contractual stipulation). It's been some time between passing this work along (ie, reading it over that last time) and now, so I can't be completely sure how long it would take to read through it, much less fine-tooth the thing with all sorts of dangling bit...

A few weeks ago, I made a mistake that cost me. It was maybe the first great piece of advice I ever received about writing: get it all down before you realize it stinks. My mentor, as you might imagine, is a bit of a cynic. And while I always believed him, I found out that he was right. I had a story that I was pretty excited about going. I might have mentioned also that it was not without its problems. But I was working. And then I stopped, because I realized it stunk. It's the first time in a long time that that's happened, and something of mine imploded, sort of like one of those whimpering cakes that fail to rise, or more appropriately, rise and then sort of flatten, dejected. It was a cornerstone of my very early years in story telling that I'd spin off yarns that were not endless so much as leading to a frayed edge that bespoke of the greater tapestry being woefully incomplete. However, last week I went out with a friend from the writer's group to a Borders of a...