June 2009
15 posts
(Terrified to start from scratch.)
Five Things Editing Has Taught Me
There’s a good chance that the character you conceieve the day you write your first word is entirely different from one who closes out the story.
“If it sticks out as egregious now, I’ll definitely be able to find it later on the next read-through” is totally, completely, and utterly false. (2a. There is no such thing as not reading for edits.)
Nothing on the page is...
And Send It to the Moon
This editing run-through, I’m taking it slow. Though I’ve read through the manuscript a million times, I realise that this is one of the last times - if not the last time - that I’m going to visit it front to back before I head to Staples, buy sixteen-thousand manilla envelopes and stamps, and start my period of advance mourning for my pride.
I’ve been going chapter by...
My entire life, all I’ve wanted was a shower epiphany. A Hollywood-sized epiphany.
Tonight, I got it.
Dear second gallery scene,
Please, please, for the love of god, pop like I want you to.
Frustrated, Meredith
And sometimes when you need that lift, someone drops it right in your lap:
“your novel devastated me. and i loved it. fantastic, awesome, really really powerful. and you can put that on your dust jacket if you want to.”
What’s harder: having unwaivering faith in your own talent, or finding someone else who does?
Hold on to Lights and Shapes
It’s incredible what a little bit of civilized routine can do to one’s morale. Last night with the house to myself for the first time in a while, I seared up a filet of ginger-soy salmon in my newly-decorated, newly-organized kitchen. I set out a placemat and a full table setting - new dishes, too - and ate listening to the rain at my new dining room table.
I loved everything - the...
Ten Exhausting Things About Being a First-Time...
Agents “not seeking the talent of first-time authors.”
How pathetic and anti-climactic the biography paragraph at the bottom of your query letter looks.
How querying to small publishing houses feels like a hierarchical playground pick ‘em (and no matter how good your stuff is, you always fear that you’ll never get picked for the team).
Losing sleep because even though...
That was, unequivocally, the most productive hour of editing in my entire writer’s existence.
At a Forty-Three Degree Angle
How much detail is too much detail?
Sculpting the visual in the literary world is one of the most important goals for me when I sit down and write. Small, nit-picky, niggly details are the most integral in constructing a scene like a frame of a film - you’re able to look around in your mind’s eye, and you know the texture of the carpet, the shade of the couch, the fingerprints on the...
Ghost of Queries Past
…and the opening concept for my query letter came to me standing on the Manhattan-bound F train this morning. The ghosts of inspiration sure do choose odd times to haunt (especially when I’ve switched bags and don’t have a pen on me).
M
I am convinced that Park Slope is located in a remote vortex in which it rains five out of seven days a week (threatening with clouds the other two, naturally), and its combination of locational and attitudinal factors produces a meteorological anomaly in which it lightning and thunders there - but nowhere else in the borough or world - nearly every goddamn hour of the day.
Books. You know, the things with pages that people seem to have forgotten about in light of the Internet and eInk readers? Yeah, those. Everyone should probably get back in the habit of reading them.
The Time it Takes to Make a House a Home
It’s always so odd to spend your first night in a bed in which you’ve never slept before, in a room you haven’t yet come to know know. Sure, you know it’s your bed, your place - you can see the key to the front door hanging from a hook by your doorframe. You’re swaddled in your own sheets and blankets. But somehow, it’s laborious trying to reconcile the fact...