Quiet Nights of Quiet… Proofreading?

Lime was out of town last night, visiting her folks, and I ended up proofreading one story then, and another today. That may not sound like a lot, but it’s almost 25,000 words of fiction I was working with. It was a lot. The good news is that with only a few changes, two more pieces will be ready to go out the door: my Korean superheroes novella and the latest version of a story I started years ago, about one Professor Whitney (now set in the 1970s, with some tighter thematic material and a tighter character arc, as well …

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Write, Write, Rewrite, and Why I’m So Busy

Well, I’ve just completed a pretty radical redraft of a story. (Critters, it was “Professor Whitney’s Resignation” when you saw it.) The original couple of drafts (in 2000 and 2006) were in 1st person POV, and then I redrafted the story again in epistolary form last week. That just wasn’t cutting it, though it helped me expand the story and know what was going on. The burden with the epistolary form is that if you use it exclusively, your “narrator” has to provide all the information he or she would reasonably do in a letter. One fix for this is …

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“The Head Ach”

William Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy’s diaries have been published. They are none too interesting. I had to read on in undergrad, perhaps because we were reading William Wordsworth, it was a Nineteenth-Century Life Writing course, and the idea of a diary (by a woman, no less) filled in slots in the course both in terms of gender representation, and genres of life writing. But I would rather have read something interesting by a female writer of the time. Not to disparage my professors in that class — Harding and Vargo were great, and most of their other choices were great. (I …

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