 One of the joys of being an author is getting to meet the readers. Having a book signing is a great way to get the word out about my book as well as meet and thank the people that make it possible. Here I am at a cafe doing the old meet and greet.
Next up I'll be at the Just A Game Con in Corvallis OR, Saturday April 18th. Find my booth and one of the first two to say the magic code word "Hol Amroth" and win a prize!!
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A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
As I continue to work with my editor Susan, this keeps coming up in my mind. Like a lot of you, I first ran into that quote here. A great game and a great quote. (This is my favorite from that game). Susan has been doing saintly work correcting my horrible grammar (as you can tell from these postings) but an often over looked part of editing is removing extraneous words. Authors tend to be wordy. We get paid by the word most of the time, and when doing stuff like NaNoWriMo you want extra words. But they don't always make the product better. I'm reminded of Ben Franklin's story to Thomas Jefferson during the review of the Declaration of Independence. (here's an article about it, go read it, I'll wait) I see my word count dropping, (as did Jefferson) but the flow of story is getting better. (No I don't think my stuff is in the same galaxy as the Declaration) There is a flow to writing. A balancing act put into print. Recognizing fat(wordy excess) from muscle(descriptive prose) is something an editor should be helping you with. And for a lot of authors (including this one) sometime it takes an outside eye, one separate from the parent/child relationship we authors have with our products, to make a manuscript into a book. I know when I first finished "Journey to Redemption" I thought it was really good, not a lot of polish required. But thanks to my editor, I now know an even better work was lying underneath the dull patina of grammar mistakes and rambling writing. I'm hoping the polished "Journey to Redemption" will be ready by the end of May. But like the writers version of old saying goes, "It ain't over until the editor says it sings" |
The Rants
This is where D will go off on what is good, bad and just straight up odd about things. Warning: May be weird and random at times. Archives
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