Happy Christmas

Whatever you celebrate and however you spend the holidays, I wish you joy, hope, wonder, and great reading material now and every day. See you in the new year! Share...

A Few Feel-Good Things

It’s nearly Christmas, and I’m feeling nostalgic for holidays past, and with that, am in the mood for touching stories. Thought I’d share a few things I’ve come across in the last few days. None of them are new, I don’t think, but with the exception of the last one, which is a holiday staple for me, I hadn’t come across any of them before, so maybe they’re new to you, too. Enjoy! I don’t know who linked to this (thank you), but it’s a story in tweets of a journalist’s experience with a couple of kids in difficult circumstances: http://storify.com/BostonDotCom/making-good-from-almost-nothing    I can’t believe I’m sharing an ad, but parents of teenagers will probably like this offering from Apple:   From last year, but new to me, is a fifteen-year-old storyteller. Loved this.   And lastly, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without at least one viewing of Tim Minchin’s White Wine in the Sun. Merry Christmas! Share...

Reading What You Like

The following rant won’t be groundbreaking. I share the opinion of most thinking people I know on this topic, and many of them are stirred up about this today. But sometimes you have to speak up even when your voice is only one among the hordes. At the hairdresser this morning, the woman in the chair next to me was reading a bestselling thriller, the sort that usually has a larger-than-life good-guy who will ultimately save the day against incredible odds. It’s the kind of book my dad chooses most often when he reads fiction. She was engrossed, and I was delighted, as I always am, to encounter someone else who carries a book around with her. It didn’t occur to me for an instant to consider the possibility that by reading such a traditionally masculine book, she was eschewing all things feminine or that, perhaps, her choice of reading material meant she really longed to be involved in foiling a terrorist plot. Her book didn’t, and the ones my dad reads don’t, suggest to me that they don’t understand the line between fantasy and reality or that they don’t know a good read when they see it. But for reasons best known only to themselves, some people continue to believe that women who read romance are lacking in critical faculties, don’t understand what’s real and what isn’t, or are, at heart, anti-feminists who long to be dominated by men. The latest of these of which I’m aware is Palash Ghosh, whose article in the International Business Times http://www.ibtimes.com/damsels-distress-why-do-so-many-contemporary-women-read-old-fashioned-romance-novels-1512548 is offensive on a whole bunch of levels. Go read it and come back, if you like. I’ll still be here. If there’s nothing new in my post here, the same is certainly true of ol’ Palash’s article. The only surprise here is how woefully uninformed he is about the industry, citing surprise at how well these books sell: at one point he says, “I had thought that romance novels accounted for a very small fringe corner of the literary market – so I was quite surprised that this segment has such enormous popularity.” The rest of the article is dreadful: disdainful, judgmental, snobbish, and filled with ridiculous attempts at armchair pop psychology. He’s no easier on the writers than he is on the readers, claiming “These ‘romance’ stories are to literature what hot dogs are to cuisine — quickly made, tasty, filling, temporarily satisfying, but with no nutritional value whatsoever.” Strong words coming from a guy who has clearly never actually read a romance novel. There are so many things wrong with this statement I could write pages on it. I’ll refrain. Even if I am tempted to point out, for example, how some of the best writing teachers I know are romance writers, because they have to work their butts off to create good, original, well-told, engaging stories that keep readers wondering how the happy ending they expect can possibly arrive. No mean feat, that. What I will do is attempt to answer this question Palash posed in the article: “But I must wonder why so many women – forty years after the women’s liberation movement, Roe vs. Wade and the pill have transformed the lives of women in the most dramatic of ways – continue to indulge in the fanciful tales of females so unlike them who live in fantasy worlds light years removed from their reality?” People read “fanciful tales of [people] so unlike them who live in fantasy worlds light years removed from their own reality” because that is WHAT FICTION IS. Books about people who live in worlds different than our own. Or books about people like us in different circumstances or people whose stories excite us or make us laugh or make us cry or take us to a different place or make us think or touch us or let us ignore the stresses of our own lives for a few hours or remind us of the good in the world or scare the pants off us or let us dream or or or…. As Jim C. Hines says, “stories matter.” It doesn’t matter what kind of story. For once and for all, could we please agree that reading is good, and that reading romance novels is no different from, no better or worse than, reading thrillers or mystery or science fiction or literary fiction or any other kind of book in the known universe? Read what you like and don’t judge others for doing the same. Seems pretty simple. Why do Palash and people like him find it so difficult, especially when the readers are women? Enough,...

On Editing – Overused Words

For the last couple of weeks, I have been working flat out on a fresh edit of my current MS, triggered by editorial notes from my agent. I had hoped to be finished with this round of edits last Friday, but as writer friends will understand, these things have a way of taking on a life of their own. Yesterday, I finally handed over the revised MS. Woohoo! One night during this process, I had an interesting discussion with my husband about editing. He doesn’t write fiction, and was interested in knowing how I approached it. I can only speak to my own process, because everyone works differently, but in case it’s useful to anyone, I thought I’d share a bit about the editing of this MS. I’ve lost count by now how many times I’ve edited this particular manuscript. I do know that from the original “finished” version, one I felt was strong enough to query and for which I got great feedback, I have cut 30,000 words. Thirty. Thousand. Words. This number may not boggle your mind, but it does mine. I have often heard it said and have said myself that “nothing is wasted” in writing. There is actually truth in this: I learn a lot about my characters from the stuff I write that never makes it into the book, which makes for a stronger book, no question; and there is always a chance something that doesn’t work in this book may find new life in another. But it is also a lie we tell ourselves so the cuts don’t  hurt as much. <g> Or perhaps so we don’t focus on the sheer number of hours that went into writing those words and then cutting them again. One of the things that struck me in this last round of edits was how many words I cut (about 4000, I think) simply by searching out and evaluating, rewriting, or eliminating words I tend to use too often. We all have these words. We’re probably even conscious of some of them and know to look for them. I already do that as a matter of course. But this time, I was surprised by some of the words I found, and as time-consuming and mind-numbing as this process was, I highly recommend doing it. As I worked through some of the substantive changes I needed to make on this edit, I kept a running list of any word I came across that I suspected I’d likely overused. By the time I reached the end, I had about 100 words on that list. Note that Scrivener does this for you (and I think Word can do it too), but in this case, I was specifically looking for words I noticed too often in the text, so making my own list was a worthwhile exercise, because in some cases, it turned out I’d only used a word twice, but it stood out, so I changed it. I wouldn’t have caught that relying exclusively on a word frequency list from a computer program, though I could certainly use it to double-check that I hadn’t missed anything glaring. Once I had the list, I used the search function to find every instance of each of the words. This turned out to be a highly useful exercise, because it forced me to look at individual sentences out of context. I spend time fiddling with individual sentences when I write anyway, naturally, but taking them out of context gave me a new perspective and somehow made seeing the ways to fix them easier. I imagine this is why some copyeditors work backwards, from end to beginning, so that they see errors instead of losing them in the flow of the whole, as we tend to do when we read. If this isn’t currently part of your editing process, I suggest giving it a try. I was really pleased with the changes it made to my book. Now I wait and see if my agent is, too. And now,  time to catch up on all the things I ignored doing while I was editing…     Share...