Confessions of a Mad Poet

There is the most gorgeous blanket of fog covering the city tonight. It's the kind of evening that makes a young writer such as myself kick back with a glass of absinthe (with the obligatory one sugar cube properly strained through a slotted spoon, of course,) put on a white frilly shirt, sweat a lot and wail about some chick I was in love with who died, and then discover at a most inopprotune moment that the Great Old Ones are rising again. Yep, it's that kind of beautiful New England evening right here on the great plains.

I almost had that kind of evening while editing the twentieth chapter of my novel tonight. I have discovered upon rereading my first draft for what is now the third time that there are certain places in my story where I could erase what's written and rewrite the scene with the characters involved ordering out for pizza and discussing what they want on it and what soda to buy with it and it would not detract from the story in the slightest. What I'm getting at is the passages are just that bad and just that unnecessary. Chapter 20 is the worst offender. Being one of the shortest chapters, its also one of the worst and I can't just axe it entirely because important information is actually revealed. Well, tonight I feel I wrested it into some semblance of being readable. In case you're curious, it's largely a scene between two women who are attempting to translate a book that's in a foreign language. Since this book has been the McGuffin of the entire plot, getting it translated is kind of important. Unfortunately, the dialogue is so rotten that readers will begin to wonder weather or not the real-life book in their hands has been translated properly.

And if I wrote it and feel that way, I can just imagine how joe average killing time in the Barnes & Noble on a Thursday night is going to feel. It's scenes like that that get you passed over and the customer walking out the door with the latest Marion Zimmer Bradley.

And if there is one thing that will NOT happen on my watch it's my book getting passed over for that hack Zimmer Bradley!!!

Well, to make a long story short (too late now,) I cleaned up the dialogue, excised as much of the weird sapphic undertone as I could find, (Trust me, there were some things in there that didn't even deserve to be in the worst tenth-rate all-girl porno imaginable,) and just generally picked up the pacing. To have lousy pacing is to kill your story. Pace things badly and you may as well just drop a fat wad of your own cash in an envelope and mail it to Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Having done all that, I'm still not sure I'm happy with it, which means I'll in all liklihood be back at the drawing board tomorrow. None of the other chapters have given me this much trouble, and I've dreaded this one from the start of the editing process. As much as I loathe the thought, it's tempting to just rip it up and start over. (the chapter, not the whole thing,) But that carries with it its own problems.

Ah, the night. It's fog like this that I wish we could have more often, just a few hours a few days a week. Just so long as the radio doesn't start emitting static it would be okay. (Silent Hill reference.) Anyway, I think I'll go to the pop machine and grab another Mountain Dew. It's not absinthe, but it's the same color and it already has the sugar dissolved in it. And if you drink enough of it it probably produces the same effect anyway. Nothing left to do now but sit here till dawn and rock out to the metal in my head. If only they let us have stereos in here...

Oops! Gotta go. There's a Great Old One outside wanting to talk about its return and the death of the cosmos and I think I hear a tapping of someone gently rapping, rapping on my chamber door...

I repent in sack cloth and bitter ashes

Recently I said some unkind things about T.H. White's novel "The Once and Future King." I report now that I have persisted in reading it and have discovered that my judgment was flawed and I was wrong to dismiss it's brilliance so casually. Read this novel. Mea Culpa.

I'm off to do dishes. Because my father just groaned about how he has to do dishes. My father has never asked me to do a thing in my life. His way of asking is lament how he must do something or start doing it, making disgusted noises at the effort of it all the way until you get up and offer to help at which point he refuses at least three times (a fine samurai he would have made, indeed,) then sighs and lets you do it. This disgusts me and always has and he has yet to figure out that I detest it and more often than not will deliberately not play along with it and continue to sit on my lazy ass out of spite. I don't mind helping. I love to help! But just ASK me for help and don't act like a dissapointed child who's been told he can't go to the movies in order to shame me into doing it when I neither need nor deserve to be shamed! Ah well. Pointless to complain about something that's been the status quo for nearly three decades. But since I haven't had an LJ for most said decades I thought I'd share it anyway.