Copyedits for FOAT came and went rather swiftly. The prose is, apparently, as squeaky clean as a brand new car right off the lot. Most of the flagged issues were ones that ended up being declined alterations on style grounds. Both Aleks and I tend to use punctuation properly in dialogue, as well as elsewhere, and I find it almost funny that a question given the cadence of a statement would by default require a question mark as punctuation instead of a period.
The nuances of spoken language are what defines a character, a mindset, an emotional state, for the reader's benefit. You change those to parallel predefined standards, and all the sudden the life is sucked out of the characters, the depth depleted from the prose. It is those little things, those nuances, that create the quality of the story, when combined in the final product.
My 35-pound lapdog almost gave me a heart attack yesterday. He tends to curl up in the footspace beneath my desk in the writing corner while I'm poking away at the keyboard. All was well when I got up to get ready to head off to the day-job. Came back out into the living room a bit later, and the writing machine was powered off, the music had stopped playing and the light was out. The doofus had managed to smack the switch on the surge protector beneath the desk, and killed everything.
Scrivener does auto-saves every five minutes or so, so theoretically I hadn't lost anything. I didn't have time to check though, until this morning. Lucky little son of a bitch (literally, and figuratively) that everything was there and intact. Otherwise I may have had to ... toss a few more cuss words his way.
My house slippers and sneakers now reside in the space beneath the desk. To keep him from curling up in there. The morose, puppy-eyed Lap Monster is now relegated to the floor space between the printer table and my desk chair. Which he is less than pleased about. While this arrangement is obviously not to his liking, it spares my nerves.
Blood Red and The Trunk Rewrite are coming along, slowly. Jhez is still in a huff about a hole in her favorite pair of argyle knee-highs, and Konaton is too busy trying not to laugh his ass off at her to really do much. Renji is less than pleased with me at the moment. So that leaves me with... killing off Jaedyn's father as the next scene to write.
Ack. Such drama, for the first couple chapters. I'm a ruthless bitch, though.
The nuances of spoken language are what defines a character, a mindset, an emotional state, for the reader's benefit. You change those to parallel predefined standards, and all the sudden the life is sucked out of the characters, the depth depleted from the prose. It is those little things, those nuances, that create the quality of the story, when combined in the final product.
My 35-pound lapdog almost gave me a heart attack yesterday. He tends to curl up in the footspace beneath my desk in the writing corner while I'm poking away at the keyboard. All was well when I got up to get ready to head off to the day-job. Came back out into the living room a bit later, and the writing machine was powered off, the music had stopped playing and the light was out. The doofus had managed to smack the switch on the surge protector beneath the desk, and killed everything.
Scrivener does auto-saves every five minutes or so, so theoretically I hadn't lost anything. I didn't have time to check though, until this morning. Lucky little son of a bitch (literally, and figuratively) that everything was there and intact. Otherwise I may have had to ... toss a few more cuss words his way.
My house slippers and sneakers now reside in the space beneath the desk. To keep him from curling up in there. The morose, puppy-eyed Lap Monster is now relegated to the floor space between the printer table and my desk chair. Which he is less than pleased about. While this arrangement is obviously not to his liking, it spares my nerves.
Blood Red and The Trunk Rewrite are coming along, slowly. Jhez is still in a huff about a hole in her favorite pair of argyle knee-highs, and Konaton is too busy trying not to laugh his ass off at her to really do much. Renji is less than pleased with me at the moment. So that leaves me with... killing off Jaedyn's father as the next scene to write.
Ack. Such drama, for the first couple chapters. I'm a ruthless bitch, though.
Claymores and Hand Grenades.
ReplyDeleteThat is all.
=)