A writer, reloaded

Editor person agreed to review the query letter. They took some convincing, but they committed to a quick turnaround. Here’s how my request for help went down.

sam: I need your help.
Editor person: Absolutely. You need serious psychological help.
sam: With the query letter.
Editor person: Oh, that’s the least of your problems.
sam: Can you give it a look see?
Editor pesron (crinkling paper in the background): Just did.
sam: What do you think?
Editor person: I see it looks like a query letter.
sam: Should I change anything?
Editor person: I’m Editor person, not query letter person.
sam: Today you could be query letter person too.
Editor person: If I do, will you hang up and leave me alone?
sam: Already hung up. We’re not even talking right now.
Editor person: We’re so not talking.

I was asleep when when editor person called tonight with some unsolicited advice about the blog. That’s in addition to yesterday’s go round.

Editor person: So, you want some advice about this blog thing?
sam: I can’t wait.
Editor person: You waste too much text being philosophical.
sam: Maybe. But I made a few good points.
Editor person: The only point you made is that you’re no philosopher.
sam: Maybe I could be philosophical once a week.
Editor person: Great, so now only once a week no one will read your blog.
sam: Well, what’s the middle ground with this stuff?
Editor person: No middle ground. Do it right and turn the tension up to 11.
sam: Pour it on, you say?
Editor person: I want to see tension dripping off the fricking screen!

Editor person has their moments, but they took me this far, so we’ll try blogging their way for a bit.

Come inside with me to a typical Wednesday editing session with editor person, into the belly of the beast.

Editor person: You got some good stuff. Good job.
sam: Thanks!
Editor person: Only, I’m very concerned about this part here.
sam: Where’s here?
Editor person (stabbing the page with a finger): Page 19. What the hell is this?
sam: Well, the characters are moving towards the trail.
Editor person: I don’t care where they’re going.
sam: Why not?
Editor person: Because there’s no tension between them.
sam: Right. So, I’ll add tension.
Editor person (tearing page 19 in half): There’s nothing to add. Cardinal rule number 1, you drop the tension, you drop the audience.
sam: I don’t want to drop the audience.
Editor person: But you do want to clean this crap off my desk.

The wreckage of that particular version of page 19 now lives under a half ton of other scratched out or otherwise discarded pages.

Editor person called and they won’t be ready for today’s session. Since they’re out of town Thursday and Friday, we’re meeting on Saturday afternoon this week. That means no updates on the fourth draft, version two until then.
That’s not to say nothing is going on. I’ve been working on the outline and character sketches for the second book Again, another forward looking visualization. Sure, they’ll want part II! Why not? Selling part I is a forgone conclusion. Right? Right?????
The second book ( I’m still hashing out possible titles) will involve all the key characters from the first one, plus a brand new character, new guy. I see new guy as a sidekick for my hero, because every great hero has a sidekick.
The sidekick has to complement the hero, but also serve as a ready source of conflict. I need enough tension between hero and sidekick that it’s interesting, but not so much that it leads to one of them sleeping with the fishes. New guy needs a level of sophistication but he has to be able to kick butt.
There’s a lot of great sidekicks out there, and I want mine to be up to snuff, so I’m taking my time developing him, using some of the down time to research a number of far reaching topics such as the history of the Philippines, US Special Forces, star based sea navigation and the swallows of San Juan Capistrano.
On other fronts, it looks like my wife, the professor and myself are going to meet up for dinner this Friday. The professor is just that, a full tenured doctor of English at a major university. Long before editor person, the professor suffered through my writing, when I was a student back in college. I want to emphasize the suffering part. Despite this, the professor agreed to give me some feedback on the screenplay I wrote this past August. Any comments are good and I’m looking forward to hearing what they have to say.
I have a separate plan and set of goals for the screenplay – but that’s all for now.

Here’s the second half of what I started blogging last night, but was too groggy to finish. Working with the editor person is always an adventure, because I have one idea of what I wanted to write, the editor person has a vision of what it could look like, and then there is the matter of what’s on the page. Let’s just say I think a lot faster than I type, orphaning some very important parts of the sentence. Like verbs. Or prepositions. Or maybe I leave out a sentence that really needs to be there, that is crucial to understand what is happening.

On later review, the mind, well my mind anyway, has the tendency to fill in the missing words, completing the sentences as I thought them in the first place. This “habit” makes for some very interesting reading.

Editor person lets out an enormous belly laugh at things like that. And that’s why I’m here, to make editor person laugh. But my point is that I make a lot of mistakes, and I don’t always see them when I’m making them. That’s why editor person is so critical. They see EVERYTHING and they catch the screw ups. Just try and slip something by editor person. I dare you.

Unfortunately editor person doesn’t have enough time to review my blogs, so errors may find their way into the entries now and again. I’ll try my best to catch them.

Here’s the second half of what I started blogging last night, but was too groggy to finish. Working with the editor person is always an adventure, because I have one idea of what I wanted to write, the editor person has a vision of what it could look like, and then there is the matter of what’s on the page. Let’s just say I think a lot faster than I type, orphaning some very important parts of the sentence. Like verbs. Or prepositions. Or maybe I leave out a sentence that really needs to be there, that is crucial to understand what is happening.
On later review, the mind, well my mind anyway, has the tendency to fill in the missing words, completing the sentences as I thought them in the first place. This “habit” makes for some very interesting reading.
Editor person lets out an enormous belly laugh at things like that. And that’s why I’m here, to make editor person laugh. But my point is that I make a lot of mistakes, and I don’t always see them when I’m making them. That’s why editor person is so critical. They see EVERYTHING and they catch the screw ups. Just try and slip something by editor person. I dare you.
Unfortunately editor person doesn’t have enough time to review my blogs, so errors may find their way into the entries now and again. I’ll try my best to catch them.

Just got back from working with the editor person. On the whole it went very well. They gave this go round a B+. Not too shabby. Not where I want it to be in the final product, but very close to a solid draft, something that I can shop around, without worrying about the manuscript getting tossed for grammar or technical glitches. More importantly I feel it’s worth paying for. I would buy it, if I didn’t write it myself. After implementing these changes I’m going to be able to hold up the book and say, yeah, this is mine. This is what I can do. It’s not all I can do, or all I ever will do, but this is something. With the time I had to work with, I gave it everything I had. I didn’t hold back.

Holding back has been a long standing problem for me. Back in high school I ran cross country, and it took me two years of never finishing better than the middle of the pack before I realized where I went wrong. I was a strong runner, but I was afraid to break hard off the starting line and run with the guys who took off so much faster. I reasoned that they would fall off later in the race and I could pass them.

My strategy was all kinds of messed up. Sure, some guys did start too fast and flame out. But many of the guys who went out full tilt, finished a lot better than I did. Lots of them seemed to finish in the top ten. In junior year, I tore off the line just like the fatest sprinters, throwing caution to the wind. Much to my surprise it was a lot easier to keep the momentum going. When you start strong, it’s a lot easier to finish strong. And there’s a lot less people nipping at your heels. Suddenly I was finishing in the top ten.

I’ll post more about the editing session tomorrow.