This is nuts. It is. Attack novel, or something. I'm in the very high tension part of this thing, zooming in toward the solution and the ending, and I know precisely what's going to happen, what they're going to say to each other, the lot.

Hey - it's how Anne Rice wrote Interview. You're kinda similar except for the editor, the genre, the plot, the having an editor, and oh yeah - you have talent.

Heh. Aimee, there's also the fact that, as a writer, I don't have the verbal runs.

Seriously. In something like "the Feast of All Saints", I'd have cut a third of that book. When did "tight" become a rude word?

When people paired it with "up"?

Pokes head in.

I'm planning to take lots of time in Europe to write. Someone, tell me quick that any ol' notebook will do, and that I absolutely don't need the brown-worn-leather-tied-up-with-a-string journal I saw in Borders.

I wants the Precious. Me and my damn stationary.

But I like tight prose, damn it! I get so damned bored with all these big goopy epics - half the story is buried under the concept of "hey, why use one perfect word when we can use eight possible ones?"

Bleah.

I get so damned bored with all these big goopy epics - half the story is buried under the concept of "hey, why use one perfect word when we can use eight possible ones?"

Sing it, Deb.

t makes ginger cookie sacrifice to Deb

Lilty, use a spiral. Seriously. Spiral or looseleaf.

I lay on the beach at Cannes in 1990 and wrote seventeen pages about the minutiae of the South of France, for "And Then Put Out The Light." I used a 69 cent buckram notebook from Chinatown.

They're still my notebooks of choice.

Lilty, for goodness sake don't spend a ton of money. Get a bunch of single-subject spiral notebooks. They're lightweight, and you don't feel like you have to write perfectly. You can screw up or rip out pages or make lists or get email addresses on odd pages without feeling guilty. I adore my spiral notebooks.