Arrrgghh.

I have been working on and off on the same essay for the last two weeks. It just won't quite come together, and it's making me batty.

thump thump thump

Aw, man. So BTDT. Spent money I didn't have at the bookstore again. I mention this here because I bought some more mysteries by my Secret Literary Boyfriend who's teaching me to write mysteries whether he knows it or not.

Working on editing this essay for possible publication and let it be known that I'm a terrible emdasher in the worst--or I would argue best--way possible. In my non fiction if I'm clobbering a point, I like to clobber right down to the form of the sentence itself. Prof who suggested it, thinks I should go the semi colon route, but I don't know... Are emdashes really that evil? Is a complex-compound sentences broken down into simple sentences really better writing? I mean, Dickens, he was writing fiction and his run-ons are beloved by all, non?

The thought of you asking me, Fragment Girl...or, alternately, Dances With Parens? Makes me laugh really hard.

I mean, Dickens, he was writing fiction and his run-ons are beloved by all, non?

Problem is, if Dickens were writing today, he'd get in trouble for it.

I, too, am the em-dash's bitch. In my rough drafts, I let myself em-dash and flirt with run-ons with wild abandon. In what I think of as first-and-a-half drafts, when I take what I've written out longhand and put it into the computer, I try to clean up the complex sentences, and I do my best to limit myself to one em-dash a page. Then when I'm editing, I question every dash. A lot of them stay, but they have to prove their right to be there.

What I wrote yesterday doesn't suck half as much as I thought it did. I'm not saying it's a brilliant piece of writing, but all it took to bring it up to my usual rough draft standard was reordering a few paragraphs where I'd let narrative interrupt dialogue and replacing some of the "he saids" with action tags. It still needs the emotion enhanced a bit, and I'm not sure I've managed the structure just right in one section, but I really can't see why I thought it was one of the worst things I've ever written. Not only is it salvageable, I think it's a decent skeleton to build a scene upon.

Now I'm going to stack some cats and go to bed.

I finished that essay finally! It still needs some work, but one of my dearest RL friends helped me a lot. What a relief.

Now I'm going to stack some cats and go to bed.

New topic, Teppy?

Suggestions, at least partly pulled from random objects I can see from the computer:

Bread
Fruit
Calendar
Doors
Love scenes (can be sexual, but don't have to be)

How about discovery or opposites? Or looking at a view?

ION, tonight I discovered that one member of my writers group has been imagining my lovely hero, Jack, as a Robert Redford type.

A world of no.

Of course, the problem might be that this guy is a good 20-25 years older than me, so it's entirely possible his mental Robert Redford looks better than mine. But still, Nathan Fillion needs to get more famous, so when I say to my writers group, "Insofar as Jack looks like anybody but himself, he looks like Nathan Fillion, only not as extremely tall," I won't get blank stares.