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.

Robert Redford was a stone hottie back in the day.

t looks up early Redford works on IMDB

Still not my type. And definitely nothing like the mental image of Jack I'm trying to convey. Similar build, maybe. But totally different bone structure, and Jack isn't blond.

Not a big deal. As long as readers think he's sexy, it's all good. But sometimes I wish I could draw even a little bit so I could capture what I have in mind.

Susan, Susan, Susan, ixnay on the over-escribing-day. When you get right down to it, it doesn't matter what an author thinks his or her characters look like. What matters is that the reader--all fifty-four million of them--knows exactly how they look. They can look like a favorite movie star or the guy behind the counter at Best Buy, or the new pediatrician, or the second fiddle in the civic symphony, or the local weather person. Crush objects, upon whom a reader can hang your character.

Truly, I like characters described, at most, with maybe height, relative to other characters, eye and hair color, or a prominent jaw, or a flying eyebrow, something unique to the character, without a detailed photographic description. So your Nathan Fillion can be someone else's Robert Redford and still be Jack.