I don't know a lot of musicians or visual artists,

Plus, composing and painting aren't the same types of processes as writing. If you've painted a canvas, and then it's poorly received, you have to start over with a blank canvas. There is no editing of a finished painting.

With writing, you don't have to throw out the mss. and start over (unless it sucks mightily; in which case, you have bigger problems). Writing lends itself much more to revision than do any visual art media.

Rice is cake-eating and cake-having.

And rice cakes are only ever so-so at best.

Even with lots of cheese.

There is no editing of a finished painting.

(This isn't entirely true; Winslow Homer kind of famously painted out the human figure in one of his seascapes by making a really tall wave splash over her. Enough people knew about the original that they didn't need to discover this via, like, x-ray.)

But in general, Steph's right -- words are pretty easy to edit mid-stream than most artistic media. It's possible to edit a movie to tell a completely different story, but beyond a certain point you have to go fetch all the actors and shoot more footage.

Well, and a movie is the classic example of a collaborative effort: it cannot physically be created by a single person.

t Hopes that the phrase "Gilmore Girls meets Witches of Eastwick" t enflames the imagination of a talented ficcer.

t blinks

Gus, what are you trying to get at here?

William Safire on how the Grey Lady finally embraced the izzle.

are you going to tell Faulkner he's got too many adjectives and adverbs?

Yes. But my Faulkner issues are well documented and likely to become a movie of the week staring Emma Thompson.

I guess as long as people are willing to buy Anne Rice's stuff, publishers will let her go unedited. But I think her books have gone down in quality over the years, and I think her editor-free process is the likely culprit. My standard is purely subjective. And since I'm not forced to buy her books or read them, I'll just roll my eyes and spend my money on other books.

I think that's a reprint from something in the Magazine a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, I remember reading it and being like, "Bill has nearly given himself an aneurysm, stooping to discuss the ways that people under forty speak day-to-day."

The funny part of the article, for me, was realizing that rapp -izzle speak is no different from the idiotic sound-insertion "languages" girls make up to gossip with each other in the 6th grade.

Consuela, the topic has been doing the usual Buffistas sine wave across a central theme. The theme was "cross-pollinations of genres", or at least it seemed that way to me. That specific cross-pollination -- GG meets Witches of Eastwick -- popped into my head as something that I should very much like to see done well. Then, I blurted.

Perhaps I should just go buy a Alice Hoffman novel and quietly read.