11.8%

I’ve been working on a lot of short pieces lately – partly because (as I swear I’ve blogged about, but I cannot find an entry) I tend to work on short pieces when the big ones feel like an endless slog, and partly because there are a lot of Scottish/Scottish-based markets with deadlines in the next month and a half. (I seem to be locating myself within the Scottish literary scene, so here’s my attempt to see whether they agree.)

Since the start of September I’ve written two poems, overhauled a third, and revised a short story that’s been hanging around for a while. When I say revised, I mean smoothing out the prose – removing scaffolding and clutter, taking away weak clauses and descriptions and repetitions, and generally making it easier to read – as opposed to replotting. The most substantial edit was changing a few of the names.

And yet without even noticing until I had a look at the word counter, I reduced the story from 3544 words to 3124 words. 420 words – 11.8% of the story – GONE.

I’ve always been a proponent of the theory that if you delete something and don’t notice it’s missing, it isn’t necessary. This becomes tougher when you’re working on a project for a long time, because it’s more difficult to tell if something is necessary or simply hanging around in your mind. In this type of situation, though, it’s mind-boggling how much extra junk I was happily living with.

(Looks warily at the bookshelves and piles of papers nearby.)

Editing poetry on the bus

It works reasonably well if you can drown out the screams of the small child setting himself on fire behind you.

In this case, I realized that the first two lines were perfectly good (after tweaking), and so were the last two lines (after being reverse-tweaked, because sometimes you make a change that doesn’t work), so I thought I was going to have to gut the middle, but it turns out that line 3 went in a random direction, so after doing a freewrite paragraph (‘So what the hell is going on here? No, really!’) I figured out how to bridge the gap, and how best to structure the list-of-five-items-one-of-which-is-repeated, and ooh that word is very cold but it can’t be.

Which, as I’d ditched my book on the way into town, was the perfect way to spend a bus trip on Saturday afternoon.

Thundercat poem

Every so often I do a post in which I comment on the words/phrases which have led people to this blog. These are getting more interesting as I write about more things; today’s batch included ‘poetry query letters,’ ‘niklas frank’ and ‘grammar in america.’ But the funniest by far was ‘thundercat poem’ – I wish like hell I knew what this person was actually hoping to find – and therefore I feel obligated to provide a response. Off the top of my head, TSR Literary Productions Presents:

Thundercat Poem

Thundercat, you are very sweet
And I love poking your little feet
But you don’t like this quite so much as I do,
And that’s why I have this bandage wrapped around my left hand
So when my mother asks when I am going to publish my book already
I will say,
Whenever I can type again without blood loss,
And also,
There’s this cat on my lap.

*bows*

(Incidentally, my mother does not nag me about when my book is coming out; that was poetic license, or maybe a trope.)

I think Thundercat would object to this being called ‘doggerel.’ Catterel?