The Joy of Editing

Ideally, one could potentially live off of their writing.

Ideally, writing is an entertaining diversion for me.

Ideally, I'd never be experiencing work if my dreams were to come true.

Ideally, I'd be a starry eyed idiot who forgot to edit shit.

The Joy of Editing. Most writers fear it, and it's a necessary good. Not an evil, because it always makes your writing better. The Aloysius story I just posted is the raw, unedited(outside a simple Open Office spell check run) word for word copy from my notebook. I've noticed a lot of glaring inconsistencies.

1) Something so damned cliche I don't even notice it's a cliche until someone points it out. Shade the Black Stallion. The fumes of the Print shop m ust be getting me because that's just about the most cliche thing I ever wrote. I'm serious, even my 8-year old self wrote off beat stories of weird shit happening. I think my elementary school teachers believed I was destined to become the second coming of Ted Bundy or something like that despite being as close to a pacifist as one can be without really being one. I try to avoid cliches unless there's a lot of not-cliche I can do with that cliche. For instance, I have gnomes of most closely resembling the tinker variety in the Orenero book setting. Cliche, yes. But I have a lot that I can do with them, and I give my own spin on the race. So I suffer that cliche. But Shade the Black Stallion? I'm 2 letters away from giving myself a brain aneurysm from the clichedness. It's a meaningless character(if you can call a horse a character. I also hate talking animals) and it's just shoddy and uncreative. What the fuck was I thinking? Editing will change that, likely into a horse that's brown or something(Brown is the universal "This horse doesn't matter" color) and still call it Shade, and likely have Sterling wonder why it's called Shade, and blame it on the seller's habit, whatever it may be.(I want to have the equivalent of crack or something in the world. Just something overly addictive and bad for your health, but the problem with writing Fantasy is that real world technical jargon is out of place. I also hate the fantasy habit of calling something something else. A pig is a pig, not a Porkbeast. Although Porkbeast is at least sensical. Many fantasy writers just have a long random string of letters with apostrophes like Ag'fer'na'zanen'ti. That makes me want to shoot myself reading it.)

2) Going off on unrelated tangents. While this isn't as much of a sin in a novel(in fact if I can make sense of it, it's a good way to expand the world and give it depth) in a short story it's long winded and unnecessary. But it's a hard habit to break. I went on no less than two in the previous section of this post. (Again, this is a blog post, so my rambling actually makes it more entertaining than anything.) I need to cut these out.

3) Too Much Detail. Short stories are suppose to be short. You don't need to know every little detail about a character. Just anything relevant and maybe a skirted over appearance.

4) Say everything twice. Say everything twice, ohhh yeah. Another habit. I'll state something blankly, then state it again more creatively. It's redundant and shoddy so I have to go through and cut those out, both novel and short story.

5) Annoying Novel Fuck Up #1: I wrote the first 30 pages in present tense. Sounds wonky for a novel, so now I have to convert everything back to past. Gee golly, nonstop fun.

When I named this blog "The Long Road Ahead" I wasn't kidding. It'll be a long, long time before I get anything significant done.

I still have yet to start to edit The Aloysius, but I'm going to leave the rough draft of the post below. I'll eventually post the first revision of The Aloysius to demonstrate how editing and everything can warp a work.

I don't feel I'm going to charge anything for my short stories personally, although I may attempt to sell them to a literary magazine just to get my name out there. I don't read many of because I'm a cheap bastard who can't afford anything, but Publicity is ultimately key whenever your trying to sell anything.