Friday, December 08, 2006

The perfect writer. She is not moi.

This is a bit of all right. I went back into the story and started the first big edit. This is past the spell check, lazy words and dumb writing errors edit. I need this story to be longer. The section is the part about the Lost Dutchman Mine, somewhere around Chapter Three. I have about 2500 new words into it and there is another 500 floating about in my head. It is so much better. My hyper-critical self asks why the flip couldn't I do that the first time around? I will forever demand that I write the story correctly the first time and then never,ever,have to do the editing or rewriting.
DS2 suggests getting famous and hiring a word processing assistant who passed third grade grammar. What a concept, to be trite. Great idea.
His theory: those writers who can produce three books a year, write them all right but they employ people who do the spell checks, the formating, the page numbering, the communication with agents and publishers and all the other stuff that goes into making a manuscript a book. The author writes eight or more hours a day, seven days a week.
My theory: those authors actually learned grammar, they type fast (me too) and they just do the whole process correctly the first time. They also work 8 hours a day, and probably seven days a week, with time out to run to the grocery store.

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