Natasha Fondren

Glenn’s coming home! I’ve been sitting by the phone. I probably won’t know which day until he’s flown to Anchorage, given the difficulty of phoning from Dutch Harbor. It could be any day (or really, any hour) now.

Good news: Bernita has a new Lillie St. Claire story in Weirdly: Volume 3. Lillie rocks, I’m telling you, totally rocks.

 Smart Pop Books has released excerpts of Ardeur, an essay anthology about Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series. There are some great essays in there! Mine is “The Domestication of a Vampire Executioner.”

Laurell K. Hamilton guest-edited, and she wrote really awesome and heartfelt intros to each essay. Lots of times, editors write a paragraph, a couple sentences. She wrote a page or two. I have to say, her success is not surprising; the extra mile must be automatic with her.

Speaking of Smart Pop Books, if you’re a fan of Dollhouse, they’re having an essay contest for the Dollhouse anthology.

So I mentioned I’m learning Spanish. The Listen ‘n’ Learn Spanish with the Movies book assigned Eight Below first. Um, YEAH RIGHT. I sobbed the whole way through. And I’m not watching it again, no way no how. I don’t care if I haven’t learned the Spanish I’m supposed to learn from it.

I’m an emotional weakling. The whole time, I knew there was going to be a happy ending for the dogs, but that didn’t help. Nor did the actual happy ending: I sobbed through that, too.

I cry at everything in real life, too. I saw a mean sign a few days ago, and I came home and cried. I was depressed for three days. I felt like running home to a mommy and saying, “He hurt my feelings!”

I have the emotional strength of a five year old. *sigh*

*Addendum: He just called! He’s already to Anchorage; he’ll be here at 11:45 am, Friday morning!

What’s going on with you?

I have a strictly professional crush on my editor. I think she’s fantastic. Since my adventure has gotten blissfully boring to talk about (although I did lose a cat all day today), I thought I’d talk about the way I go through my edits. Not saying it’s interesting, but I’m supposed to be talking about writing once in awhile, no?

There was no letter this time, just a bunch of comments in the essay. Those are easier edits than the overall ones, anyway. I wrote and re-wrote this thing about three or four times. (There are a total of eleven documents to do with this one essay, if that gives you any indicator.) I wrestled with this one, let me tell you. I think if there had been fundamental issues, I would’ve screamed and cried and thrown in the towel.

When I get edits, I do them in passes:

The Easy-Peasy Pass: I tackle the easiest ones first. This is mostly going through, right-clicking, and accepting changes by my editor. Maybe changing a word or deleting a sentence. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it gets rid of a lot of red in one fell swoop.

Ahhh! Much better. Looks like I made a lot of progress.

The Sure! No Problem! Pass: Then there are the little changes, the ones that pretty much make no difference to me. Swap the order of this sentence? Sure! Delete this bit? Gone! Tweak this idea? Easy!

After that, finding the easy edits is hard.

The Procrastination Pass: Nothing actually gets done during this phase, and I keep looking at all the comments I’d rather procrastinate. These are the edits that are going to take some work. I might, um, actually have to write a WORD. Or maybe even a SENTENCE. In a few cases, it might even call for MULTIPLE SENTENCES. And worst of all, sometimes I have to go and LOOK SOMETHING UP. I go through at least once or twice and do nothing, in the hopes that another “easy-peasy” or “sure! no problem!” fix will appear.

After I’ve blogged about doing my edits, after I’ve played with my cats a bit, taken a walk, poured a glass of wine, vacuumed the carpet, fed the cats, and taken a nap, it’s on to…

The Grind Pass: These involve swapping the order of things, adding whole new paragraphs, fleshing out ideas, etc. Ugh. I mean, I have to THINK. I have to drink some coffee. In fact, these can wait until tomorrow morning, right? It’s ten p.m., and I can’t very well drink coffee now, right?

Besides, I had a traumatic day: I thought my cat had gone missing. The squirt was hiding all day. It’s ONLY a twenty-foot camper, and she still managed to curl up in a spot I couldn’t find. She didn’t come out for breakfast!!! I thought she’d escaped through a screen, so I was wandering the campground and crying, trying to find her.

It’s time for wine, not edits!

The Final Smooth: After all the work is done, I have to go through to smooth out the changes. Swapping the order of two sections means I’ll have to see what no longer makes sense. When you start changing words, you suddenly have the same word two times in a paragraph. Ick. Stuff like that. When you change one sentence, the rhythm tends not to fit in the whole paragraph. All has to be smoothed out.

And then it’ll be done!

It’s funny, as I was packing for this adventure, I came across a stack of my essays for my German lit minor. Wow! I was not a natural writer. You wouldn’t believe the stupid mistakes I made! (Of course, most of my essays were written the night before.) I’m astonished the professors gave me A’s. A few of the A’s were presented thus: “Nevertheless, A-”

After this, I have an endless bunch of fiction to write. Ahhh. Nothing like an essay to remind you how much you LOVE fiction.

So how do you do edits? You don’t go in ORDER, do you? LOL!