April 2017
Monthly Archive
Secret, mystery, humiliation, conundrum … and partial explanation
Posted by admin on 18 Apr 2017 | Tagged as: Uncategorized
Fifty commas deleted yesterday morning … total left is a secret.
Listing all the sentences in a piece, each on its own line to ensure their length varies, reveals tense inconsistencies, more small mistakes. Doing so also inspires content adjustments … a mystery.
Duplication searches highlight some words inocuous enough to show up without offense in every third sentence, some appearing tolerably every few paragraphs. Other words are so self-important they need confining to once per section, even only once per manuscript. The drudgery is logical, effective, thus enjoyable. It inevitably displays, every ten or twenty pages, two identical words, each carefully chosen to be unique, in as many lines … a humiliation.
These essentials blue-pencil hours and hours … a conundrum.
Partial explanation: this morning’s three new commas.
!!!
Posted by admin on 10 Apr 2017 | Tagged as: Uncategorized
Exclamation points, supposedly, can be over-used. Not a problem for me. I thought. Burrowing again into pieces I considered edited revealed dozens and dozens more than I remembered. Almost all are gone now. My screen, with and then without the marks, showed me how exclamation points muffle, and how replacing them with periods (full stops) frees the words’ meanings to reach the reader. I trust.
Public Reading: Tuesday, April 4, Annette Street Library, 6:15pm
Posted by admin on 03 Apr 2017 | Tagged as: Uncategorized
The Canadian Authors Association Toronto Branch will welcome members and non-members to the Toronto Public Library branch at 145 Annette Street, on Tuesday, April 4, 6:15-8:15pm. “Bring your best work, or a work in progress!” says Christopher Canniff, branch president. You may read for 3-5 minutes … if you sign up: president@canauthorstoronto.org. I’mm looking forward to reading three very short bits from the memoir I’m writing. For more info click here.