Brain Farts

The ever-so-wise Homer Simpson once said :  "How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain."


Like Homer, I have my fair share of "DOH!" moments.


My most recent one came last night while I was working, once again, on my first chapter. (That beyotch refuses to go down, I tell you).


Anyway, somewhere in the course of about an hour, I managed to forget everything I know about my tenses. Seriously, I couldn't figure out what tense I was revising in. I write in past tense, but it sounded suspiciously like present to me (and I have no idea why). Yet when I noticed it and tried to correct myself my past tense sounded TOO past tense. 


Have you ever ridden the "Zipper" at the carnival?  That crazy ride where you willingly strap yourself into a cage that zips and twirls and spins high in the air, leaving you not knowing which side is up?  Yeah, that's pretty much what I felt like last night.


It was so bad, I had to stop what I was doing and read a real book just to re-familiarize myself with how to write properly. Darn stupidity leak caused me a whole night of revision work!!


On a positive note, I finally got myself hooked up with the RSS feeds I was talking about a few posts back. So going forward, I should be much better about keeping up with everyone's blogs. 


And I got to meet Terry from A Writer of Wrongs while he and his family were in town this weekend. It was freaking awesome to meet a fellow blog buddy (even if we spent more time talking baseball than writing) and now I'm on a mission to meet as many writing blog buddies as I can. 

Do You Ever ...

Do you ever get pissed at yourself for becoming a better writer?

I know it sounds ridiculous, but hear me out.

Recently, one of my Twitter buddies mentioned Noah Lukeman's  "The First Five Pages".  For those of you who aren't familiar with it (I highly suggest you get it ASAP, btw) it is a reference guide to helping writers avoid the rejection merry-go-round. Some of the information was pretty standard, but it was explained in a way that helped me to not only recognize those things I missed that were slipping into my writing ... it also gave me solid ways to fix them. 

More importantly, it was written from the perspective of an acquisitions editor. The perspective of a man who is looking for reasons to reject a piece of work so he can move on to the next submission in his stack. Not only that, he places his chapters in order of what usually (in a bad way) catches his attention first. I'm about a third of the way through another round of revisions using some of the things I've learned in his book, and I'm surprised how much better the ms reads!

That's the good news.

The "eh" news, is that I already thought my ms was doing pretty good.

That sounds wrong.  What I mean to say is that I've finally had to admit to a major flaw of mine: not realizing I still had so much left to learn!!

Storytelling has always been a strength of mine. I'm good at coming up with ideas and finding ways to weave them together that makes it interesting from beginning to end. Through my school years, and with friends and friends, etc., my knack for high-stakes story lines and lovable characters was always enough to get me by with my less than precise writing. (In case you haven't noticed by reading my blog, I can be a little needlessly wordy at times)

Now I'm learning that when it comes to the big bad world of publishing, the littlest of details in the craft makes a huge difference. In fact, it's the difference between a decent manuscript and a wonderful one.

Don't get me wrong, I'm really excited when I learn a tip or trick that makes me a better writer in the long run ... I just get a bit miffed at myself from time to time that it has taken me so long to realize the need to get better at what I do. For a "smart kid", I sure can be pretty slow sometimes!  ;o)

Reading Update:  So, I started reading Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere" about a month ago. I'm still hanging in there -- just about 100 pages in -- but, I gotta be honest. I'm not really sure I have any idea what's going on in the story.  Anyone read it before and can tell me if it all starts to make sense at some point? Or is it just one of those stories that probably isn't going to click for me, if I don't love it already?