lovecraft68
Bad Doggie
- Joined
- Jul 13, 2009
- Posts
- 45,551
I was invited to be part of a Halloween anthology with some other authors who use the same publisher. Issue is the only story I have that would fit the theme, and be short enough to fall under word limit is from back in 2012.
Knowing anything I wrote back then has some seriously bad grammar and other issues, I decided to go back and give it an edit to not embarrass myself(more than usual)
The story "A mother's Love Never Dies" is here, but I'm not bothering with the free lit version, this is the SW version which had already been tweaked somewhat, but still a wreck.
But as I undertook this, I was struck by how this-if you have the time-is a great exercise to see how far you've come from then until now.
Some things I found and corrected.
Ellipsis-I abused this so badly during dialogue to try to show nerves or hesitancy in an awkward conversation that the reader must have thought my characters had speech impediments.
I still didn't have the dialogue tags consistently right, an issue I still have on the fly, but know how to correct them all now during an edit.
Word count, started at 14,500, got it down to 13,413 by eliminating not just sentences here and there, but entire paragraphs of "what's the point here?"
Fixed a slew of was issues "she was wearing" to She wore as an example
Way too many "started, starting, began, beginning," example "She started running her fingers through my hair" to "She ran her fingers through my hair.
As an aside, the long gone JBJ taught me that issue when he looked over a story for me. He may have been a troll, but he was far more helpful than people gave him credit for.
The issue of what I call repeating myself. "she rose up, she knelt down" rose and knelt are all that's needed, you don't rise down or kneel up. She stood up...stood is fine, "she rose to her feet" where else do you rise to if you were sitting?"
Little things like that help word count as well as just being more concise.
There's other things, but you get the point.
On the positive side, the story is better than I remember it, I expected it to suck just because I hadn't been writing long at the time. The dialogue flowed well, the characters were consistent, and the romance angle worked better than I'd remembered as well.
The end result is I can see I'm far better at grammar and technical writing than I used to be, and also was pleased to discover that when it came to story telling, I was way better back then than I gave myself credit for.
Again, something worth doing if you have the time, and want to see where you are as opposed to where you were.
Knowing anything I wrote back then has some seriously bad grammar and other issues, I decided to go back and give it an edit to not embarrass myself(more than usual)
The story "A mother's Love Never Dies" is here, but I'm not bothering with the free lit version, this is the SW version which had already been tweaked somewhat, but still a wreck.
But as I undertook this, I was struck by how this-if you have the time-is a great exercise to see how far you've come from then until now.
Some things I found and corrected.
Ellipsis-I abused this so badly during dialogue to try to show nerves or hesitancy in an awkward conversation that the reader must have thought my characters had speech impediments.
I still didn't have the dialogue tags consistently right, an issue I still have on the fly, but know how to correct them all now during an edit.
Word count, started at 14,500, got it down to 13,413 by eliminating not just sentences here and there, but entire paragraphs of "what's the point here?"
Fixed a slew of was issues "she was wearing" to She wore as an example
Way too many "started, starting, began, beginning," example "She started running her fingers through my hair" to "She ran her fingers through my hair.
As an aside, the long gone JBJ taught me that issue when he looked over a story for me. He may have been a troll, but he was far more helpful than people gave him credit for.
The issue of what I call repeating myself. "she rose up, she knelt down" rose and knelt are all that's needed, you don't rise down or kneel up. She stood up...stood is fine, "she rose to her feet" where else do you rise to if you were sitting?"
Little things like that help word count as well as just being more concise.
There's other things, but you get the point.
On the positive side, the story is better than I remember it, I expected it to suck just because I hadn't been writing long at the time. The dialogue flowed well, the characters were consistent, and the romance angle worked better than I'd remembered as well.
The end result is I can see I'm far better at grammar and technical writing than I used to be, and also was pleased to discover that when it came to story telling, I was way better back then than I gave myself credit for.
Again, something worth doing if you have the time, and want to see where you are as opposed to where you were.
Last edited: