A line from the novel

"I see you later," he said, cheerfully waving goodbye to her. "Odd," she mumbled facetiously, "I see you right now." 

— — —

You must engage your brain to know the knowable; you must disengage it to grasp the unknowable.

Editing...

When composing a sentence, there are few things more important to me than the melody or rhythm of the words. Just recently I spent days, no weeks, rewriting a line because I wasn't happy with the way it sounded. Its grammar was correct, the thought it contained was expressed with meticulous precision, and not a single word appeared to be unnecessary.  And yet, I didn't like it.  When I read it out loud—and reading it out loud is a must—I found it sounding bumpy and inelegant.  So I kept working on it until I was satisfied.

I can get obsessed with this sort of thing, you know?  Indeed, I must admit that I am tempted, on occasion, to improve the sound and flow of a sentence even at the expense of its clarity, as long, of course, as the intended meaning is still coming through clearly enough.  Am I too extreme?

The good old ways

I hate texting.  As a writer, I should like the written word, but texting?  I can't stand it!  Due to my profession, I know just how hard it is to express my thoughts and feelings to those who cannot see my body language or hear the tone of my voice (thank heaven for italics, in that connection!).  So much crucial information is contained in those components of speech, but texting conveys none of them.  How much better, therefore, is the simple, old-fashioned phone call.  And speaking of old-fashioned, none of todays social media can compare to the ancient technology called 'the pub'.  Not that I ever had a hangout like the famous bar in the TV show, Cheers, but I love the non-alcoholic version of it—Starbucks—and spend much time there, writing and chatting with other creative people.  I will never know as many people there as I do on facebook or twitter—but the connections are deeper.  For example, I have 132 friends on facebook, but only two of them remembered my birthday (the good thing is, I now have to remember just two birthdays myself.  Lol).  But when I got my coffee at Starbucks that morning, someone had scribbled 'Happy Birthday' on my cup (plus I didn't have to pay for it, yay!).  Or more recently, I asked the folks on twitter for some feedback, but out of my 7,347 followers not even one responded. The measly ten or twenty  people I know at the coffee shop were far more forthcoming.  Texting might be practical in certain situations, and social media is a lot of fun—I truly love facebook and twitter—but the forms of human interaction that have been with us pretty much from the beginning of time will continue to nurture the soul better, I believe, than any of the high-tech stuff we might yet come up with. :-)

A line from Tehtena's diary

When a young woman walked by, I glimpsed the soul of a young suitor in the old man's eyes and knew that time caused more wounds than it healed.

Editing

As I edit my novel, which has by now been more than three years in the making, I find myself sometimes at odds with the person I was when I started writing it.  So now, just as I must frequently step into the shoes of my fictional characters to let them speak in an authentic voice, I must also step into the shoes of my younger self to keep the story the way I originally envisioned it.  Wounds that festered back then and made me write certain things, have long since healed and I have to scratch them open again to recapture the mindset that once guided me.  It works, but is it really necessary?  Perhaps there comes a point when a writer ought to stop shaping the content of his or her story—at least if work on it spans a long period of time—and focus solely on the language in which it written.  Sure, a writer's skill level may also change over the years (hopefully for the better), but most likely not as drastically as his or her emotional state or outlook on life. If you, my dear writer friends, have also worked on a single story for very long, please let me know what your experiences were. :-)

Simple pleasures

I joined a friend on one of Manhattan's newest city buses the other day, and he remarked how much he liked the new-bus smell.  That was a first.  I've heard of people enjoying the smell of a new car.  A few very fortunate ones might even delight in that of a brand new private jet, and others, slightly below them, in the lovely aroma of a new stretched limousine.  But the folks I hang out with relish the smell of a new bus. This goes to show you where my place in the pecking order is.  :-)   No wonder I feel so close to my fictional princess in her disguise as a lowly seamstress.