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May 30, 2013
It’s a very strange feeling, reading something you wrote long ago. In On Writing, Stephen King suggests that after you finish a draft, you should put it away for a couple months and work on something else. That way, when you go back to edit it later on, it will be almost like you’re reading someone else’s work. It’ll be familiar yet new, allowing you to see it as you never could when you were slaving over it every single day. It’s...
May 17, 2013
Perhaps one of the best gifts I’ve ever received was from one of my editors, and like many great gifts, I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time. It was the book On Writing by Stephen King. I’m not a big fan of King’s work – I don’t enjoy horror, and I find his writing to be too wordy by half (an amusing criticism coming from me, I’ll admit). He is a great writer though, and this book taught me...
May 15, 2013
Last night I edited both my novel and a My Way or the Anime post, and I was struck by the differences between the two. Editing a blog post is easy. With a deadline close at hand, the incentives to stop screwing around and finish are high. The ephemeral nature of the format also means less editing is required. If I phrase something awkwardly in a blog post, that’s okay – there’ll be another one next week. The emphasis is on putting...
May 14, 2013
As I went through the story my editors marked up for me earlier today, I found myself having a hard time enjoying my own work. No, that’s not true – I actually enjoyed it quite a lot, which either means it’s good, or I’m a giant egomaniac. Knowing me, it’s probably both. Or just the second one. That one’s definitely included. I think the difference is in how I enjoy it, which is in spurts. I can’t just sit down...
May 13, 2013
I have two editors. They’re old friends, one a prolific reader and a wizard with the English language, the other something of a writer himself (and all those other things as well). If anyone will determine the quality of my book other than me, it will be these two, and I feel lucky to have them in my corner. That they’ll read this post has nothing to do with me saying that. Okay, perhaps it does, but that doesn’t mean...
May 12, 2013
Why a new site? For a while now I’ve blogged at Random Curiosity, both episodically and under editorials that once carried the Stilts Out Loud name. That’s no more – those editorials are now known as My Way or the Anime (as more than half of them were called anyway), with this site inheriting the Stilts Out Loud name. But why? Anime is a passion of mine, but it’s not the only one. The reason I wanted to write for...