Five Things Make a Post

[rolanni]

1. Christine Valada and Len Wein have lost most of their house, many of their belongings and the family dog to a house fire. Chris, Len and Chris' son, Michael, are fine, for values of "fine" that include both "alive" and "bereaved." I'm torn between being so very happy that Chris and Len and Michael got out safely, and being so dreadfully sorry for their considerable losses.


2. It amuses me hugely when readers try to guess which part of any particular novel Steve wrote and which part I wrote. It doesn't work that way, folks.

3. Hexapuma has a sloppy, drippy cold. He's obviously Completely Miserable, and I can't pick up the Magic Pink Stuff at the vet's until tomorrow. Worried cat-mom, here.

4. Here in Central Maine, we're having a thunderstorm. Up-country, it's snowing.

5. Progress on Mouse and Dragon

50295 / 120000

Comments

It doesn't work that way, folks.

[bookmobiler.livejournal.com]

I always assumed you did the consonants and he did the vowels. Unless you decide to switch. :)

Re: It doesn't work that way, folks.

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

No, it's the abstract art method. They stand well back, and he tosses nouns onto the pristine white pages while she fires verbs where they will land. Then they both spread handfuls of punctuation, periods, commas, quotes and all that, with willful abandon across the wordy landscape. Then some pruning, a bit of careful framing, et voila, we have a novel. After which good morning of labor, they sit down with the collie dogs ... er, Maine coon cats? and consider what to do with their afternoon.

Re: It doesn't work that way, folks.

[bookmobiler.livejournal.com]

handfuls of punctuation, periods, commas, quotes and all that, with willful abandon across the wordy landscape


Wouldn't that be the cat's supervisory function?

I bet Hexapuma has a mean way with a semicolon ;)

Re: It doesn't work that way, folks.

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Aha! Quite right, I'm sure. Which probably explains why commas and semi-colons occasionally resemble cat's claws. And exclamation marks are related to whiskers? Periods are probably just paw prints, simplified? Hum, this puts a whole different look on the question of punctuation, doesn't it?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

50K celebration! Those words just keep piling up. I figure somewhere we'll have an avalanche, maybe have to do some hack-and-slash revisionism, but then we'll be skiing the back country by fall, right? Keep those pages turning!

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I rarely spot (and even more rarely look for) which author wrote what in a collaboration. Occasionally authors do comment about it in an afterword ("He wrote the odd chapters and I wrote the even ones, then we swapped over and each rewrote each others' chapters") but even on reading that and going back I still don't usually spot them.

And really I don't care, except that I am interested in the process of writing in general and the different ways authors do it (which is why I really enjoy the comments you and other authors make about how you do writing, revising, etc.), the same with composers and other creative people. If the story is well-written then I get caught up in it and don't even notice chapter boundaries most of the time ("I'll just read to the end of the chapter before going to bed" ... a couple of hours later ... "Why am I at the end of the book already?").