Eagles Over the Kennebec

Saturday. Cold and grey.

We here at the Cat Farm and Confusion Factory are under Rush Orders from the publisher and so will be scarce until the copy edits have been reviewed/accepted/rejected.

<complaint>I had A Plan. My Plan was to write a nice, comfortable short story, to get back into the mindset of writing-not-editing, interspersed with making chili, breads, and other Stuff for the freezer so as to be prepared to slip into writing the next book. Forget that Plan.</complaint>

Kettle's on. Breakfast will be PBnJ onna whole wheat English muffin. Lunch -- oh, who knows.

I did set the alarm for O'Ghod O'Clock, and I did get up to turn up the thermostats. But then I went back to bed for another hour, because I'd rather work late in a warm house than early in a freezing one.

And that? Is the news that's fit to print.

Everybody stay warm, or cool, or whatever may be appropriate.

Frequent readers of this blog will recall that yesterday, I posted a snippet from work-in-progress Carousel Seas; then deleted it when a complaint about the ungrammaticalness of the snippet was the first response to it.

Now, posting snippets is something I do because I want to; it's fun in much the same way as eating cookies fresh out of the oven is fun.  Neither is meant to be nutritious, necessarily; just a little hit of pleasure to sweeten the day.

Snippets usually come directly out of the work I've done on the day of their posting; they are first draft material.  That means they may contain spelling errors, punctuation errors, errors in arithmetic, grammar errors, and all the other sorts of Soul-Destroying Horrors that attend first draft material.

The cry of "not grammatically correct" struck me exactly the same way as you would have been struck, had I walked into your kitchen and slapped the plate of warm cookies out of your hand.

Exactly that.

I mean, if I don't want a warm cookie, all I have to say is, "No, thanks."  Right?  No need to be rude about it.

If a snippet offends you, then don't read any more snippets.  That's easy, right?  I put them at the very bottom of the page for a reason, you know*.

I want to make it clear that I don't think my work is perfect; and I certainly don't think the snippets are perfect.  Some things I post as snippets don't survive the final draft.  I am, at least a little bit, aware of the demands of my craft.  I do multiple read-throughs of my working manuscript, correcting, changing and shaping.

I also want to make clear that I do not reverence grammar above all things.  Grammar is a tool.  It is not the only tool.  Which is why my initial, but usually suppressed, response to those who need to explain to me that my grammar sucks is, "So. Fucking. What?"

For the folks who are asking that the snippet be re-instated, and that snippeting continue. . .give me a few days to think about this.  I don't like having cookies slapped out of my hands; it's upsetting.  This doesn't mean that I need -- or want -- tons of praise for my powers as a baker; I mean, for ghod's sake, they're just cookies.  I just don't want to be abused for having baked them.

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*The Reason Being that I was taken to task (a couple years ago now) on Baen's Bar for snipetting.  The objection there being to one's unrelenting self-promotion.  That kerfuffle cost me three days' work and a migraine, so you can see why I hide the snippets now, and also why I want to be very careful of my space on this.  If I can't feel reasonably safe, and get some pleasure from the act of snipetting, then it's clear, in order to protect my work, that I shouldn't snippet.