Friday, February 13, 2004
Yesterday, Spooky and Jennifer and I went over all of Murder of Angels through page 73, which includes Chapter One. It took us about three hours. And while I made quite a few line edits, and fixed one minor continuity problem, I think it made me wonder if this undertaking isn't something just short of a waste of time. I'm fooling myself, thinking I might actually rewrite anything. I don't rewrite. Sometimes I feel like that's an authorial deficiency on my part. Most, or all, of my friends who are authors rewrite, often willingly. There must surely be something wrong with me that I don't. I sit down. I write the novel. I start at the beginning and I write until I reach the end. Once I've reached the end, changes to the first draft are likely to be, I'd guesstimate, less than 5%, and maybe less than that. This has been true with Silk, Threshold, Low Red Moon, most of my short fiction, and now, it seems, it shall be true of Murder of Angels (there was a lot of reworking with The Five of Cups, but that's a special case, and if you want to know how and why you should buy the book, please).
It may all be an artefact of the way I write. I don't really write drafts. I finish each sentence, make sure it's perfect, then move on to the next sentence. Nothing is tentative. I polish as I write. I try very, very hard to get it absolutely right to first time, which, in my mind, leaves little room for change.
Sure, I could rewrite so that different things happen than the things that happened in the first draft, I could fashion endless alternate versions, but where's the point in that?
So, I'm uncertain whether we'll continue with the reading or not. Most likely we will, as there are obviously still things that I, my first readers, and the copyeditor have missed, little things like misspelling, absent or unnecessary commas, and the aforementioned minor continuity flaw, and I do want this book to be perfect. As perfect as it can be. But, for better or worse, I don't see revision happening. And I feel as though my time would be better spent writing something I have not yet written.
Jennifer will probably finish the first draft of her dissertation today, which will, obviously, be a momentous occurrence. The influence of the Gothic upon the work of T. S. Eliot. She's been working on this for more years than I care to recall. The push to finish is why there's been so little mention of her in the blog of late.
Someday I'm going to sit down and write a chapbook detailing which dictates of English grammar annoy me the most. On second thought, that might be far too lengthy for a mere chapbook. Yesterday, it was the proper use of "any more" and "anymore." Disregarding those who believe that the word "anymore" doesn't exist (I follow the OED in my belief that it does; it's something my copyeditor and I actually agree on), we're left with the problem of distinguishing the one from the other. Consider this sentence from Murder of Angels: "I'm not going to talk anymore." Or, on the other hand, should it be, "I'm not going to talk any more"? Some (Jennifer included) would say that in the first instance, "anymore" stands as an adverb, indicating "any longer." In the second case, "any more" would stand as an adjective and a noun relating to the quantity of words. Now, I would argue, and this seems obvious, that in many examples, including this one, there's no essential difference in meaning between "any more" and "anymore," as the production of additional words would, by necessity, entail a greater length time, and speaking for a longer time would produce additional words. Hence, in this and similar cases, choosing either "any more" or "anymore" becomes arbitrary and can be determined only by the author's intent, which, as regards which form is used, is here irrelevant, because the same meaning is gained with either "anymore" or "any more." So, it seems, at least in many instances, "any more" and "anymore" are synonyms and interchangeable, though in other cases, they certainly aren't. But the fact that they can function as synonyms in a wide and unrelated set of statements seems to undermine an actual "rule" of grammar which would maintain that there is a useful difference between the two. The paradox defeats the possibility of true Law.
And sometimes I think I'd be better off if I could stop expecting grammar to be logical, and stop trying to think of it as a scientific system. It is neither.
As promised, more items are being added to the Species of One shop. Check out the "Ugliest Cat in the World" mug and the Low Red Moon goodies. For the time being, we're offering all Low Red Moon, Silk and Threshold T-shirts at only one dollar above cost (the one dollar is to cover our CafePress fees). More to come!
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