I know I’m not the only person who has a “special reader”, that person you give your work to after you’ve cooked it real good and you think you can knock his/her socks off with one bite and yet, you never do. But this is the reason you keep bringing him/her work because maybe one day you will write something that will make your special reader pass out with adoration. Or so we dream.

My special reader is also a poet. Her name is Kori and she is a graduate student at the University of Washington. If someone had told the two of us that we would be attending graduate school for the same discipline at the same time in Washington state, we would have, very literally, laughed ourselves into crying. Surely, we would have said, wiping the irony from our eyes, the Universe is not so twisted. Read more »

I recently started reading for another literary journal. I found a journal I respected, contacted the editor, and was welcomed in to the fold as a level two reader. Now, I’ve only been at this for a month now, but I’ve already seen a piece that I saw while at Willow Springs.

I said no to the piece while at Willow Spring (and it was, obviously, ultimately rejected), and when it popped up in my reading box again, I did add a note saying that I probably wasn’t the best reader since I’d seen it, and rejected it, before. However, what struck me about the piece was that, in the two-ish years since I’d seen it the first time, it was the same. If revisions had been done, they’d been superficial line-level edits.

On the one hand, this bothered me—though of course the writer had absolutely no way of knowing that the same person would look at it at two different journals, so this is perhaps a bit unfair. On the other hand, I have to sort of admire the writer’s faith in the piece, the determination to get it published as is, the belief this writer has in the piece.

That’s not me. I’m the writer who starts revisions after three-ish rejections, which is probably a bit silly, because every successful writer has experienced rejection. But me, I’m still not confident enough in my writing (mainly, my plotting) to keep pushing the same stories. Maybe it’s the time, the distance from the story that helps me, because when I look at it months later, I do see problems.

Maybe this is the mark of me as a novice reviser (I’m getting better!), but my semi-professional opinion as an editor was that this writer’s submission needed to be revised. I apparently need to spend less time worrying about revisions, and this writer needs to spend a bit more. And I know there’s no magic number, but you tell me: How do you know when it’s time to pull a piece from submissions and take it back to the revision stage?

Today’s the big day. Not the day I buy my first house (that was in April), not the day I celebrate being married five years (that was in May), not the day I see the first ultrasound of my child (that was two weeks ago). No, today is the day I see my other baby: the first book I signed as editor at Gray Dog Press is being released today.

There were others that saw the light of day first, several books that have my name on their contracts, but they were already accepted before I started at Gray Dog; my signature was merely a formalizing of a previous decision. My work on those was largely proofreading and light copyedits, some cover design. And there’s the Zafiro book, And Every Man Has to Die, that I signed after BP, but he’s penned several books and it, too, was pretty well accepted before I started here. Burning Paradise is different. I picked it out of the slushpile, vouched for it when the time came, and now I’ve seen it through from a twenty-year-old manuscript to a brand-new novel. In many ways it encapsulates my experience as Senior Editor at GDP. Along the way there were many moments of confusion, frustration, exhaustion, celebration, and primal piss-in-your-pants fear.

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Recently a couple of friends posted this article  on Slate about using only one space after a sentence. I read it, because I’m a two-spacer, and I was pretty shocked at the level of anger associated with it. OK, OK, I’ll try to stop. I didn’t realize it was such big shit. I mean, I’ve got my own pet peeves when it comes to writing. But I’ve been a two-spacer for years. And I’d never heard that two spaces was wrong. So I admit I felt a bit hurt by everyone’s condemnation of two-spacers. I’m pretty new to the writing community, and admittedly I lack some of this kind of knowledge. 

I can’t remember if that’s how I learned to type (on a typewriter!), but I do know that in my work, two spaces are required. I’m a medical transcriptionist, and my supervisors insist on two spaces. Which is why the default on my word program is set to greenline when there’s only one space.  So even if I wasn’t in the habit of doing it already, I’ve gotten into the habit of tap tapping after a sentence, because it’s required of me. Granted, the people I work with also insist on hyphens in words like long-standing or up-to-date, which really gives me the red ass (no hyphen). I’m also forced to type numbers instead of write them out, which makes sense in the medical world, but which also forces me to continually change 4s to fours in draft after draft. 

So I’m not sure how I missed this seemingly extremely important tidbit of grammatical gold, but alright already, I’ll stop. Right after I delete all the extra spaces in this post. There. Done.

How do you measure a good day of writing? I imagine it varies by project, but generally speaking, what leaves you feeling like you accomplished something for the day? Does it come down to more quality, quantity, or a a balance of the two? What about the same questions for a day of rewriting?

For me, I think I measure both types of days with a balance of the two (and I imagine it’s the same for most writers, but I felt like I should ask anyway), with the balance shifting more toward quantity when I’m working on a rough draft and more toward quality during the rewriting and editing stages. It’s still interesting to me, though, because many of the writers that I follow on Twitter keep count of their net words for the day, whether they’re writing or rewriting, and that is the main way they seem to measure success.

I think that to keep some form of MFA-found writerly sanity (and Shivani can make of that what he will), I’m going to have to work some rewriting days into this next month of NaNoWriMo craziness. After all, it is the fall, and that means I’m overdue for sending out work for potential publication. Hitting 50K will be fun (if I make it), but not at the expense of the other skills I’ve developed. We’ll see if I’m singing a different tune next Monday.

As a self-professed grammar geek, I was a little upset to realize that I had somehow missed the news that the 16th edition of The Best Style Book Ever (aka the Chicago Manual of Style) was given a publishing date of August 1 (although Amazon claims I can have it tomorrow if I select one-day shipping—and yes, that hyphen is necessary). Had I known about this glorious event sooner, I might have thrown a party, at which the main form of entertainment would have been sharing our most despised grammar, style, and usage pet peeves (a recent one of mine is unnecessary quotation marks). I even might have served these cupcakes.

But all that aside, I can’t wait to see what additions and changes are included in this new edition. More guidelines for electronic mediums and sources is a given, and Amazon tells me there will even be something called a hyphenation table, which makes me more excited than I care to admit.

The bad news, though, is that without a job I can’t afford this marvelous piece of editorial genius (okay, that might be overdoing it slightly—maybe). Until such time that I can spend over $40 on a reference manual, I know what to ask for for my birthday.

Also, isn’t that cover just gorgeous?