I’ve got the tattoo bug again. I’m thinking something you’d expect on a coat of arms—especially an image that incorporated an archer. I have god on my belly, and a honu on my forearm, and it’s time for something emblematic and mythic on a grander scale. Any artists out there want to consult?
I found this on my searches, but it’s a little rough:
This has been a weird period of writing. This weekend, I wrote myself to a place with unlimited possibility. And whenever I find myself in such a place—a pivotal juncture—I know that it’s best to give myself time, not to try to write and delete and write and delete, but to step away and breathe.
Monday morning, I sat down and wrote a violent, frightening exchange. It came unbidden, and easily, and even as I wrote it, I understood how the scenes around it were clarified by the incident, how they were written with the incident in mind. How is this possible? How can I write to a place that I cannot imagine—how do I lead myself there?
It’s more than faith, certainly. There’s a guide rope of some kind, and I’m never sure if I’m the guide, or the guided, but I know when I’m on the path.
I made that comment yesterday about Gaiman liking adverbs a bit too much, and I thought I’d be clearer today. It’s his use of utterly. Actually, to give more clarity still, on the edit of Red Audrey, my editor told me that I’d used the word slightly too much. I did a search of my manuscript and I’d used it five times. That didn’t seem so bad, but then I read each entry and I realized that people were slightly doing things that they were, in fact, doing. Gaiman had a line in Neverwhere in which a character stumbled slightly. Really? Stumbled slightly. What would that look like, and how is stumbling slightly different from stumbling? Or someone being utterly lost? How is being utterly lost more lost than lost?
I had an instructor in college who’d freak out if someone wrote complete stop. Is there another kind of stop? she’d ask. I do think adverbs are important—if someone smiles slightly, that is not the same thing as smiling. But adverbs are about a subtle difference in the modification of the verb, and Gaiman doesn’t use them that way. Is that a crime? No. To a certain extent, it’s just a style-thing, or possibly, an unruly pet peeve that I’ve had beaten into me.
Nance Van Winckel was my thesis advisor, and she hated the word and. She’d take it out of poems and prose even at the risk of complicating meaning. One day, I went straight from our session to a poetry class with Christopher Howell. At one point in the class, he told us, “I think and is the most beautiful word in the English language. I use it whenever I can.” Style-thing and personal preference.
