artistic license

“just too flowery” –
haven’t you ever heard of
artistic license?

[7:25 AM]
Almost, verbatim, a comment I made in the car with Ayeka this weekend.

As you all know, I worked on two novels during National Novel Writing Month – The Quiet Ones (an action/thriller about a wife who discovers her milquetoast husband isn’t quite so dull) and Echoes of Angels (an action/fantasy about a girl who’s trying to piece together what a recurring nightmare has to do with her comatose father). Lulu.com, the site that I’ve self-published my first poetry collection through, offered a free copy of your book to NaNoWriMo winners within the US… so long as it was submitted to them by the sixteenth. On mentioning this, Ayeka offered to edit the books, at least as far as to get them readable.

So, imagine if you will, the two of us on a car-ride to visit my folks this weekend, with me driving and her sitting shotgun with a laptop, trying to parse out what I was saying when my fingers were moving faster than my brain was.

Most of the edits were common sense – I tend to use the same descriptive words too much, or I use run-on sentances when I get really excited. But some of her edits were just because she didn’t like my idioms (the “revenge is sweet like candy” and similar similes/metaphors). And so we got into these little back-and-forth modes over them as I didn’t want them cut, and she couldn’t see keeping them in.

*Sigh*

Creative differences, I know.

But, The Quiet Ones does now have a preliminary edit I could include in the freebee book for 2005 (and we’re just including the raw of Echoes of Angels). I’ll probably keep working on cleaning them up in preparation for their sequels…

And yes. Clockwork is still waiting on illustrations. I should hear later this week or early next from Minagi about it. And we might, might, release one of last year’s NaNoWriMo books later this summer….