It’s funny– I know that some of us write to preserve memories of our families, friends, or pets (Chaos… I know you’re out there… and Mayhem, Sekhmet, Pepper, LuLu and Havoc too…) It’s true–these blogs really DO serve as time capsules–I know every time I put a conversation from my family on here, that it’s one more story more likely that I’ll remember when the children have moved out and I’m left hoping I did right by them. (No. Can’t possibly have done right by children as awesome as mine. It’s a curse of having awesome kids…)
So, I’ll remember that tonight I told Chicken’s Spanish teacher that her nickname was Chicken and that he offered to call her “guyena” (sic) which means ‘lady chicken’ in spanish when the other students couln’t hear. I’ll also remember that it was payback for remembering to tell me she wanted me to attend open house TWENTY MINUTES before the damned thing started, and that I feel as though we’re even now, but she might not.
It’s a good story– it’s worth remembering.
So, keeping this in mind, I was reluctant to open Vulnerable to give it a much needed edit in order to submit it to yet another e-pub. (Wild Horse Press– apparently I have a connection.)
I was afraid of what I’d see. After all, after blithely publishing the thing, I had been both praised for my originality and pounded into the pavement, bloody, broken, and barfing, for the things I did wrong–namely sentence punctuation, although a couple of people confused this with ‘simplistic writing’. I was afraid I’d open this up and find the same arrogance with which I perpetrated my first blogging errors (some of you remember those…) or that I wrote like a third grader, or, (even worse) that I was undeniably brilliant that first time out and the cosmetic errors hid the fact that I will NEVER WRITE ANYTHING THAT GOOD AGAIN!!!
Oddly enough, my fiction is not serving as a time capsule in quite the same way as my personal writing is.
It’s a good story. It is. It’s something I’d like to read, and I’m damned proud to have written it. The punctuation errors are NOT as bad as everyone says they are, and they are NOT the be all and end all of this good story. The continuity errors, while embarrassing, are NOT as bad as some I’ve seen in edited texts with big paychecks behind them. Of course I was not as in love with my own prose back then as I am now, so it is a good deal shorter–and leaner–than I write at the moment, and my experience with arcing a plot was not as polished.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not good. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of all those people who loved it in the first place. It is, in fact, something to be proud of, crappy editing or not.
Cool. Time Capsules–besides embarrassing the children (which is a good reason all in it’s own) I’m finally getting to see the point in keeping them.
