Surgery Without Anesthesia

For the last two weeks, I'm been excising extraneous words from Promiscuous Mode, cutting it from 109,000 words to 105,000. This was after a prior session which had already resulted in cutting 5,000 words.

I find it amazing that one can go back again and again making corrections. I also fixed a bunch of passive sentences, awkward phrasing (how did that get left in there?) and routed out unnecessary sentences, adverbs (especially) and adjectives.

It's hard work, this paring, but the novel is always stronger, better, more readable. A good editor could probably find a few thousand other words. After all, I cut 16,000 words out of World of Mirrors.

Next week, we're travelling to Sleuthfest, in Deerfield Beach, FL, sponsored by the Florida chapter of Mystery Writer's of America. I'm meeting with an editor or an agent and also reading the first pages of Festival Madness to an audience. Tonight I'm practicing on my writer's group and Thursday on my Toastmaster's chapter. Practice makes perfect, etc.

I'm also going to send out another half-dozen queries for PM. This is my last year of crime fiction writing unless something breaks. Then it's on to literary fiction, commercial fiction, women's fiction, whatever. And then to the young adult that is screaming, "write me! write me!"

It's hard to admit failure after pounding away at a project for almost 15 years. 5 books, endless rewrites, queries, groups, meetings and finally rejection. A lot of sucking up, believe me. On the plus side, I have become a decent writer--no one gainsays the competent writing. Seems to be the stories. They're good stories, but they're perhaps a little "thinky" as one instructor noted.

Heaven knows, anyone who programmed computers for as long as I did is bound to be "thinky." That's what computer people are--have to be. Thinky. What a word. What a concept. And mystery readers are people-people and like their stories "Feely."

I tried to make the transition from Thinky-thinky to thinky-feely, but I am not a touchy-feely person. Sorry, can't help it.

It's not that thinkers are unfeeling, but first and foremost, they're thinkers. Vivaldi was a thinker. So was Bach. Thinkers can write thrillers, but I have no interest, and probably less talent in that genre. No ideas, either. So it goes.

Listen, if you need 4,000 words, mostly redundant sentences, adverbs and a few adjectives, I have them for sale cheap.

Grapeshot