The Evil Inner Editor

The Inner Editor is quasi-evil when writing a first draft. Don't get me wrong. He ensures I avoid fragments and run-ons. He proofs my basic grammar. He spell checks for me, although MS Word does it too, just not as well as the evil inner editor. These are all good things.

But he's always poking at me while I write, making me feel bad.

"That sentence makes me angry. When I get angry, Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset. And when Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset, people die!" "

"Your protagonist's dialog is insolent. When I was insolent, I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds."

"How dare you use an adverb there. I demand the sum of ... one million dollars."

"That scene. Throw me a friggin' bone here."

In short, the dude slows me down. And yes, he's a dude. He's a bald dude with a bald cat and a miniature clone living in an underwater lair.

I very well know it's fine to write crap, at least in the first draft. But will the Evil Inner Editor let me? How do I turn him off? Why can't he just have a look at the first draft once its written, and then give me one cohesive critique? I'll tell you why. The Evil Inner Editor doesn't work that way.

He's an omnipresent, mojo-draining taskmaster that needs to be locked away in a space ship in geosynchronous orbit around the moon until I'm ready for him. Until then, I'll agonize over each paragraph, sentence and word. I need to stop that. I need to stop him. Sometimes, I'll have the mojo flowing. The story finds its way from my head to my fingers, and the word count shoots up. I need to bottle that. That's the genie that keeps the Evil Inner Editor at bay.

I'm going to start paying careful attention when the words rush out. What am I doing to keep the Evil Inner Editor out of my head so that the story can flow freely? Once I get that figured out, I'm going to try it on purpose, and see if it's repeatable. I'll blog about the results in a few weeks.

A submission and the ten year old editor

I've done it. I've submitted The Children of Midian directly to a new small press publisher. Risky, I suppose, but I'm willing to give it a shot. Let's see what happens. I've done a bunch of research on Absolute Write, which is key to a lot of my decision making. They are not on P&E yet, so let's see how the ride goes. I'll let you all know as soon as I know anything.

I've spent nearly the last 24 hours researching small houses. It seems like many of the newer and successful smaller houses got picked up by or merged with others. Front Street Press joined Boyds Mills Press about five years ago after a very successful ten year run.

My about-to-be ten-year-old daughter has been reading Midian, and she's proved to be a terrific editor. I renamed one of my characters a while back, and in one of the later chapters, she spotted the old name listed once or twice. A little background makes this an interesting lesson to learn.

The leader of the children in Midian goes by the name of Mara. There's also another primary character whose name was Sarah. There are a few scenes in which these two have a lot of screen time with Elliot, and I found that the rhyming was a bit off-putting. So, I changed Sarah's name to Rebecca, wanting to keep it biblical.

I relied on the ol' global search/replace of MS Word. It worked great! Except in the two instances where I had spelled Sarah's name as "Sara". She was Rebecca everywhere except in this one section of the book where she was Sara twice.

Thus commences a "nearing bedtime" scene the other night between daddy and daughter.

"Daddy?" asked my girl. "Who is Sara?"

"Sara?" I said. "There's no ... oh, crap."

Lesson? Don't rely on global/search and replace AND when searching for names, look for ALL spelling variations.