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The Cold Writer's Block of Winter

1/17/2014

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My production has been down lately, and this is why.

Well, I don't know what the weather is like where you live, but in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, renown for having the most precipitation in the Atlantic provinces, snow is how it goes. This year with an exclamation point.

But I'm still not going to use an exclamation point for emphasis there. You sound crazy when you use exclamation points!

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The first snowfalls were a source of amusement. There's two steps down here.
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I took to the snow stubbornly, the flab of fall sure to slough off.

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This is one of the first storms. It snowed for two days, and then I methodically went after the white stuff with aplomb. Two hours later my neighbor across the road rescued me with his snowblower. I didn't mind.


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Most of the time, I never think about living on an island, Newfoundland being the 16th largest island in the world.
Then we have poor weather, followed by unseasonal cold, and a failure at the provincial power hub resulting in rolling blackouts, and when I finally get up to the grocery store, this is what's left of the meat section without the ferries being able to cross.



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Meanwhile ... new tenants were coming to live in the apartment downstairs, and it was up to me to shovel their driveway before they arrived
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At the end of the first day, and 10cm of snow still falling ...

They make kind of a creepy flipbook.

But it had to be done ...

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It was made more difficult by the guy my neighbor hires to do his driveway snow-blowing his snow up into this driveway, EVEN AS I WAS SHOVELING IT. I flagged him down and told him to stop. He said, "Nobody parks there."

And then made more difficult when I got to where the industrial snowblower had widened the streets and had piled the snow at the end. That's why it looks like a huge piece of cake there. It was solid ice, and peeled away like flakes of glass.

Feeling bad for his hired man's complicity in my labor, my elderly neighbor offered me the use of his snowblower, but it only would have chopped itself to pieces on the ice.

Until finally ...

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Grocery bags for scale.

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A buddy came over and helped me move the last ton or so.

And that's winter, my writer's block.

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Manuscript Phlebotomization

9/13/2013

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A Taste of My Own Medicine

I edit books for other authors, and often I feel bad about how much blood I draw from their beloved masterworks. Truly the death of a thousand cuts. It can be hard taking the role of the professional honest person at the end of the line: "The Honester" (Yeah, I am absolutely calling myself that in the future). So, mostly out of curiosity, when editing my own science fiction piece, THIS LAND, I turned the Track Changes around on myself, and set to work.

After the first pass through the book, I knew I had already surpassed any bloodletting I'd ever done to a client. This was more than surgery. This was a slaughter. If it were a physical book, it would have closed with a squish.

I got a kick out of looking back after an editing session to see exactly how much I had colored. As an exercise in motivation, I recommend it, as you can visually track your progress.

Below is the version that went out to beta readers. It has 12,160 revisions (5972 insertions, 5633 deletions, 68 moves, and 487 changes to formatting). Though it's not reflected here, after I got it back from beta readers, I cut 7000 words, added 3000, then I sent it off to a proofreader and went over it two more times, implementing recommendations, before publishing it.

It feels great to have the completed book in my hands (so to speak), but also sorta satisfying to be able to crack it open and see how it all happened as well.

EDIT: The last screen capture is from an e-reader app which didn't fill me with confidence.
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Track Changes

2/26/2013

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As I do editing for other people, and use Track Changes, I was curious as to what my own piece would look like after a polite revisitation. Result: I could probably turn off the light and bask in its glow.
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My choice of red lighting or green.
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Not Your Average Writing Advice

2/18/2013

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It's usually a good idea to pander to your strengths in whatever you do. And I feel that, as a writer AND an editor, I have some pretty cogent things to say about how to get things done with writing. I see the same kinds of mistakes all the time.
Like ya, know. Whatever.

So I made this:
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Of course, if I'm trying to help out with site traffic, who's this for: other writers, the very people to whom I already have a surfeit of access. Go on my twitter account and they're always there, yelling at me to take their free books and then never read them so they can feel good about meaningless numbers on their Amazon pages.

Still. I like it. And because I'm like a four year old who always wants to show you what he's made, even if it's a mud pie that he wants you to eat, here it is: I made this.

Take my mud pie, internet. Take my filthy mud pie and you like it.
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Guilty Steaks

8/8/2012

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Tonight I was digging through the *junk drawer* in my room, actually a rubbermaid container still loaded down with the outlier pieces of my last move and whatever bric a brac resisted my attempts to place it fittingly around the room at any given time. In the bottom, amidst the accumulated dust, the precious lost paper clips which could have proved useful so many times, and many escaped batteries, potentially dead, I found the guitar pick pictured below. Across the top, in perfect typewriter talk, it says 'Guilty steak ...' and below that: 'pearls in the sand.'
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I plucked it out of the dust, blew it off,  and pocketed it as personal archaeology. It stems from a period a couple years back when I was editing my novel, Raw Flesh in the Rising, about a sailor wrongfully exiled to the infamous leper colony on the Hawaiian Kalaupapa peninsula.  I don't recall why I was printing those particular pages - perhaps so I could expunge the sentence at hand in a fiery ritual - I only recall that the page came out of my old Canon with a pick-shaped hole in the text. When I dug around, there it was, the proverbial monkeywrench in the works. I like to think that it was trying to tell me something, seeing that the paragraph stamped on the pick is perhaps the worst I wrote in the entire book.


Judge for yourself:

Then, terribly, his hands were anvils again. The men, leering still, grinning still, even up to the moment Eric, worked into a spitting frustrated rage, hit them, their skulls were like eggshells. They burst apart like greasy tomatoes. Guilty steaks littered the ground, and the half-shattered grins of the men glinted like strings of pearls in the sand. In his sleep, legs wheeling, Eric groaned.

Makes me flinch to read it. Portraying dreams in entertainment should be outlawed.

In my defense, the piece underwent a good flaying for defying good sense, order, and taste, and in the final tally was convinced to read like this:

The two together then receded like rocks sunk into the sea, white shards shrinking, until both became as dead and distant to him as the moon; and though he found again that he could speak, too late, he had nothing to say. Half-shattered grins glinted like strings of pearls in the sand and, in his sleep, legs wheeling, Eric’s groans wandered unheeded amongst the broken pillars of the trampled grass.

At first I thought it was unlucky that the pick had been tattooed with one of the worst lines of my piece. I thought perhaps a sequel to the previous fiery ritual was in order. In the end, however, I erred on the side of good ol' fashioned hands-in-pockets deterrence. I figured I'd let it serve as a reminder that not everything shoots out of my fingertips as gems. Usually, it takes time, perseverence, and polishing.

Of course, the next time I get in a literary huff, into the fire it goes.


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Gilbert Godfrey reads 50 Shades ...

7/21/2012

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I haven't read 50 shades. And I've pretty much just assured myself that I never will.

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    L.S. Burton
    PictureFarewell, third person bio.




    Lee Burton doesn't have cats or kids, but he does have a lot of books, a couple of mugs he thinks are really fantastic, and a good pair of shoes which haven't fallen apart yet despite his best efforts to murder them with kilometers.

    Burton has written almost six books. Almost six as some are still scantily clad in their respective drawers. Each of them had their own goals and were written differently, and he is very fond of them all -- except perhaps for his first attempt at a novel, which remains a travesty.  That one he keeps locked in a dark basement and feeds it fish heads.

    In 2011, Burton won the Percy Janes Award for Best Unpublished First Novel in the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Competition for his novel Raw Flesh in the Rising.

    And just recently, in the fall of 2013, Burton published his first science-fiction novel, THIS LAND, about which he boasts constantly.

    Available at Amazon

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