The tiny little part of my tiny little blonde head that controls essential tasks—those things that have to be done, but which I absolutely dread and abhor doing, like formatting submissions, writing cover letters, and outlining projects—decided that the perfect time to write the series outline for the Mason Trilogy* would be while I was all hopped-up on cold medication. Because my brain is special.

Series outlines are the bane of my existence. Basically, they're your "short pitch," your chance to try to sell your story in a format that's longer than a cover letter, but shorter than the whole manuscript. Series outlines are sort of like high school book reports: they're packed with spoilers, and they strip out most of the detail of a story. "A young girl travels to a foreign land, kills the first person she meets, and teams up with three strangers" levels of stripping out the detail.

Feed is over five hundred pages long. Deadline is on track to be just as long. I have no real idea about Blackout, but I'd be astonished if the last book in the series was somehow shorter than the first two. I managed to condense all three volumes to nine pages. My agent loves me right now.

Fear me. And now? I'm going back to bed.

(*This may or may not be the official name of the series, but since all three books are about Shaun and Georgia Mason and their exciting journalistic adventures, it's as good a name as any. My original name for the project was "a good excuse to study virology and talk about zombies a lot," so this is really a pretty big improvement, marketability-wise. I'm great at naming books. I'm terrible at naming series.)

It's time for number seventeen in my ongoing series of essays on the art and craft of writing. There will eventually be fifty essays in this series, all of them based on my fifty thoughts on writing; once number fifty has been written, I'll need to find something to do with my time. Maybe I'll, I don't know, write a book or something. Not all the essays will be of use to everyone, but I'll at least attempt to make them entertaining.

Here's our thought for the day:

Thoughts on Writing #17: Have Faith In Your Editor.

This is actually a thought that applies to everyone who writes, whether you're doing essays for a class or trying to craft the Great American/European/Australian/Martian/Whatever Novel. It's publishing-oriented in the sense that I do believe that work intended for publication requires more extensive editing, and we'll be talking about that. It's also writing-for-fun-oriented, in the sense that we want our readers not to bludgeon us to death with trout. Here's today's expanded topic of discussion:

A good editor looks good when you look good. They're trying to help you. Listen to them. Not everyone is a good editor. After a few experiences with the bad ones, you'll learn how to recognize the difference.

It's impossible to provide the experience necessary to tell a good editor from a bad one, at least in part because that definition will vary from person to person. Sometimes the variation will be slight; other times, the variation will be large enough to become incomprehensible. So we're going to try to cover the generalities today, and more importantly, we're going to be discussing the reasons that we need to be edited at all.

Ready? Excellent. Let's get started.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on editors, being edited, and why these things are necessary.Collapse )

Well, I promised that if y'all didn't break anything, I would provide my recipe for cranberry sauce. I like keeping promises that are tied to things not being destroyed. It reinforces behaviors I wish to encourage, IE, things not being broken.

I originally swiped this recipe from Michael, who originally swiped it from his mother. Why? Because after lots and lots of Thanksgiving dinners including cranberry sauce, his was the first time I actually ate and enjoyed it. Seriously, this stuff is mind-blowingly good. Here are two versions of the Best Cranberry Sauce Ever, one original, and one modified to be Weight Watchers-friendly.

( The original is this way!Collapse )

***

( Weight Watchers version is this way!Collapse )