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Home of Michael Perry – Author, Humorist, Singer/Songwriter, Amateur Pig Farmer

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Posts Tagged ‘how to be a writer’

Carp and Pabst and Poetry and Population 485

This post about my bowfishing habit reminded me of a top ten favorite Nobbern moment, from Population 485:

I was cleaning carp out behind the house one afternoon when the rawboned neighbor guy walked over. He had been fiddling on a junk car. “Nice ones,” he said, looking down at the fish. And they were, a bodacious passel of Ictiobus bubalus, as my carp-shooting buddy Mills and I like to call them when we’re all dressed up in camo on our secret log, sweating in the sun and smelling of fish slime and Off!. A little Latin to offset the caveman behavior and stink. Mills got me into bow fishing, and now it’s a problem. I sneak off to shoot carp the way some guys sneak off to shoot pool. Mills smokes them up with apple and hickory in his old concrete smoker, but first I have to clean them. The neighbor stood there silent while I sawed off heads and peeled out guts. Every now and then he took a drag on his Marlboro and a pull on his Pabst. Finally, he spoke.

“So. Yer a writer.”

“Well, yeah, I mean…”

“You do poetry?”

“Well, I’m not much of a…”

“I do some poetry.”

“I, uh…”

“Good shit.”

He walked back to his car. We never spoke again.

 

Working Ahead

The next book is due out August 21. Now I’m in that odd space in which I’m working on the next-next and next-next-next books (one a Young Adult novel, the other, well, let’s wait) so that when I head out on book tour for the next book my head will actually be full of the next-next and next-next-next and it’ll be like having someone you saw every day for two years suddenly reappear after a six-month absence. By that time, much of the book will be a surprise to me again.

Here’s something from the Young Adult book I’m working on:

If you see me you will know me because I wear a leather vest sewn from the hides of one dead badger and two dead deer, all skinned by myself and also I stripped the lettering from that old car and stitched it to the vest across my shoulder blades using copper wire so that in polished steel you can read my name and know it: [TO BE REVEALED LATER]

There are also two other possible book thingies in the hopper. Grateful to be busy.

911 Call

What happens when you’re working on a book manuscript and your emergency pager goes off and you don’t have anything handy for writing down the address so you just type it out as it comes over the airwaves (actual cut and paste as I found it when I got back from the call, with address altered for privacy):

He’s always out front talking up a storm, but in the back you hear all the ringing clang and clamor and in there you’ll find his wife Freda at the bellows, who is 4137 Freeder dr cross of Old town hall, hemlock

 

Things They Don’t Teach You In Author School

If you order a bunch of your own books and your special storage area down there in the pole barn is all snowed in, yer gonna have to break out the front-end loader. (I believe they call this inventory management.) (Note to the safety conscious, ROPS only down because in the engaged position they rip the garage door off.) (Also a thank you to these guys for pallet delivery and storage.)

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No, Really, I Meant It About the Copyeditors

Pursuant to my recent post on copyeditors, below are some of the comments left by the copyeditor of my most recent manuscript (book due out in August). Even out of context they should give you an idea of how thorough a good copyeditor is, and why I mean it when I say a good copyeditor makes me look smarter than I are, as it were.

might be better to delete this, since the sentence indicates “lowland” and this seems confusing, since it’s visually bringing the reader to a creek bottom only to find treetops, so to speak. I suspect you may be referring to the bottomland (low-lying land along a watercourse, says Webster’s) around Cotter Creek but again, the wording seems confusing here when you try to envision it.

from Le Tourneau company of Peoria; see old ads at, e.g., http://www.classicmachinery.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=198

: there is a hyphenated adjective but here the function is passive verb with adverb, hence no hyphen

I’d suggest something like “the World Court in The Hague,” since The Hague itself is a city of a half-million people. The World Court is technically the International Court of Justice, and the city also of course holds the International Criminal Court, but both of those names are long-winded, of course, so the shorthand World Court seems better. Could even just say that and drop “The Hague” altogether

And this represents only a page or two…

Anthony Shadid

Dead at 43, it appears not by bombs or bullets as might have been expected, but rather health issues in extremis.

I have nothing to add to what I wrote in this post from a happier day:

But this I firmly believe: if hell ever shows up at my doorstep, I hope there will be journalists on the order of Anthony Shadid who will – at risk beyond any amount of compensation and far removed from the swivel chairs and golden microphones of the studios – do their best to set the story free.

On Editors and Copyeditors

Just recently my editor taught me when to use “elder daughter” instead of “eldest.” Today my copyeditor taught me that these {} are called French braces. Sometimes I get questions about the “adversarial” relationship between writers and editors, and I say, sure, sometimes you have to stick up for your stuff, but most of the time (if you’re working with good folks, as I am), editors and copyeditors are in the business fo making me look smartest than I am.

Yes, those two typos were for fun.

Struggling Writer

For the students of PCIS, here are the images we worked with today when we spoke about writing and revision (if you click on the pictures, you will see a few comments).