Erik Emery Hanberg

After a major edit of my novel, I dropped it down by about 21,000 words. That ends up to be just about 21% of the words.

And the story didn't change a bit.

Like. At all.

That's a good sign I had a problem.

I'm going to go through it again soon. This time for pacing, to make sure I didn't take out anything important or rush anything too badly. It'll probably grow again. But I feel good about the edits I made.

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While editing a novel I finished back in 2002, I found this humdinger.

Vertical aperture? I want to wring the neck of that 23-year-old English major.

It's been years since I've pulled this novel out. I've always had a real soft spot for it and decided it was time to give it a fresh look. What I've discovered is that I've significantly overwritten the damn thing. Before I started work Friday night, this novel was 104,731 words long. I'm about halfway through my first pass and I've already cut 11,000 words. (That's about 30 pages so far.) I wouldn't feel so bad if I haven't edited it so many times before. And every time I passed over vertical aperture? How embarrassing.

The 2009 Erik is a follower of Will Strunk's advice, "Omit needless words," often to a fault.

The 2002 Erik thought, "Omit needless words, unless they happen to be pretty, or you just learned it recently and want to show it off, or otherwise sounds literary and deep and meaningful somehow."

On the positive side, I still do love the story that's buried beneath all those words.

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I just finished Play to the End, by Robert Goddard. I've never heard of the author, but he can tell a good murder mystery, that's for sure. I've been reading a lot of mysteries in the last few years, which has a lot to do with my interest in writing in the genre. This book was the first in a while that I had to put down so that I could work on my own. I don't know what it was, but but it got me going!

Set in Brighton, the book takes place over a week. The "detective," as it were, is an English movie star with not much going for his career anymore. He's leading a play that just hasn't found its legs and seems to be the final nail. When he tries to help his soon-to-be ex-wife get rid of a creepy stalker he gets drawn into the mystery.

I was quite hooked. A fun reading mixing my love of England, theater, and mysteries. Many thanks to Pat for handing me the book while I was on a treadmill at the Y. A great recommendation! Just sorry it took me a few months to get to it ...

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Mary just got back from a week-long visit to St. Louis. While she was away, I let my inner geek run loose.

There was the Saturday tech conference, of course. I finished the first season of Chuck, a show about a computer geek who accidentally ends up with government secrets downloaded into his brain. And my dad and I watched all three Lord of the Rings movies in 3 days. Inspired by that, I also sketched out an idea for a fantasy trilogy of my own if I ever decided to write one.

Chuck is a fun show--a guilty pleasure of mine that I was only introduced to a little while ago. It wouldn't work nearly so well if Zachary Levi, who plays Chuck, were not so incredibly likable.

Watching Lord of the Rings (LOTR) the way we did was really fun too. We didn't really pay attention to where the movies ended, and when we called it for the night, we were usually somewhere in the middle of one of the movies. We watched the theatrical release of Fellowship and then the extended editions of the next two movies (I'm not a fan of the extended version of Fellowship). According to IMDB, that means that we watched 652 minutes of LOTR, which is nearly 11 hours.

And for my own idea for a trilogy of fantasy novels ... well, I'll keep that in the dark for now. First, I'm likely never to do it. Second, all fantasy premises inherently sound bad. It's like trying to get a sense of baseball by studying the rules (ie, two men throw a ball back and forth and a guy in the middle tries to hit it).

So I'd say that's a sufficiently geeked-out week, no?

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