Orbis Writings

This week I went to Le Marché du Livre and bought myself a couple of french adolescent novels from Quebec authors in order to improve my french.  Because, frankly, my french sucks.

I can speak it very well, but my vocabulary is kinda limited.  And reading really takes a long time for me to process.  I’ve resorted to translating what I’m reading into english just so I can understand what it is saying.

So I figured, reading adolscent novels won’t be so indimidating because the vocabulary should be a lot simpler and having been written by Quenec authors means that there won’t be too many words I won’t understand. Keep reading →

I was up until 2:00a.m. last night, or this morning if you like, doing the last edits for the short story.  This time I worked on each paragraph individually, rephrasing and adding where it lacked.  Then re-reading from a couple of paragraphs before.

During lunch I did another read and replaced one of two words here and there.  I’m happy with the final result.  I’m surprised that I was able to find a happy solution to the writing and not edit until there was nothing left.

The final word count is 2118.  I just hope that the story is just as scary as the draft.  Overall, I think I spent about 8 total hours editing the story.  Which isn’t too bad.

Now I need to complete and edit another story for the end of the month.

Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines!!!

I hate deadlines.  I still need to type the final edit changes to the short story and submit it tomorrow.  My life is way too busy.

I finally found a use for that damn small jean pocket.  You know the one that’s inside the larger pockets in the front of your jeans.   I have never had a use for that freaking pocket.  It’s often too small or too tight for change.  Now I keep my flash drive there.  I carry that memory stick with me where ever I go.  it’s got my stories, my resume, and some other key information that I may need.  Or if someone needs to share something with me.

I’m on my last edit, I swear.  This is number six.  I figured out what I was doing wrong.  I was never re-reading my edits before applying them to my document.  So I ended up doing more edits than necessary.  So for this edit, I’m re-reading it over and over until I make no more changes.

Things are looking good now.  I think that this is the final edit.  I hope that it is.  I need to ship it out in the next 2 days.

I just caught the last 30 minutes of Donnie Darko on television and I finally understand the end. I have watched this movie so many times and the ending always stumped me.  But I finally got it.

The movie is about him seeing the future from his bed before the jet engine crashes into his room.  At the end he decides not to leave his room knowing the pain he will be causing.  But because the future has occurred within another time line, people have a vague hint that they may know him.

Finally!!  I am so freaking happy.

I just edited my first short story and things are looking good.  I did four edits in all.  It finally reads very smoothly and ready to ship.

This is what I ended up editing at each edit stage.

First Edit — In this edit I removed any obvious extra text that didn’t add anything to the story.  This included narrative that told the reader what to think when I really want to let the reader to their own thinking.  I attempted to just provide hints and let the reader draw their own conclusions. I also cleaned up the tenses, fixed spelling mistakes, checked for consistency, etc.

Second Edit — I removed more extra fluff.  During the first edit there were some parts that hung in the back of my mind that bothered me a little, I removed some of those items.  I removed some sentences that didn’t do anything in order tighten the story.

Third Edit — At this stage I merged and tightened some sentences.  Attempted to say in one sentence what I had written in three in order to smooth out and make the reading more compact, but still sending as much information to the reader as possible without making it so obvious.

I also reordered some sentences.  i noticed that there are sentenses that are very dynamic and so placing those at the beginning of the paragraph set the readers mind in the right state to continue with the narrative.

I also rewrote the first sentence by reorganizing words, compacting the sentence to provide more bang for the buck.

Fourth Stage — At this stage is when the story is very tight and smooth.  This is where I discovered some missing bits to the story.  Also discovered som final paragraphs that really bugged me that I needed to rewrite; about 2 or 3 of them.

I also nitpicked some specific words here and there, my instead of the, the instead of a, stuff like that.

I think the final product is very good, and ready to send out to the Reader’s Digest 77th Annual Contest.

Update: I’m going through my story and adding some more to it.  This would be my 5th edit.

I’m not referring to the novel, The Ruins, that I recently completed.  But what if people could be deceived by plants, maybe alien plants, or monster plants, into mating with them.  Maybe plants that look like a sexy red head.

This this based on a great article I just found.

Orchids that mimic female wasps may not only waste the time of the male wasps they lure into spreading their pollen — they also seduce them into wasting valuable sperm, Australian researchers reported on Wednesday.

This is pretty scary stuff for wasps.  A plant that supposedly cannot see is able to make themselves look like female wasps.  Of course, this is evolution at work.

Maybe some of the girls that I’ve met were actually walking birch trees.