Oh, dear.
* gay (56x)
* lesbian (21x)
* pain (3x)
* hell (2x)
* sex (1x)
I’m assuming we didn’t use them all in the same sentence!?
Our Jane is away in Scotland – where it is pouring buckets on her summer – and she is having her joy of word counts. I, too, hate word counts. Even in school I was horrible at them — we had a professor who required us randomly to write a 40-page paper or a 3000 word essay on an unnamed topic — “Just write,” he would tell us. I loathed him. I can either be wordy, or I can be brief, but having strictures put on word count just puts me in knots.
I had to write a synopsis of my own novel this past week – and I had to count words. That’s enough to remind you of all of the awful college English professors in the world – and I had good ones, for the most part. I’ve discovered that there are some things I’m awful with — the Evil Synopsis, the first line, and the novel conclusion. I wrestled for three days with the three sentences that ended my last piece. And eventually you hope something like that pays off — like it did for these authors. Congratulations to them for having superb first lines!
Via Eve @ the Disco M’s, we find a very funny link to Editorial Anonymous that teaches us what those between-the-lines editorial letters really mean. We read, laugh, and groan — and hope for an editor — together!
In all the hubbub of last week, I forgot to mention a small review of a picture book that made me a little misty. The Chronicle reviewed Fred Stays With Me!, which received a starred review from the School Library Journal. The first lines tell the whole story: “Sometimes I live with my mom. Sometimes I live with my dad. My dog, Fred, stays with me.”
Hope you’re keeping close what you love this week.
Well, my personal blog is apparently PG, which is totally wrong because I definitively know I have used the s-word any number of times and have possibly also dropped a few f-bombs. In fact, I remember a rant really early on in which I gleefully and gratuitously used many curse words in order to celebrate having a personal space in which to say what I wanted. So I’m not going to take too much stock in their ratings…
Ooh, that’s interesting about the NC-17 rating. Scoring specific words can be pretty arbitrary, can’t it? Pain could refer to a toothache. Sex might mean gender. You could be having a hell of a good day and be discussing lesbian nuns and gay priests.
It looked like fun though so I had to try. I was sure my review of a sex ed guide would net me an NC-17 but nope, apparently I’m “R.” Guess I’ll have to work some more “hells” in there!
Hey, I did good, ma! Look! I only used the word “shoot” once in all of my blog’s existence, and din’t use anythin else! I’m a “g-rated” blog! Woo-eee!
Wait.
In books, they tell you to “let your characters swear.”
Guess I’m not doin it right, huh?
Shoot!