Friday, August 16, 2002

I love Copy and Paste. Section of story goes from here to there. This gets deleted, moved over there, this gets rewritten, that gets completely cut... tonight was an editing night. I did an amazing amount of editing on a couple of stories and I'm still not happy with one of them, so I see a few more hours of editing in front of me on that one in order to get to flow smoothly. Someone famous said that there were no good writers, only good editors.

I'll admit that I don't like editing. It's a necessary evil of writing though, second only to a spell-check. The worst is when you have to hack away at a paragraph or sentence that you absolutely loved but realize it doesn't work. Or icky transitions that don't flow and no amount of padding will ever get them to work. Editing can be disheartening work, it really can be.

I'm impressed with "first draft" writers - people who just throw words up onto the screen and in their minds, it's absolutely perfect "as is." There's a certain amount of confidence in that attitude that I simply lack. It could explain why my hard drive looks the way it does.

There ought to be an "Adopt a Fic" program, where we can adopt each other's WiPs and nag them into being finished. So does anyone want a C/T fic? A C/7 lives happily ever after story? How about a B'Elanna explains it all fic? If you don't like those option, how about a story when Kira goes on vacation? Kira in the Resistance story? A Maquis DS9 story from God knows when?

I just found yet another virtual season out there. This one is a Star Wars-Star Trek crossover. Which reminds me of the endless "Is the Millenium Falcon better than the Enterprise?" discussions that used to prevail on ASC. I just spent an obscene amount of time checking this site's message board forum out and I've been very well entertained by the discussions. They take their season very seriously over there - even grading the authors who 'auditioned' for their season (apparently the winning entry received an 87%).

I'm afraid my fragile ego wouldn't be able to take that kind of beating. Especially now that I've confessed to the fact I don't like editing and have a WiP graveyard on my hard drive.

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