The Printing Dilemma

So, a couple things that need mentioning.

1. September 27th was the 2 year anniversary of this blog. That’s crazy to think about! Two years of writing about writing. And really, I’m just now hitting my stride. Thanks to all of you who have been here from the beginning, I appreciate it more than you know. And thanks to those of you who are just discovering my little slice of WordPress. I hope you enjoy the journey with me.

2. September 28th, a beautiful thing happened. I reached 100 followers. 100. I now have 103, or something like that, and it blows my mind to think about. 100 strangers have stumbled upon my blog, and found the words interesting enough to want notification of anything new. I don’t know how long it SHOULD have taken me to reach 100 followers, probably not 2 years, and I don’t care! Thank you to each and every one of you who clicked that little plus sign, I truly appreciate it.

Today has been productive. Woke up at 9am, talked to my mom while I researched plane ticket prices to go home in March, and paid the car and credit card payments.

Then I packed up and drove down to the Dragon’s Lair, aka the Office, and printed off 17 pages of ‘The Portrait of Sterling Madison’. Some things to note: When copy and pasting from Scrivener, MS Word likes to default to size 14 font. If you don’t catch this, and print anyway, it makes uncomfortable reading. Also, when your Office requests that you not print more than 5 pages per session, and you ignore them, make sure there’s enough paper in the printer.

Ended up 4 pages short, and couldn’t figure out how to reload the printer, so I had to cancel the job and book it out of there.

But, 17 pages is quite a bit of story to edit. Even if the font is way too big.

So, good initial work has been done. What was 4,356 words is now 4,058 words, and it flows a lot better so far. There’s still a lot of inconsistencies to be addressed, some scenes that either need added or cut, and some details that aren’t quite right, but it’s coming along. It feels good to cut up a story by hand. Editing on the computer just doesn’t cut it.

Something about holding the story helps me separate from it. I can read it over and over again on the screen, but I can’t seem to find any distance, or objectivity. As soon as it’s printed, I can look at it anew. It could be anyone’s story. And that’s how I treat it. I look at it, and edit in the margins like I would a colleague’s story in workshop.

Although, I must say that my handwriting is starting to look eerily like Patrick Michael Finn’s did on my story a couple years ago. That’s a trip.

So, initial edits, beyond what gets done from original handwriting to retype in the computer, have gone well. I’m allowing my mind to refer to this as the third draft now, and that’s exciting!

My mom is going to check her garage and see if my old printer is in there. If it is, she’s going to send it to me and then the printing dilemma will be no more!

Anyway, I’m going to go stick my nose in ‘Everything’s Eventual’ and get some lunch.

Thanks again, Blogland. I’ll see you tomorrow!

BZ