Where Words Live
We are editing Women of the Oak Savannahs. I’ll miss the syntactical twists that must be removed, the favorite phrase that has to go. You come up with a fascinating vein, you milk it too long, you cut the clever idea back until from the twenty sentences you started with you are down to one and the thing means nothing and the whole matter is dropped. That can take most of a day.
The paradox of being a good writer means you are a rule breaker. You know what you want to say then find doing so within the rules of grammar is a confinement resembling an unhappy marriage. You want to go have an affair with words you should not be sleeping with. Writers are riven with weakness but will the stubborn and suspect remain faithful to their craft.
There are moments of inspiration followed by hours of grappling hand to hand, rock to rock, word to word. I have been wordsmithing a snappy teaser to my latest novel. I’ll leave it here and be finished with you.
Hundreds of thousands of trees are felled by Napa Valley’s wine barons in collusion with campaign contribution compromised politicians. The bitter defeat of the still powerless majority proves to be the crack in the wall of ever dwindling support for an industry that has finally gone too far.
