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.
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!
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!
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…