The Hippity-Hop Theory of Writing

"Because I don’t work with an outline, writing a story is like crossing a stream, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock."

Ann Beattie (from The Paris Review)

Snark Hunting

I was away - a short break in Bruges.  Lovely, thanks.  And now I'm busy with the copy edit of In The Mouth of the Whale, dealing with queries and corrections raised by a fantastically sharp-eyed editor with a good and solidly old-fashioned (in the best sense of the world) grounding in grammar who has not only read every word and noted every punctuation mark of the MS, but has queried the correctness and value of each and every one too. It's the first time I've done this kind of thing entirely on screen.  For every other novel and story of mine, I transferred marks made on a printed MS to an electronic file; this time, I'm hunting for overstrikes and red-lined corrections with the help of the search-and-replace function, and recalling a little of the performance anxiety I felt when I transferred from typewriter to word processor. But I get to read the whole thing again, this time in physical form, when the proofs are delivered, and the thing moves another step closer to actuality.