Since I plan to finish Wolf's Rain this weekend, I've decided my next project will be the second draft of my first novel. To that end I'm reading a book called Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. It's decent so far, but I've got two complaints:
1. They believe in the "least common denominator." They advise, basically, that you keep your narrative and description as short as possible and appeal to readers on the same wavelength that movies do. Now look, I realize that fiction and the audience of fiction today is not the same as the it was years ago, and I don't expect it to be. I understand that a writer has to write something that will appeal to other people or else earn no money. But there's really something lost if we can't aspire for the full and rich prose of men like Lovecraft or Dunsany (or, to go out of genre, Hugo or Tolstoy. To name a very, very few.). More than that, prose isn't meant to appeal to audiences in the same way that movies are and to try to make it do that is just... well, sad.
2. The authors of this book claim that "self-editing is likely the only kind of editing your manuscript will ever get." These folks are professionals and I assume they speak from experience. But spent a summer interning in the editorial dept. of Tor Books and I saw some editors there who really care about the state of prose and really want it to be the best that it can be. I have seen books dedicated to dearly departed friends thanking them for their valued insight and help. I've heard editors sit around the table and lament that some book or another wasn't better edited, with the clear tone that some other editor, somewhere, wasn't doing the job they were supposed to do. So on behalf of my friends, I'm pretty damn insulted by these folks.
Still, despite all this, some of their advice does seem valuable and the book's not very long, so I'll see it through.
Moving on, many of my grad school apps ask for an academic writing sample. I've decided to use an essay I wrote in school detailing Foucault's misinterpretation of the point of the Arabian Nights and what I felt the point of those stories are. It's a good essay, but my writing's improved a bit since I wrote it and I have a few new insights into what I said then. So, I need to edit the essay a bit. Which means I'm going to have to spend some time in Barnes & Noble this weekend doing research. To remind you all of what a geek I am: I'm really looking forward to doing this. It'll be heaps of fun.