My Editing Week 2(12)

Hi all,

I've started editing Stalking Tigers and it seems it is going to take a while. I spent last week fiddling around with the last chapter and actually added to its 6,000 words, not a good thing when one of my prime objectives is to get the word count of the novel down from its 130,000 words to something like 100,000. It would seem that editing, for me anyway, needs longer continual sessions than writing so I can ensure there is consistency within scenes and chapters. I will have to change the way I allocate time to writing.

I critiqued another story last week. This one had problems with its flow because of a combination of made up nouns, oddly constructed sentences and overuse of a thesaurus. The ideas were okay.

I finished reading The Elves of Cintra, by Terry Brooks, the second book in the Genesis of Shannara series. I thought it was a better book than the first, which was mostly set-up. The second was also better written. I hope to post a review of it later this week.

If you were wondering whether people have decided books are a cheaper form of entertainment to buy during our recession, they may have. According to Bookscan, in the first 10 weeks of this year sales of books went up by 7% in both volume and value in Australia, but if you took out Stephenie Meyer's series sales remained static.

I wonder if many Australians have been buying Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. It's a 1957 science-fiction novel whose sales are booming on Amazon at the moment according to an article I read in The Age. In it entrepreneurs and industrialists withdraw their labour from a society whose masses are described as parasites and moochers. They hide in a camp and when society, starved of their genius, collapses they are begged to come back and take over the economy. Must be what Peter Costello is waiting for. I don't think I will be reading it.

Graham.