It’s an awful sentence. Negative. And weak-verbed to boot. I know all about sentences like that. I’ve been hunting them down in my manuscript. Eight hours a day, five days a week. I finally feel like a real author. Even with the [unpublished] preface. Here, on revamp #258. Okay, it’s not really that bad. But that’s how it seems.
Back to the Rome sentence. It may be awful, but it’s also very true. Applicable for cities, families, and books. Maybe especially imaginary world books.
I’m currently reading the true account of a reject horse named Snowball. (See Elizabeth Letts' The Eighty Dollar Champion.) Dog meat material turned jumping champion in the middle of the last century. The author’s done a tremendous job of digging into the story, setting the stage, bringing the characters to life, taking us to the scene of the triumph.
Oh, but goodness, it makes me glad I’m writing fiction. I’d really hate to set up camp in a Surnian library to research their history. And the Elite? I don’t know how I’d portray them faithfully. They’re much too terrifying. I’d be afraid of them decapitating me in the middle of the night if they didn’t like what I said. Which, of course, they wouldn’t.
The good news is the characters are putting on flesh and blood. Really. Bounding right off my computer screen and into the house. (Don’t worry. I locked them in the basement last time. I don’t think they’ll try it again.)
Until next time . . . Enjoy your coffee and the color green. (Hopefully not both at the same time.) I’ll be staring at my computer screen, seeing all sorts of things that don’t exist.
(Oh! Thought you might like to eyeball this relic from Surn. Found it in the village library. Squashed between a teenager’s journal and a recipe for fried frog legs. Apparently, no one thought it was very important. I snuck it over to the Xerox machine when no one was looking.)
