The Sex is Still Always Just Fine

The Sex is Always Just Fine

“Oh honey, the sex was just fine. The sex is always just fine–”

“Arched back? Gasping for–”

“What is it you’re reading these days?” Connie centered her sweating Arnold Palmer on the cardboard coaster then dabbed her lips with a linen napkin. She examined the contour of tendons under the slack skin on the back of her hand. “But really you’re on the right track there. He was funny.”

“Mmm. Doing it with a guy who makes you laugh is the best.” Lisa popped a cherry tomato leftover from her salad in her mouth and Groucho Marxed her blonde eyebrows. Seeds spurted out of her lips.

“Ew, no,” Connie said, but Lisa continued waggling her eyebrows. Connie grimaced and looked away. “Stop. Just stop. No, what meant was he was comical.”

“What? Then his thing did stand-u–”

“Finish that sentence and I’ll walk the check on you.” Downtown Denver was never a cheap place to eat, but the Palomino in particular prized its cuisine. Lisa sat up straight and put her hands primly in her lap atop her creme skirt. Connie doubted that pose would last after what she said next. “No. He’d clearly seen too much porn.”

“Ahhh, the bush freaked him out?”

“Jesus, Lisa!” Connie sputtered. The pair of women froze like nuns in a bathhouse as their unnoticed waiter topped off Connie’s glass with more tea. He departed with a professionally blank face, but Connie would never eat there again.

Connie warmed to the thought of the next thing she would tell Lisa, but she reached for her ice-filled glass because of the thing she would not. “He was fascinated by the panty-lines on my hips. He kept tracing the indentions in my skin.”

“Cool?”

“Was that a question or were you agreeing?”

“Whichever.”

“Cool. It was cool.”

302 words on day 745

Wholesale Razing

In part to remind myself what I’d written regarding the Chronicaller thread and in part out of curiosity for what someone else recently read on 1000 Days I just read back through about ten of my entries.  I suspect my positive opinion of what I’ve written is a shortcoming of an inexperienced writer.  If I knew better I would have been scandalized by the terrible things I’d written and the terrible ways I’d written them.

I wasn’t.  Or at least not universally.

Enjoying reading your own writing is a good feeling.  I’m left somewhat more heartened about what I might write in the future than I have been in the past months.

Screenwriter John August edits dull or bad passages from scripts in videos on his blog.  His near complete replacement of the original words reminds me of these house remodeling shows.  The episodes where the photogenic carpenter opens with a house situated on a particular parcel of land, then brings in a bulldozer to raze the house, then closes with a shiny new home.  Sure there is a home where another home once stood, but not exactly what I’d define as a remodel.

This analogy is unfair because words and walls aren’t exactly equal, but still technically correct in that John’s edits aren’t tweaks of grammar or upgrades on non-visual words.  He starts with a boy stealing a car and he ends with a boy stealing a car, but much better.  Either the result is more efficiently lined or more compellingly visual.

I hope I’m not overlooking portions of my own writing in need of wholesale razing.

Teaching Myself to Edit

Real writers are voluminous writers. They have completed novels, abandoned novels, and unwritten novels. Never mind writing more than one story in a lifetime or year, they write more than one a month. Sometimes after tens of pages they give up on a story because it turns out to be going nowhere. No doubt many have forgotten so much of what they’ve written they’d not recognize it if it weren’t on their harddrives.

These authors hack out manuscripts well past midnight night after night. I suspect when they pause for thought it’s not to figure out what to write but which way of the many they want to write it. They continue typing through rough patches and lulls, because, really, what else would you do?

1000 Days is still teaching me the same lesson I needed to learn on day one. It’s still teaching me to write something I enjoy and then to ignore it and move on to the next day. This is a difficult lesson. Every idea I have feels like THE idea—too important to cast off after a day or two of exploration. I do it anyway.

It’s time for me to learn to edit.

My pieces here don’t really have the word count to warrant an edit in the sense that I’ll be taking a first draft to the second draft stage, but I’ll have to make do with what I can. Saturdays I will reach back about 100 days for editing fodder.

Tomorrow I’ll be digging into…

Day 104: Bunbun of the Veleme

Word count: 264
Day 205