throw another bear in the canoe

Collaboration? Above and beyond moving a piece of furniture together? *grins*

All I know about collaboration is how I do it, which is probably useless to anybody who isn't me, or collaborating with me. That's like marriage advice, I think.

Or is there something specific you want to know?

Oddly enough, for me it's helpful to hear how others go about the process. I'm still trying to figure out how I do things, and so hearing about how others do things gets my brain thinking along the lines of "No, that won't work for me, that might, that definitely will, that will if I tweak it to this" and so forth.

So just hearing about your process would be helpful to me - but possibly not to anyone else!

I'd like to see something about the revision process.

Say you've written a first draft of a novel (or maybe five?), and now it's just lying there in a lifeless lump. What do you do with it? How to go about turning it into something that someone might actually want to read (or, dare I say it, publish)?

I've heard that most aspiring novelists never even finish that first draft, but I'm sure there must also be other people out there like me, who have passed that first hurdle, only to get stuck at the next one.

Hear, hear. I second this request.

You don't think there's enough contradictory revision advice out there already?

Is there something more specific you can ask? Because really, all I know about it is that you go in, hypercritically, and do as much as possible to fix the parts that suck.

And fail.

I mean, what are you wondering about? Tell me more.

I honestly think the benefit for us new, unpublished writers is seeing that there isn't "one way" to do things. It's easy to say "Well, that's how it's done" and then when it doesn't work for you, you just give up.

So while it seems contradictory to get all of these different views, it really isn't because the lesson is that it's different for everyone. So again, hearing about how others do it helps us to get ideas about how we're going to do it.

For SU, anything with humor.

Well, me, of course...

(This is when I wish I had an animated winking thing for my little picture.)

You know you're all I write about, man.

Did I say I was sorry to have nearly missed you in Saratoga? I don't believe we had a conversation in which either of us was standing still.

*sigh*

I knoooowwwww. :-(

How to get past "what you don't do wrong" and into "what you do do right." Or to put it another way, how to go from fixing what's broken to making things better.

---L.

Oh man. If I knew the answer to that, I'd be making J.K. Rowling money.

Ernest Hemingway has this wonderful quote in his novel, "True at First Light":

"I've never been present at the birth of a new religion before and it makes me nervous."

I would love to see you write an article on how you create a new religion or mythos for a story.

Thanks, Rob Crowther

I don't. *g*

You need to ask somebody who writes that stuff, I'm afraid.

An interested observer recommends finding a crackpot archaeological/ sociological/ anthropological theory and running with it. :P

(But I know nothing, right.)

Or we could just hold a seance, crack open a howling copy of the Necronomicon, and drum up the spirit of L. Ron Hubbard. (grin)

...No. Just no, man.

The crazy might be contagious.