More, Please

My novella, Blood Soup,  is being published by Eternal Press in September. I’ve been working on the edits for about a week now, and I hope to get them finished either late tonight or early tomorrow.

It’s slow going.

There are only 85 typed pages, and more than 100 comments from the editor. Most of the edits are a matter of style, IMHO. Mostly, she wants me to add more commas.

I started out in the journalism business where the Oxford  comma–that pesky comma which appears before the word “and” in a list–is anathema.

It’s my unflattering opinion that folk in the literary world waste commas. They shove them into every sentence they can and space be damned. But I know that if I omit a few here and there, I can write another word…and that might just be the perfect  word.

The literary folk put in all the commas and add the extra words, too.

I’m trying to be accepting of that fact, and that’s what’s taking so long. I read the draft, accept a comma here or there, and then start over. (See how I slipped that Oxford comma in there?) The next time I read, I accept another comma or two and then begin again. I suppose I could just accept all the commas at once, but that would be like giving in.

I need to put up a fight in order to accept this whole Oxford comma deal.

The other items (it’s not all commas, after all…) are (mostly) more of the same: the editor suggesting additional verbiage. It’s liberating, in a way, to be told, “Yes! You can write more here…” and yet, it goes against all my training.   :: sigh ::

Time to go accept a few more commas…