{"id":9835,"date":"2011-11-21T06:30:53","date_gmt":"2011-11-20T17:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=9835"},"modified":"2011-11-21T00:12:20","modified_gmt":"2011-11-20T11:12:20","slug":"in-the-spirit-of-poe-and-proofing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2011\/11\/21\/in-the-spirit-of-poe-and-proofing\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Spirit of Poe and Proofing …"},"content":{"rendered":"

Check this out—my fellow Supernatural Undergrounder, AA Bell<\/a> has a post up now on “Editing: How Much is Too Much In The Pursuit of Perfection?”<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

How apposite is that? I have to say, that when I first saw it yesterday it felt very apposite indeed given a big part of what I have been realising over the past ten days, with the first pass proof for The Gathering of the Lost<\/em>, is that you can definitely over-edit. And that is a big part of what I meant on Wednesday 16, here<\/a>, about not losing the (already) good in pursuit of the perfect, ie yes, if one works on something forever, one might get it to a state of nigh perfection. Or<\/em> one might kill it completely dead. And even if you don’t (kill it dead that is), the chances are that the revisions are only working on somewhere between 1-10% of the whole—and the other 90-99% is already more than good enough to be shared wth the world. So my motto as I got into the proofing process quickly became: I’ll only change this if there is a strong\/compelling reason to do so, rather than thinking: “If only I xyz<\/em>, maybe this could be even better …”<\/p>\n

(And if I work on it for the rest of my life maybe it could be absolutely perfect (& no one would ever get to read it): yeah, right!)<\/p>\n

But back to AA’s post: Where does the Poe come in? Well, AA uses a quote from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven<\/em> to illustrate all the various editorial options—and it is rather fun to see what she does with it, so I invite you to head on over and do just that, here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

(I have suddenly been struck by a dreadul fear that this is something only a writing geek—I will not say nerd—would appreciate. But oh yes, that’s right, I am<\/em> a writing geek, so who cares if my geek-gal slip is showing: anyone who visits this blog knows that about me already! \ud83d\ude09 )<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Check this out—my fellow Supernatural Undergrounder, AA Bell has a post up now on “Editing: How Much is Too Much In The Pursuit of Perfection?” How apposite is that? I have to say, that when I first saw it yesterday it felt very apposite indeed given a big part of what I have been realising […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funstuff","category-supernatural-underground"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9835"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9843,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9835\/revisions\/9843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}