Gabapple Writes

His parents really liked the name ‘Sam’ but thought Samuel was too common, especially since his dad is a celebrity. So they tossed various names back and forth, and Will suggested ‘Salmon’ and it made Marion (yes his mom’s name is Marion, shush) laugh so hard that he put it on the birth certificate without consulting her for real when Salmon was born. 

They don’t even think of the fish anymore. It’s just ‘Sammon’ to them, really. 

Salmon would say that they hate him, though… giving him a name like Salmon Wilfred Coal. 

THIS IS TRUE. But Salmon is a teenage boy...! 

The author of The Raven Boys has some great advice about being concise in your writing. To paraphrase, her suggestions come down to this:

Err on the side of not being boring.

Keep your genre in mind (YA novels tend to be 50k-90k for a reason)

You can always cut. She took only redundant sentences and words out and cut 40k from her first draft of The Raven Boys without losing a single scene. 

Consider the reader’s experience: the book needs to be consumable without a huge barrier for entry, or many readers won’t even pick it up.

Go read the whole post here. 

Please. I am TERRIBLE at poetry and I promised I’d write one for my bff @mamodewberry for a project and I don’t even know what to do omg please help. I commit many poetry sins in this and I just... AAHHH

*sobs into hands* It’s below the cut. 

replied to your post:

“So my goal is to finish Fishsticks first draft by the end of October,...”

:

When you (eventually) go to do your big edit of the draft, I ran across what sounded like daunting-but-excellent writing advice: Retype the entire story back into a new document. It becomes easier to rephrase/cut/add when you’re retyping each word.

Oh my goodness, that sounds brutal... and EXACTLY the kind of thing I would be into. I can definitely see the benefit of that, and I’m a very fast typer...  YEAH I’MM DO IT. Thanks for the suggestion!

And then it was Kesha time. 

But the point is... yikes. I am going to do a lot of revision and put a stop to that post-haste. No more sighing, brow-raising, eyerolling, turning to look, glancing, etc. etc. etc... 

Mostly it’s the sighing. Stock phrases. Crutches.