Revisions or How Fancy Can My iPhone and My Manuscript Get?
23 June 2013
So last month I fancied up my cellphone’s cover. (Because I am too cheap to buy a fancy one already made.) I glued on the owl and stuck on fingernail decals/stars/diamonds. Pretty fancy. But The Prince Consort asked if the fingernail diamonds would fall off.
Well, yeah. They did. They weren’t exactly right for the phone. Kind of like the book manuscript I’ve been revising for years. The revisions weren’t working. I’d made a ms. that didn’t tell the story I started out to tell.
So for both I went back to the heart of what I liked.
On the cellphone cover: the owl
and the manuscript: the funny heroes, the dragon and the wizard.
Once I knew what the heart of each was, I asked myself, “what story did you really want to tell? What did you really want to say before you let whatever was lying around dictate what went on the phone cover and in the manuscript?
A few new stick-ons for the cellphone. Does it tell a story to you, now? It does to me. Actually it tells a lot of stories.
For my manuscript, I went back to the original story. I’m back with the eccentric characters and their hero’s journey, told as a comedy of errors.
I can’t be sure that the cellphone cover won’t get an extra doo dad to enhance its story. And we’ll see what the dragon and wizard do to get to Ghost Mountain, in one piece and without really making the dragon’s sister so mad she …
Kath: with glue on her fingers and a muse in her ear.
