I'm not an Editor nor do I play on on TV. However, as a writer I see the tremendous value in editing. I highly recommend people hire and develop a close relationship with an Editor. They can do so much to help shape your book and your writing. In my opinion, a good Editor doesn't rewrite your book. They help YOU write it better. Your unique dialog, characters, plot, settings, voice, and narrative are what you are bringing to the table. An Editor helps by getting rid of the "clunkiness" that plops up in all of our writing. You should be catching most spelling errors and some grammar errors with your word processor's spell check and grammar check. An Editor shouldn't have to waste time correcting spelling and grammar errors--at least not the easy to catch things. Of course these tools aren't perfect and another set of eyes are helpful to catch words like "united" that get written as "untied." I made such a boo boo once in a fund raising letter I had written for an organization. I didn't catch it until weeks later after dozens of letters had gone out. Software has its limitations.
Charles Harvey
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Friday, March 23, 2012
The Black Queen
You try the spa again. Mr. Sims is dead. (You wiped your ass with his obituary.) You wrap yourself in your “Angelic White“ Martha Stewart Home bath towel and float next to the jism sticky walls. Eyes disturbed by the lines in your face, drop to the floor. But you strike gold--you think. A Spanish accent invites you to his cubby hole for “cake and cream.” Just when the “nicca” was opening the door, two college age boys black as sable cats, slim as gazelles, and hung like colts, walk by leading a parade of tented towels and tongues hanging from mouths. Your “nicca” with the Spanish accent joins the parade.
You had you a man briefly. Well it was for eight years--millennium for gay lovers. He had a job when you met him. You both dreamed of picket fence domesticity. You yoked yourself to a thirty-year mortgage. At the housewarming you caught him patting the ass of somebody’s friend. A week later, you caught him dining on that ass on top of the new Calvin Klein bed ensemble, the day after he declared he was a man and would never eat your ass and nobody else’s ass. You closed your eyes to all his enigmas and psychosises. His dick was so big it blinded you. He lost his job and became a “househusband.” You worked, he whored. The bedroom was his kitchen. When he wasn’t drunk, he battered more cakes than Betty Crocker. You came home to cold pots and a hot bed reeking of sex funk. You quietly stopped paying the mortgage. The sheriff hauled him clad in his polka dotted drawers and all the furniture to impoundment storage. Whiskey and coke wouldn’t let him get out of bed. Today, you imagine him still locked away in the storage shed--his teeth the color of shit and the polka dot drawers hanging on his bleached bones.
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Monday, March 5, 2012
Writing Tips 8 -- Memoir or Catharsis
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| Harvey on Smashwords |
Is it Memoir or Cathartic or Both
I ran across someone’s blog recently, where they were writing about some painful childhood experiences. I didn’t read deep into it, because, well for one it just wasn’t that interesting to me. I asked him what his goal was for the project? He said, “Heck at this point just to remember as much as possible and get it down. Suggestions?”
My response was, “I know the memories mean a lot to you. And it's very personal. But I'm not sure a stranger would understand. Augusten Burroughs had a not so great childhood, but he makes his stories so lively and engaging. Sometimes you have to look for the humor in the bad situation and hit us with a sort of irony.”
Friday, February 24, 2012
Othello Jones
He's all mouth and all braggart, but there's an interesting twist at the end.Excerpt:
OTHELLO JONES
“Othello Jones! Othello Jones, is that you?”
“It’s me and my twin brother.”
“Your twin brother?”
“Must be. You called my name twice.”
“You don’t have to be so rude. Especially the kid I taught eleventh grade English, and the kid I took to the clinic to clear up a bad case of clap.”
“I don’t hug men. It ain’t been no hundred years since I seen you last. And besides, I wuz born rude. My Mama said I gave my middle finger to the Doctor who slapped my ass to life.”
“You sure are full of yourself.”
“If I ain’t full of me, who’s goin’ to be?”
“But don’t you think humility has its place?”
“Yeah, under the bottom of my two hundred dollar alligator blue-skinned patent leather shoes!”
“Oh.”
“Is you humble?”
“Well yes. I’m not boastful at all.”
“You just told a contradiction.”
“Life is full of . . .”
“If a bastard is humble on the outside of hisself, he raging with hatred on the inside of hisself.”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“Don’t you want to dig my grave and fill it full of me?”
“What?”
“Wouldn’t you like to kill me, man?”
“No.”
“Liar! You’re itching to end my existence on the planet.
“No. You’re my ex-pupil. Why would I want to kill you?”
“Yeah you would. I see it in your sideways glance at me. You don’t like my shoes, my gold watch, my four hundred dollar Brooks Brothers European cut blue silk suit that shimmers like the blue sea in front of your pale gray eyes, my white John Henry shirt with real pearl buttons, my Oscar de la Renta tie. And to top it all off you would severely despise my red Calvin Klein silk lowrise drawers if you could see them! And I know you hate this clean cut Mister Joe masterfully put on my head. It makes your own stuff look like a wet mop. You white, but you not nearly as pretty as I am.”
Othello Jones
Saturday, February 11, 2012
February is Black History Month...But all our history didn't happen in February
A majority of Emmett Till's family members said Thursday that they object to plans by the Justice Department to exhume his body in order to find clues to solve his brutal murder 50 years ago. . . . Till was 14-years-old when he left his home on Chicago 's South Side to visit relatives in Mississippi Chicago Tallahatchie River
-- Karen E. Pride, Chicago
What y’all aim to find by
digging up his old bones?
Old old bones, old and innocent bones
Why y’all want to disturb him?
He ain’t with his bones.
He down here in the muck with me
and ain’t nobody trying to dig my rusty ass up.
His Mama, bless her heart, she got the bones
and that head that looked like a bad cabbage.
Thousands seen it in Chicago
Where was my picture? I suffered.
I used to gleam prissy and howl
now mud bugs nest in my teeth.
I kept the good stuff off that boy—his spirit, his soul, his spleen
caressed it out of his naked body
The real Emmett sometimes he runs up the road to Money
gooses that white gal between her legs—boy still gots
that spunk in him.
Then he runs back to me for shelter.
Carolyn wakes up, rubs her thigh
goes back to sleep. 1955 was a long time ago
She wants to rest. I want to rest, and even Emmett.
You got the pictures. You won’t forget
Every now and agin some black boy still gets
drugged behind a car, still gets strung up in a tree
or the roof rafters of a county jail
They still make fans like me
heavy enough to drown boyish devilment.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
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