On good writing and gore; or, How a really good manuscript broke me
There’s this manuscript. It came in on Friday of last week, and I’ve been working on it obsessively since then. Because it is SO GOOD.
Seriously. I mean, Editor D and I both knew it was good when he acquired it, but we never expected it to be this degree of staggering awesome. I think we’re both a little shellshocked at the quality of the book.
That, and how gory it is.
It’s a gorefest. It’s worse than Darren Shan. Seriously. In my quest to get through this nearly-500 page manuscript as fast as possible so I could find out what happens, I was reading while eating. Bad idea. I got to the first really gory scene and I stopped with a forkful of pasta halfway to my mouth. Lunch was over.
It’s funny. Editor D and I kept walking around yesterday in a sort of happy editorial daze. I overheard him say the same thing to different people a whole bunch of times-and I was saying it myself, to anyone who would listen.
“This book is really incredible. It’s so good. And so incredibly gory.”
It’s so scary and gory that last night, for the first time since we moved into our house, I closed the closet door before I went to bed, just to make sure the monsters wouldn’t come out and eat me.
Then, this morning, I started reading the fifth trade of Robert Kirkman’s excellent and very gory Walking Dead series. I got about halfway through, and then the combined violence and gore of the manuscript and Walking Dead just shut me down, and I just couldn’t any more.
Wow. I just totally got broken by that manuscript.
Seriously. I mean, Editor D and I both knew it was good when he acquired it, but we never expected it to be this degree of staggering awesome. I think we’re both a little shellshocked at the quality of the book.
That, and how gory it is.
It’s a gorefest. It’s worse than Darren Shan. Seriously. In my quest to get through this nearly-500 page manuscript as fast as possible so I could find out what happens, I was reading while eating. Bad idea. I got to the first really gory scene and I stopped with a forkful of pasta halfway to my mouth. Lunch was over.
It’s funny. Editor D and I kept walking around yesterday in a sort of happy editorial daze. I overheard him say the same thing to different people a whole bunch of times-and I was saying it myself, to anyone who would listen.
“This book is really incredible. It’s so good. And so incredibly gory.”
It’s so scary and gory that last night, for the first time since we moved into our house, I closed the closet door before I went to bed, just to make sure the monsters wouldn’t come out and eat me.
Then, this morning, I started reading the fifth trade of Robert Kirkman’s excellent and very gory Walking Dead series. I got about halfway through, and then the combined violence and gore of the manuscript and Walking Dead just shut me down, and I just couldn’t any more.
Wow. I just totally got broken by that manuscript.