What I ought to have said on that Fourth Street panel

[pameladean]

This year Fourth Street left room to drag people onto panels at the last moment. I had an hour and a half's warning of the first one, but missed completely the moment when I was put on the Sunday afternoon panel about how you know when to stop revising. skzb reasonably felt that, given the situation my book and I are in, I should be on this panel. I

Comments

[mizkit]

Man. And the bitter thing is that I want to read the original book you wrote. Not that I won't read this version, but I do so very much hope the long form makes it out there someday.

[oursin]

Me too.

I found it quite bad enough when a journal edited an article of mine with a chisel and hacksaw in order to make my deathless perfectly adequate, if UK-English, prose conform in a clonking way to some (US academic) style guide, rather than assuming that if the sentences were actually coherent and non-obscure of meaning, this was a pointless and timewasting exercise.

Not to mention, the losing of a lot of socially- and period-contextual stuff in the biography to get it down to desired length.

Much commiseration.

[pameladean]

I'd think this kind of wnolesale hacking would be even more dreadful in non-fiction. My stories are malleable (characters, not so much), but the facts of the matter are REAL. Oi.

P.

[oursin]

O well, doing the contextual stuff in detail has provided me with an entirely new project of research and writing spinning off.

I also do tend to deplore that thing that some non-fiction writers do which is put in stuff just because they have found it, even if it's tangential or not very interesting.

[kip_w]

The cut stuff isn't GONE gone, right? It exists somewhere in a file. Maybe you could do something with that one day, or (as several here seem to want) make the uncut version available as well.

[skylarker]

The book you wrote (as opposed to the one its being cut down into) sounds very interesting. Enough so that I hope they'll keep your 'director's cut' version available as an epub option when the other version goes to print.

[jphekman]

I was just thinking about Going North the other day, and thinking about saying this to you: The Secret Country trilogy is my favorite set of books in the world. I put off re-reading it because I want to savor it whenever I come to it. The fact that you are not able to write the sequel to it that you want to makes me unutterably sad. I know you have certainly already thought about publishing Going North privately, but I want to add my voice to the others which must be encouraging you to do it. I don't know exactly why you are still trying to make it fit your publisher's mold; I am sure you have very good reasons to do so. But I wonder if things are gradually coming to the point where those reasons seem less and less good

[hairmonger]

We likes being vacuumed, we does!

Mary Anne in Kentucky