Saturday, May 23, 2009

The First Cover with segway into a tirade on words

So this is it! Moonlighting in Vermont's cover art. 

I know my last blog was incredibly sulky. I apologize. I've gotten to the point I need to pinch myself. Against the odds, my book is being published. I'm oh so lucky. 

Don't get me wrong, I like the stories I tell. I enjoy writing, and hope with judicious editing they will be written well enough that the words don't distract from the story.

Stories are all about words. Words that create the images we see in our minds when we read. But a poor choice of a word can impair our enjoyment of the story. A word, sentence, image, fact (correct or not), can pull the reader completely out of a story. And sometimes, they never go back.

So, for a storyteller, words are the double edged sword. (Clique, I know. But I promised myself that my blog didn't have to be perfect. Write more, worry about it less is my new motto.)

Anyway, you can't have a story without words or images - if it's a visual like a slide show or movie it could be without words  - but put in the wrong one, make a false step, and boom, story's over. That's a great deal of pressure. I'm happy to say that it doesn't usually stop me from writing. It does slow down the process of editing though. My vocabulary isn't always up to the task of finding the perfect word, search though I might.