Today’s Revising Comments To Myself And/Or The Manuscript

I’m doing these, in case anyone is curious, to make revising a little less tedious and boring.  Today I will not be revising No More Lies, however.  I will be revising a short story about a horribly unloved cat (Her people won’t let her on the counter and the dog kisses her!  Can you imagine such a terrible life?!) that I’ll probably post in a few days.  Yes, it’s silly.

“Oops.” (I used Undo one time too many and undid pasting the text into a new document.)

“The . . .”

“Zuh-rill-ee-uh.”  (I suddenly couldn’t be sure the cat’s name was spelled in a way that made the pronunciation clear, so I had to say it slowly.)

“What the hell is going on now?!”  (Okay, this one was more at the computer than the manuscript, but since it looked like my word processor might’ve suddenly locked up for no fucking reason, it counts.)

And that’s it for that story.  That hardly took any work.  This either means I wrote a pretty clean first draft — possible, it’s barely over 1000 words so there’s not much room to make mistakes — or I missed a lot of really obvious shit.

So, moving on to one of my favorite bits of No More Lies:

“Oh, I spelled that right!”  (Associate.  It looks wrong.)

Lots of sighing because my timeline in this bit is tying my brain in a knot.

“Ow, that sentence!”

“‘Around’, yeah.”

“‘Was’, ‘was‘, what the hell?!”

I laughed very hard at this bit, which is just . . . this is Bobby at the beginning of this story, in a nutshell:

I was trying to figure out what to do with a bra I’d just found in my couch.  And wondering whose it was.  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a woman over.

“Argh!”

“‘Staring to sound’ . . .?”

“I love Bobby.”

“Done?”

(Conversation with cat:  “Would you not grab my lips while I’m talking?!”  “Mrowwww!!”  I think that means “Fuck you, I’ll grab what I want.”)

“Argh!”

“‘Her tone’, no.”

“‘Despite’ . . . yeah, ‘despite being a drug dealer.'”

“Yeah.”

No, I was wrong. This is early story Bobby in a nutshell.  This is his girlfriend he’s talking to here:

“I’m not going to catch any rare, communicable, incurable diseases from your bathroom, right?”  She sounded sincerely worried.  That hurt some.

I decided to try to put her at ease by making her laugh.  “None that you haven’t already caught from me,” I said with a smirk.

And now I’m at the end of a scene and tired of the cat grabbing my mouth every time I read a bit aloud to make sure it works, so I’m done for now.