So, I’m scribbling furiously on the “collaboration” I’m doing with the kid. Still having a ball. And I think I’m keeping it inside a reasonable word count right out of the gate this time.

On the other writing front, I finally went back to my own book, my opus, my four-book arc project.  And I’m editing it.  Actually, I’m halving it.  It’s actually a bit depressing how easy it has been so far to trim all that extraneous fat (I didn’t do a good job in the writing! Would that my own fat were so easy to eliminate!) but I definitely see the wisdom in letting something sit for a while before you go back and look at it again.

Because of that, I’m putting off my goal of pitching the book to 365 agents in 365 days.  I’ll still do it, but not til I’ve got a leaner, meaner word count.

Meanwhile, because reading makes one a better writer, I’m just wrapping up the Dark Materials trilogy. It’s interesting to read books from a writerly perspective, as opposed to just looking at a ripping good yarn.  I can see tools and tricks he used, and I can still enjoy the story — and I can sort of chuckle at the anti-religious slant. The part I don’t get is where he lapses into political descriptions and philosophizing. I’m curious how his editing process went on those pages.I mean, there was more than one occasion in my reading where I had to re-read several paragraphs to figure out what he was talking about, and I’m pretty sure no kid under the age of 17 had a prayer of comprehending what the hell he was talking about. Did he and the publisher debate whether to dumb it down? Did they think kids would understand? Or did they just figure kid readers could skip over the dense parts and figure it out later? Is it a layers thing, where adults read one story and kids read another? All things to chew on.