Making good use of the delete key

Tell me if this is true for you - does the level of your writing progress directly correlate to the cleanliness of your house?

This week, I am happy to report that dust bunnies abound, the floor needs mopping and the place could use a general tidying. Yay! This means I’ve been writing. A lot. So much so that I have arrived at that golden moment on a project where it is actually acceptable to print it out and begin editing on paper. This is a piece that's been in progress on the computer for a full year. Time will tell if this is a gross misuse of paper and ink. Right now, it just feels good. And I do look forward to reading the novel as a reader – which is, as they say in Texas, a whole nuther process.

Also this week, I’ve discovered something decidedly quirky - The Delete Key Awards These awards, brought to us by the fine One Minute Book Reviews Blog, are given to published books whose writers and editors did not make good use of the delete key. Ah, we are all guilty of this at times. But this is just downright funny. (Unless this writer ever wins one. Then, it will not be so funny, eh?)

I offer into evidence, the runner’s up for the 2008 Delete Key Awards contest:

“And there it was, the hole that had given birth to me.…This was not the first time I’d been face-to-face with my mother’s genitalia.” - From Alice Sebold’s The Almost Moon (Little, Brown)

Seriously?


From Holly Peterson’s The Manny:
“We’re in the modern era, baby, you spoiled, Jurassic, archaic, Waspy piece of petrified wood!”

“He was munching furiously on his prey, like an African lion with a freshly caught zebra.”

Not the WORST string of words I've ever read. Still quite worthy of this award.

The grand prize winner in the 2008 Delete Key Awards contest

“A new species is arising on the planet. It is arising now, and you are it!"

“We are in the midst of a momentous event in the evolution of human consciousness. But they won’t be talking about it in the news tonight. On our planet, and perhaps simultaneously in many parts of our galaxy and beyond, consciousness is awakening from the dream of form. This does not mean all forms (the world) are going to dissolve, although quite a few almost certainly will. It means consciousness can now begin to create form without losing itself in it. It can remain conscious of itself, even while it creates and experiences form.”

Both of these sentences came from Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (Plume)


Also offered into consideration was this line from Barbara Walters' memoir Audition

“Just before the ax fell, lightning struck and my life changed, never to be the same again.”

Barbara! How could you? How could your editor? Oy!

Time to get my manuscript off my printer and start looking for places where my characters are face to face with nether regions of their mothers while munching petrified wood like an African lion that is arising like a new species on the planet right before lightning strikes. Surely, I will never be the same again!!!!

Whaddya think. Should I just clean the house first?

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Author, Janeology
www.karenharringtonbooks.com