HYPERTEXT: A Bottle of Beer – Editing IV or Ruthless and Barbaric
A Higher Power has brought to my attention the need to take the knife, dig deeper, and cut out the cankers from this hypertext. He’s right.
It’s tough to look at your own work and yet, with all the reading and studying I’ve done, particularly in the last few years at an intense level, I should be better at it than I am. To recognize what I’d see in the work of others and even if I can’t prevent myself from writing them in, at least know enough to take them out in editing.
My writing used to be very unimaginative and stiff. After several classes and kicks I began to shed the Poe influence (here I refer to the grammatical style of structure rather than the positive Poe influence) and become a little more willing to share in writing the pictures of story that only I saw in my head. Appropriately titled, Reflections in Imagery was a story that just about sunk under a woman’s thoughts as she viewed her naked body in a full length mirror. Okay, so I overdosed. It’s a habit of mine as a Scorpio to be one way or the other, God forbid I should walk the middle of the road.
So I go back and read and decide and cut out the waste. And once it’s gone, it’s gone (honest, I used to save these things!) so for its final appearance, here is the first of the fallen, and rather appropriately contains the metaphor of the blade:
Balanced on the horizon, it flamed red in its agonies, sinking slow and low on the sharp blade of highway.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology