Okay, whatever, it was funny as hell.

How come I’m only able to see the brillance of the Ed Letter once the edits are implemented, completely finished and I’ve bitched and moaned with each change?

Wait, don’t answer that. It may not reflect well on me.

Ahh, sesame street. I need to start Tivoing that for my little weenie. But I’m kind of bummed that Cookie Monster doesn’t eat cookies anymore.

I’ve never had to deal with giving a hint that a character is lying, but I can see how difficult that would be. That’s something to think about.

Good luck with your edits!

But there’s something to be said to cleaning up all those little frogs and working your way up to the big one…

Okay, to gross even for me.

“doing all the easy stuff first makes you think you’ve made real progress, and if there’s hard stuff coming, at least it’s reduced to a page or two of hard stuff, rather than 10 pages of all kinds of stuff.”

This is also how I approach house-cleaning. Now I have a way to explain this to the hubs. Thanks!

I also like characters speaking the truth, in general, and definitely speaking *up* whenever possible, as advocated by Emma Gads in a recent blog post. Usually, unless thre’s a very good reason for the character to remain silent, they’ll blurt out what they are thinking. Amy, in particular, does this a lot.

And yet, some characters must lie.

Ah, Roger Ackroyd. A classic, Gina! I’ve done the unreliable narrator bit (for a novella I wrote for a class in college) and it’s DAMN hard. harder even, I think, than doing the “sympathy for the devil” first POV route (cf. Lolita or Darkly Dreaming Dexter), which is no picnic, either.

Amy is a very reliable narrator. She may not always see things PERFECTLY clearly (what 21 year old does?), but she’s very honest with you about what she sees, and even, occasionally, about the fact that she knows someone else may see it differently. I think because of the intimacy of the style of the SSG stories ( She tells you all about her sex life, etc. straight off the bat) you are inclined even more than usual to seew hat she sees. If someone is lying to her, they are lying to you, too.

Or maybe I’m just being all rose-colored about it. But this is what I think about during revisions. FYI.

So yes, maybe this is craziness, but it’s good to be crazy with others.

Read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie for more on the case of the unreliable (first person) narrator…

(warning: link contains spoilers)

Diana, I highlight editorial letters, too. I also do the easy stuff first, then move into the harder, hardest, stet. Then again, I also do color-coded plot boards…and I’m the most disorganized woman on the planet.

Back in the day when I was teaching high school lit, I always taught my students to be increasingly suspicious of the first person narrator, because they lie, to the reader and to themselves. I think that may be why I had so much trouble getting into first-person narration in genre lit–I didn’t want to worry about whether that person was lying to me. But I got over it.