Perfect Penmanship

Last I heard, "nobody's perfect" was a pretty well accepted adage, but apparently some of us are more perfect than others. Okay, not to malign a literary heroine of my teenage years, but Blog of a Bookslut included this fine tidbit today: Anne Rice getting all high and mighty about editing. Or rather, how she doesn't need any editing.

Hell. I remember reading The Witching Hour in college -- you could basically open the book to any page, plunk your finger down arbitrarily on a passage, and laugh at the stilted way it was written, the grammatical errors, or the run-on sentences.

I always thought it was a shame that after Interview with the Vampire (which, I daresay, as her breakout book, was her last book that seemed well edited -- and that was the book that made her one of my literary heroines, at least for a short period of time), everything pretty much went downhill, technically.

Everybody needs an editor. Even the most fastidious amongst us writers have times when a phrase looks right to the eye, reads correctly to the inner ear, and it's not. We've missed a typo or a grammatical error, maybe even because we've simply seen the manuscript so many times we know how it's supposed to sound.

Bookslut also railed about J.K. Rowling, who also deserves some ribbing for sloppy editing (not to mention, those more recent barbells, er, books, could have used some adept cutting).

Anyway, I guess it would be nice to be published and popular enough to have the option of becoming a prima donna, but I hope if my day ever comes, I won't become one.

Thanks to Brian over at Bibliotechno for emailing me that blog post.

Thanks for reading,

LLB