I have met the enemy, and it is I
My first name actually is Donald, but don’t tell anyone. Sign found at the RF in NY. Donald, whoever he is, never appeared, so I assume like so many storytellers, he had his elbows on the bar and was whining about his editor, at the mead hall.
Especially when she’s right.
My manuscripts exist in a state of prelapsarian perfection when they’re hot off the printer. Which is to say, before anybody else looks at them. Much the way my downhill skiing is a study in feline grace and power when I have a slope to myself and nobody pointing out that I lean back when I’m in trouble. I no more lean back on the tails of my skis than I over-use passive sentence structure, not, at least, in the mogul fields and manuscripts of my mind. It is possible that the pages I turn over to my wife/editor are not quite the Platonic ideal of the perfect story in which I am never using passive verbs. But they’re close.
And why would I lean back on my tails when I’m never “in trouble”? Black Diamond is my middle names.
All of which is to say thank you, Cheryl. You’ve given me notes on 270 pages so far and you don’t even like science fiction.
