Edits & E-Bay

I am not allowed to have an E-Bay account.

This was decided very early on in the relationship. At about the same time it was decided that I am not allowed to have a credit card, or any great amount of money in my bank account. The reason for this being it tends to get spent immediately on games, DVDs, or other gimmickery that is not rent, utilities or food. I am perfectly content with this arrangement since I have no head for finances and what money I do keep is sufficient to the task of buying cigarettes and hamburgers.

However, E-Bay does have it’s uses. For example, there’s a game that I played once on the X-Box that is completely amazing and fun. The game is called SSX 3 and I had to review it for GameAxis once. I was completely engaged by it and to this day recall it as one of those games that is very nearly perfect in execution; you can marathon it, you can take it for a quick spin, you can fool around, you can practice hardcore, you give yourself goals, or you can just take a leisurely trip down the mountain, and the music kicks Super-Ass.

After hemming and hawing for the last couple of years, we finally decided to track the game down on the PS2, only to find that Singapore’s fear of the old had once again taken hold, and no one carried the game here anymore. On E-Bay, however, we managed to track it down for the unbelievably reasonable price of $4.75 American. So in just six weeks more snowboarding fun than you can shake a stick at will be MINEMINEMINE!

With permission from the Fiance, of course.

The line edit to The Pale Summer is now done. I went over it with the metaphorical fine toothed comb and fixed the errors I could find, meaning that there’s still probably a 20% margin of things I missed. I’ll probably try and go over it one more time when I’m doing the big rewrite. The page count has gone up by two. That’s not as frightening as it sounds. All it means is that some chapters ended right at bottom of a page and the insertion of a “he said”, or “that was” bumped the line into the next page. What is frightening is the urge to embellish more details here and there, and that would bump the word count up significantly so I’m having a mighty struggle to resist that urge.

Still waiting on comments from readers. I’m hoping they’ll see things that I don’t, since I’m at that stage where I look at the manuscript now and think “I just don’t know…” There’s a lot in there that I’m proud of, and a lot in there that I think may or may not require adjusting. I’m hoping some of them will point these things out, especially in the “You can lose that” department, because the whole point of the exercise at this point is to cut things down. If they start telling me that I really cut too close to the bone on some parts and need more development, then I’ll know for sure this book was meant to be somewhat bigger than what I sheared it down to, and that’ll be complicated…