Well the world didn't end and now I am working on a new book. So my math was off, 2 + 2 = nothing, because numbers are an illusion to give us feeble mortals a method of keeping track of other illusions and the robots have yet to let us awaken from our sleep, to see the true nature of, um, nature.
So as I embark on writing another book, as always my mind thinks back to ‘07 when I wrote my first book. I had started in late April of that year and it took until late June or early July to finish it. At the time I thought it was the greatest thing I had ever done, all 94,530 words of it. Sadly it still remains the longest thing I have ever written, but also, what I think of as the most piss poor thing I had ever written.
Yet, as someone who longs for their first love and wonders what could have been. I too long for this story and wonder the what could have been. I sit down to edit it at times wondering if I can salvage the story, or even make a story out of it. During writing I changed all most all the original ideas I had had about the book, I took the dark ending and lightened it up, I even rushed the ending so as to keep people interested. I had a weird idea about the zombies that I only hinted at and would elaborate on more if the book did well and I wrote a second one. I had crazy things in it such a girl on girl rape and a revenge rape with a gun. So yeah, sounds like I may have been on drugs(I wasn‘t). I recall I killed a character off with out even saying how, he was just dead, turned into a zombie and a few miles away from where he originally had been.
Even taught I don’t think that book will ever see the light of day, it did teach me something: It takes time to write a book. Before that I never once thought it would take so long to write a book, in it’s first draft. It also taught how to set up goals when writing. When I wrote that book every night I made sure I would write at the very least 2,000 words. Sure some nights I would let myself get by with being short a few hundred words, but not much and I would always try to make that up the next day. I only took two days off from writing at that time.
So what happens now? Well much like that book and it’s plot jumping around I am going to jump to another subject in this post that has come to mind. See during writing this I looked up my very old writing blog, to make sure I had the year right. Despite having lots of stuff to say on that blog, most of it is very poorly spelled. Worse then what your seeing here. That’s one reason I will not go through and try to edit my first book, so many horrid spelling errors. Yet I’ll still work on the short stories I wrote from around that time, like Rude. They are short and the editing can be done fast and not remind me of how much of a moron I am.
The thing I want to now talk about and what I think I wanted to talk about when I started this blog post, damn getting sidetracked, is spelling. As I have pointed out before, I didn’t receive the best education and I dropped out of college. My spelling is years behind what it should be and my grammar is also behind, but I don’t think as much as my spelling… Er, getting to the point now…
So how much does spelling play into writing?
It seems that there is two different schools of thought.
*Spelling is very important to writing, even if you have a great idea, you can kill it with your spelling.
*The idea, the story, is far more important then the spelling and grammar. That stuff is the job of the editor.
Right now I don’t really fall into either slot. Why? Well if you spell as bad as I do then you want to be in the second, but I am also aggravated when I read something full of errors. So I have yet to make up my mind. I guess I have to say I lean towards the second more, but I do think the writers need to do their damndest at making sure they don’t put the editor through hell.
Now let’s see if I can blow your minds, I am not going to name names, but these two schools come from two different big name writers. One I have had the chance to ask him directly his thoughts on the subject and the other I gathered from a book, about writing.
So here is the question I want anyone reading this to ask themselves:
Does story come before spelling or does spelling come before story?
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