cellini's Diaryland Diary

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Leaner, Tighter

The starter is dead on my truck. I already have another one ready to install. I push-started it this afternoon and drove it home from where it was stranded yesterday in a grocery store parking lot. I had a 5 mile walk home yesterday. It fucking sucked.

Now I need a set of jack stands to raise the truck high enough to get at the old starter for removal. I tried doing it in the garage this evening but there wasn't enough room down there for me to work on it.

My editor at Sl@te checked in with me again today to apologize for the delay on running my next article for them. I'm happy that she is checking back with me, but the fact remains that she is too slow for me to depend on that gig for much money. They seem to really need more content up in the science section then they have had and I'm capable of giving them probably up to 4 good pieces a week. But the editor is too slow to work through it quickly enough.

She's new there and maybe she'll be able to move faster once she's more settled in.

I need to send out more pitches to other publications. These last few days have been eaten up by my truck problem and bouts of nightmarish loneliness and misery.

My writing is getting leaner and better lately. I'm tweaking my style a bit (not so much here, where I usually toss shit out without even reading through it) in a deliberate way. I've decided that my style has been cluttered up with more words in a typical sentence than is really necessary. Usually words that don't affect the meaning of the sentence at all.

For example, here is how I might have written a paragraph a few months ago:

"The starter on my truck crapped out and died after sort of acting up for a while. I got stuck in the parking lot of the grocery store and had to walk five miles home before even calling for help, because I didn't have a cell phone signal. The part that I have to replace is in an awkward area under the bottom of the truck and I need to borrow some equipment to jack the truck up higher in order to work on it."

This is how I would re-write that today:


"My truck's starter died yesterday after acting up for months. I was stranded in the grocery store parking lot and my cell phone had no signal. I walked five miles home along winding country roads with a thunderstorm rumbling on the horizon. The wet roadside weeds soaked my jeans below the knees and the air had that thick scent of hot asphalt after a rain.

The part that I need to replace is located awkwardly beneath the engine. I need to borrow some equipment to jack the truck up higher and work on it."

I like to think that version two is better.

8:50 p.m. - 2012-07-24

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