Too Much on the Bone

I sent the masters thesis project off the VDM Verlag on Tuesday. Thanks to revsions and reformatting, I cut 43 pages and nearly 1,000 words out. Now I'm in a waiting game (How else do writers get through life?) Having combined the poetry, fiction, and essays into the narrative feels more "reader friendly," and it is this version I hope VDM will take. I may need to do some updating on the "gay gene" issue and in the APA and NARTH sections, too, but that's all assuming the manuscript is picked up.

Revising Depending on the Light accomplished another thing I had hoped: it's given me the impetus I need to get back to more revisions on the novel Resistance. Passive voice, dead words, etc.

Which brings me to another musing. Language seems, by its nature, to tend toward verbosity. We want to communicate, so we use more words. Problem: they take away from the communication. So we must pare down. It's a never-ending fight with writers. If we all pared down exactly the same way, would we end up with essentially the same writing voice? And what about matters of style? I've been thinking about these things in my own revising process, and how easily dead words and passive voice creep into the text. (I'm sure there are some instances here, like this last sentence.) Like slowing metabolism, language tends toward the "extra" on the bone, the roll of fat against the day of famine.