This Thursday’s Child—Iridescent Glory

In my earlier post, Breakthrough, I mentioned iridescence. Here it is. The cloud between the lens and the sun doesn’t have to be large, but it must be there.

Today I needed to make a sympathy card for a Toastmaster friend. I used a couple of different shots for that, but again, clouds were necessary, as a symbol of sorrow.

My writing may someday have the literary equivalent of iridescence, but not quite yet. I’ve only tried the scansion and notation method on a page and a half of the manuscript. I’m also wishing I could get my hands on a copy of Virginia Tufte’s Grammar As Style. It’s been out of print since 1971. The copies on Amazon are way beyond my current budget. Next month, I might try to spring for Tufte’s Syntax as Style.

Somehow, I need to break free of the “write tight” and “keep it simple, sister” dictums, to cease to see sentences of more than ten words as verbose. If those old seventh-grade essays weren’t gone, (and musty with mold as I remember last finding them, elsewhere than here), they might help too; though I’m fairly sure that in those days I thought nothing of packaging three or four fat adjectives together in one phrase of description.

While that works to lengthen sentences, editors these days view such writing as padded, and the mark of a beginner. I’d like to keep telling myself that I’m beyond that beginning stage, but perhaps it isn’t so. One thing is certain. I write better dialog than I did back in seventh grade. I’ll call that progress.