Proconsul Report

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Proconsul Report

You ever wonder what happens when stories get edited? What happens to those bits and pieces that the editor(s) decided should go? F. Scott Fitzgerald used to take those removed pieces and try to put them into other works. So did Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and James Joyce. Just think. Something from say, The Chrysanthemums by Steinbeck could have worked its way into The Grapes of Wrath or vice-versa. It might be vice-versa. I can't remember the publishing dates for either work off the top of my head. Twain used to call editors, "horrible cannibals." And Hemingway once joked that sometimes, he drank not for himself, or for his friends or those who passed, but for those words that were lost because of some idiot in the copy room.

I have a love/hate relationship with the editing process. I love it, because it picks up where I'm more wordy than necessary, more often than not. I hate it, because sometimes it plucks out those gems that I spent so many hours crafting and laboring over. I don't just delete them, though. I took a page out of Fitzgerald's book, and keep them somewhere. And I freely admit. There's stuff in Khyron's biography that I took out and saved, and it wormed its way into GJW fiction, Runons and even the occasional short I write purely for myself or the Clan.

I also have a love/hate relationship with the writing process. It's like marriage. I argue a lot with what I'm writing, make up with it. Argue again. Over and over. I go on these benders where I can type up close to forty pages in a sitting. And once that's done. I just start hacking away at it. When I wrote Khyron's biography, it swelled to just over 37 pages. I never showed anyone that draft. That's the most incomplete draft ever. Slowly, carefully, I carved it. I parsed it down to around 10. And that's the one I started sending out to people I trusted to give me the real dirt when it came to editing.

Still, the process of writing, especially good writing, is extremely personal. Because whether you like it or not, the best pieces you will ever give birth to are tied to you. They aren't tied to you because you labored for 40+ hours typing out 10,000 words. They're tied to you, because the best of your writing will almost always be a culmination of your experiences. Could you honestly write about love without ever having been in love? No. Could you paint a real, a vivid and astounding image of horror if you've never witnessed it? Probably not.

However, I would love to see all of you flex your literary muscle. To that end, there are two literary type competitions open to the entire Clan. Shiny goodies are available to the best. The first is a writing competition. Unlike the godawful MT's and topics in major competitions, this writing competition is patterned off of, well, the kind of writing competition you will be more likely to find in real life. I give you a prompt or starting off point, and you write. There is a minimum of 1800 words. And a very loose maximum of 3000 words. I say "very loose" because if you really need to go over 3000 you can. The caveat to this is that too many words can kill a story just as easily as not enough. You have to pick your words and their usage carefully. The competition starts today, and runs until the 18th of May. Here is the first line for the story : It just wasn't fair, this kind of thing happens to other people...

Good luck with that one guys. You're free to take it wherever you want it to go. That even means, it doesn't have to stay in the Star Wars universe. I just want to see good writing. If you want the formal competition details, or to see me play around with Richard Bratigan's The Scarlatti Tilt, they're at the comp page

God that's ugly. I won't ever paste the URL to a competition again.

The second competition is a Runon. The runon is located here:

http://www.darkjedibrotherhood.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=4160

Rules are in the first post. Read them carefully. I would also advise people to read the first "In The Shadows" which is located here:

http://www.darkjedibrotherhood.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=844

Furthermore, you will need something else for this Runon. I am using this newest runon to introduce more undead creatures to the Clan. Every few days, I will post updates to http://www.tarentum.org/2/viewtopic.php?t=6. There, will include more and more undead creatures that the Clan has run into and may run into. By the way, coming up with pictures for those things would be appreciated and rewarded with shiny goodies, too.

We're still sending out rewards for work done during the last Rite of Succession and the Outer Rim War. Sorry if it's taking a while, I'm kind of getting annoyed with the level of detail necessary for some of this stuff. It has me nostalgic for the days of yore when awarding a medal was actually done by the person sending in the recommendation, because the Summits controlled the roster and the id-lines of their members. Darn Dev and Howie for starting to regulate that stuff.

If you have any questions about the above, please feel free to e-mail me.

Regards,

Maxamillian von Oberst-Tarentae,

Proconsul of Clan Tarentum,

A bunch of other stuff goes here

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