Punctuation affectation
things you learn from editors
DEAREST ONES:
I am thrilled to announce that my short story collection will be published (for sure, I have signed the contract) by Borda Books in 2023. It is called A FLASH OF DARKNESS: collected stories of M. M. De Voe. You will like it! It is full of ridiculous stories that will amuse you while they dismay or alarm you—just like this newsletter. (If you are my mom, you won’t understand why you like it but you will read it anyway, which is very nice of you, and I appreciate that.)
In addition to the book deal, I published a few opinion pieces. A review of the new Whole Foods in FiDi, a little futuristic speculation about how to fix the writing industry. But my main focus has been making final edits on the manuscript.
My favorite thing about the process so far is that my editrix, the fabulous Angela Borda, began our relationship with the usual compliments and eagerness and then she said, “You like colons. There are 158 colons in this collection.”
A week later, I am still grinning widely when I type this.
How many colons should a story collection have? How many commas? How many question marks? How many stories? How many characters per story? How many pages? Why can an editor always know if there are too few or too many of these things? What magic do they have?
THINGS I DID THIS WEEK THAT MIGHT AMUSE YOU:
I saw A STRANGE LOOP on Broadway. It is a musical about imposters syndrome. Very meta: the writer of a musical is writing a musical about how hard it is to finish his musical. The joy is that the viewer knows that this musical is being performed on Broadway — and I had even greater joy/hope because at the performance I saw, the musical’s lead actor had fallen ill and instead of canceling the show, the actors did a simple reading of the script, with the numbers sung, and the writer of the show came out to perform his 25-year old self’s self-doubt and self-loathing. Why was that fun? Because we knew from his bio that his 40 year old actual self had won dozens of prizes for this show about how desperately he wanted to break through his mental blocks to complete the show—including a Tony and Time’s Man of the Year!
Seeing that show performed by the main character’s future-self felt like being told not to give up. (That said, once a play like this exists no person will ever get a production of another play like this—you can only break ground once. And his got done because the self-loathing portrayed is so impossibly deep and the exhibited talent is so clearly huge that the more success the show receives, the more everyone’s self-loathing and self-doubt are exposed as “in our heads” and not real.
The second thing I did (that same day) was go see A MAN CALLED OTTO, Tom Hanks’ American translation of A MAN CALLED OVE, which is the perfect novel and also a fairly recent, mighty-fine movie in Swedish.
After the movie, there was a panel that included, besides the director and most of the actors from the show, Tom and his producer-wife Rita and their third son Truman, who, his mom kept saying “is not an actor, but an excellent cinematographer, listed in the 600 and everything.” I could not get over how familial their interactions were, from the bashful laughter after the moderator asked why they had remade the film. “Oh we were just watching the foreign film Oscar nominees at home over dinner,” said Rita, “And the movie was just so good, so I said to Tom, hey someone should bring this film to America and give it a wider audience, and then he said, yeah but who would play Ove, and I said you, and he didn’t say no, so I knew there was a good chance he would say yes…”
Then when discussing who would play the young Otto, she went on to describe how both of their older sons are “real actors,” but the casting director wanted someone who looked like Tom, and of the three sons Truman looked the most like Tom, so they tried him out and his embarrassment at all the attention was perfect for the part.
Which is a huge part. With lots of lines. It made me think that on film with multiple takes, a good director can coax a great performance from literally anyone, even some guy’s youngest son who isn’t even an actor.
(The actress who played young Otto’s young wife fiercely defended Truman as “a real actor” and no one noticed her impassioned little moment, but in that one sentence I heard an awful lot of backstage conversations played out.)
This whole interaction really opened my eyes to what can be done if 1) you are Hollywood royalty 2) you have the money and 3) you steal a good idea and don’t ruin it by trying to change it.
Okay fine, the book wasn’t stolen. They paid a lot for it. But isn’t is sad, in a way, that Tom Hanks had to remake the entire movie in order for Americans to believe that they might like it? It is shot-for-shot nearly the same as the Swedish original, with a couple of minor editorial changes…think of the differences between the British version of the Harry Potter books and the American version.
Why does an American audience always need to be spoonfed baby-food versions of original art?
That question was specifically for the one reader who noticed that I inverted the writing news with my random ridiculous thoughts this week. I see you.
I just finished a re-read of The Great Gatsby, and all I recalled from the first three readings was the whole eyeglasses/advertisement-as-God thing that I wrote a paper on in 6th grade or whenever I read that book first. This time I can’t get over all the coded commentary on Nick Carroway’s life and systemic discrimination and the perpetuation of classism, and, as a writer, the extremely subtle ways that the scenes with dialogue are written. So many insightful details are merely implied—and most readers fly right by without stopping, because they are mostly just reading for plot.
(Did you notice how that is a Gastby reference, there? see? we don’t notice anything.)
I have recently been reading books for more than just plot; as I take my daughter around to do her first looks at colleges, I have a lot of waiting time. College was the only time that plot seemed irrelevant: in life as well as in art. What happened was always less important than why it happened and what it might mean in the grander context of living.
Milda
Congrats...Super news. Plz put me down for a signed copy of first edition. N
Congrats on the book, Milda! Can't wait till it comes out! Loved your reflections here. What fun!
Ginnie Hartman