Carrion Comfort is beginning to take shape.
I’m beginning to see this as an entirety instead of a conglomeration.
My tendency for wordiness, however, gets the better of me, all the time. I’m currently revising some drafts of texts, and one of the actions I’m taking is reducing the wordiness.
Above, for example, I almost wrote “a conglomeration of bits and pieces” instead of just “a conglomeration.” What else is a conglomeration than a thing comprised of bits and pieces?
I say this because often, when writing these blog entries on Carrion Comfort (My Grief Handbook), I don’t want them to end. I don’t know how to make them end, so they just stop. They often are shapeless because in my head, in the larger book version of this text, they are chapter length.
But should they be? How much should be added to these vignettes to make them whole? What am I bringing to the table by expanding these thoughts? The success of a piece like this is, I think, the sincerity of it.
But I am a revisionist. As I told my students the other day, one needs to find his or her writing process. I found mine while writing my dissertation: vomit on a page, and revise for five years.
How do I let this go? And when I do, what will it mean to my grief?
The Postmodern Bluestocking 