Frazz by Jef Mallett for July 12, 2018

Stuff that gets in the way of the story’s progress.

Per walkers are intrepid. They’ll walk anything on 4 legs so long is it isn’t carnivorous or larger than they are.

Editor wants 400 pages.

I’ll give him 400 pages.

How is Bradbury all Hooptedoodle?

Hooptedoodle: All the Final Four projections that get published three months before the season begins…see “Pigskinpiffle”…

Out of Leonard’s 10 rules of writing, the most important one is number 11, which he never cited: as soon as a rule gets in your way, break it.

http://www.elmoreleonard.com/index.php?/weblog/more/elmore_leonard_on_john_steinbeck/

I walk in Waukegan every chance I get.

Now I’m in the mood to re-read some classic Bradbury.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy is an example of excellent world-building, which most SF authors go thru in their own minds before starting in on the story, then leave 90% of it off the printed page so they can deliver an actual narrative to the reader. Robinson, however, unloads it all, with the story slipped into the cracks here and there. What he should have done, IMO, is published a novella with a 3-volume appendix for the benefit of those who care more about the physics than the people.

Leonard and Bradbury both have very clear, lucid styles (as does Steinbeck).

And what grade is this guy in?

What’s all this kerfuffle about hooptedoodles? You’d think they were going to a hoop-de-doo…

Noun: Simply put, hooptedoodle is a literary term that refers to the type of overly wordy prose that gets in the way of propelling a story forward. It’s filler, and could be edited out without taking anything important or relevant from the writing.

I enjoy all three authors, and I think anyone who calls Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine hooptedoodle and avoids it is missing one of the great coming-of-age novels around. It’s poetic and very insightful. Beautiful.

Sorry, but I found Bradbury to be the most depressing writer I ever experienced. I can try to read a short story “blind,” but when I start feeling suicidal half-way though I know who the author is.

In general I’m opposed to abridgment, but there are places where it’s a necessary evil, e.g. “Moby Dick” or Mark Twain’s “A Tramp Abroad” (although to be fair the pieces in Tramp were written as newspaper columns).