I love rewriting my work – honestly I do! Some writers hate it, but I get a kick out of tweaking my words, tightening sentences and catching any errors I missed with the first draft. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the last week.
I mentioned earlier about WiP #2 – the book on Democracy for Capstone Press. Well, at first I thought one of the biggest challenges would be injecting it with humour . . . and I was right.
In addition to cramming all you need to know about democracy into 2000 words, I came up with a whole bunch of gag comics based such fun topics as the US Senate, the Reign of Terror in post-revolutionary France and electoral fraud. Simple, right? No. But definitely fun.
It was a challenge but I really enjoyed it and hopefully my editor will too. We’ll see in about a week’s time when I get my edits back.
Until then, I’ve escaped the land of rewrites and have a weekend ahead of me working on a super-secret, cannot reveal, wouldn’t you like to know project that I can’t even label as WiP #5 yet. Yet.
Patience my friends. Patience.
The Reign of Terror is packed with gags. Witness: on the way to the way to the guillotine Danton’s terrible pun to Fabre d’Eglantine about how Fabre would be creating great vers (verses/worms in French) by the following week; Hanriot’s trick with the dangling eyeball as he climbed the ladder to the guillotine, and Robespierre’s limerick about a sans-cullotte from Nantucket (I can never remember the last line of that one).
The most important lesson from the Reign of Terror is that where is the expression terrorist comes from – it means a government that terrorises the people. Somehow in the intervening 210 years it got subverted into meaning the opposite.
Andrew – I should have talked to you before I wrote my drafts! You’re a gag-writing machine and there’s nothing grade schoolers like than jokes with dangling eyeballs and worms.
I didn’t know that about the word terror – that would have been fun to put in there. Darn.
Yes, poor Hanriot, the usually drunk commander of the Jacobin government’s military forces in Paris, was arrested during the events of Thermidor in the Year 2. During his apprehension there was a struggle and his eye was poked out. It wasn’t severed however and dangled out of its socket for the remaining 12 hours of his life. As he was climbing up the ladder to be beheaded a enterprising souvenir hunter dashed from the crowd and plucked the eye away and made off with it. Thankfully Hanriot was drunk and barely noticed apparently.
See how history can be fun, kids?