Killing My Darlings

By now, with the release of the new movie starring Daniel Radcliffe as the pre-Howl Allen Ginsberg, many of you will be familiar with the advice given to writers to "kill your darlings." You may even desire to know who really coined that phrase, meaning to cut all self-indulgent, superfluous, if masterful passages of your magnus opus during the revision stage. If so, read the article by Forrest Wickman in the online blog of the culture and current affairs magazine Slate for the short list of suspects. As for me, it is time to take that advice to heart.

It is round two of revisions on the memoir I am ghostwriting (though perhaps that phrase is not entirely accurate as my client has told me he intends to credit my labors in the "as told to" category). If anything, getting my name on the tome only heightens my anxiety at this stage to make a decent showing.

Word Games and Panlexicon

As the Millennials say, "My bad." It has been over a month since I have blogged. Seems that writing a book gets in the way of all sorts of fun activities. 

One activity I do indulge in, however, is thinking about and searching for the perfect word, not only for the book I am currently working on, but for passwords, user names, puns, snippets of email exchanges, and so on. 

One of the best I have come up with in the last year or so is "Palabramor" as my twitter name. In case you don't speak Spanish, that combines "palabra" or "word" and "amor" or "love." Cute, huh? Too bad only Spanish speakers will recognize my wit.

In this vein, I have been playing with the idea of a business name for quite some time that would incorporate all the writing services I offer, not just the memoir ghostwriting. Any writer will recognize the amusement value of such an enterprise. What fun it is to play with words. I suspect that most will also soon realize, after a Google search or two, how difficult it is to come up with something really original.