What if I created a blog and never wrote in it?

Forgive me, blogworld, for I have sinned. It has been nine days since my last post, and that one really didn't count.

The reason I have been so dilatory is that I've been actually editing. I know, pretty amazing. My novel-in-progress, Border Patrol, is slowly moving from rough draft to first draft stage, and I'm about one-third of the way through it. I edited three chapters of it yesterday before my brain threatened to explode.

I also plead in my defense the excuse that we at The Town Drunk have been in the midst of our second reading period, which just closed.

Here's what I have learned from reading slush:

1. A great opening paragraph won't sell your story, but it will keep it from getting pitched right away. Yes, slush readers really do write a story off if its opening is terribly written.

2. Narrating the entire plot is a really bad idea. Show us stuff happening. Invent characters, make them talk to each other, make them do stuff.

3. A concept is not a story. Stuff has to happen. See item 2, above.

4. It's okay when you're sitting down to write your story if you don't know where it's going. Take your time, let it wander around until it figures out what it wants to be about. But don't send that first draft. Once you know what your story is about, once that first draft is done, go back through it and ruthlessly hack out everything that doesn't hew to that story arc. Your story is not the forest, but the map through the forest. Show us the way.

5. And I realize this is not something that all slush readers and editors require, but it's something I need -- make me care about what happens to the protagonist. The way you do that is through characterization. Show me who the protagonist is, make him or her human -- even if he's actually a three-headed bugman from Alpha Centauri. It's human emotions that allow me as a reader to connect with a character. The best story I read in the slush pile this period is one that had me leaning forward until my breath was almost fogging the monitor, so anxious was I to see everything turn out okay for the protagonist. If that story doesn't make the cut, I've determined to write the author of it a letter encouraging him (he's a new writer) to market the hell out of it. That's a story that will find a home somewhere.

6. Read the damn guidelines.

I'm sure there are more things I've learned from the slushpile, but that's all that occurs to me right now, and it's time to go off and do some actual writing. A bientôt, mes amis.