Editing: Black Pudding

In approaching this story, I go back to one of the times that I workshopped it, and people mentioned how many exclamation points there were. Okay. Fair enough. Most of my stories use virtually none, but this one used them all over the place.

I think the reason goes back to Covey's personality. For her, everything is worthy of the exclamation point. At least, that's how she would be saying it if she were actually narrating. One thing that I've noticed about my writing is that my punctuation adheres more to the way something is read aloud rather than to the precepts of grammar. In a way, I'm actually sticking to the original purpose of punctuation, and that's fine for a first draft. But I know the rules of punctuation, and that means that on a revision, I need to fix them.

So in other words, to reserve the power of the punctuation, I need to use fewer exclamation marks. I can handle that.

I also got a lot of comments about the ending of the story. Some people liked it the way it was, others wanted to make it more overt. Honestly, I think it would eviscerate the story to change the ending. Everything that needs to be implied is there.

The final comment was my description of the food being "safe." Although most people figured it out right away, there was some vagueness at the beginning that could make it tough to interpret. It shouldn't take much of a change to fix that up.

I picked this story to start my revisions because I think it's pretty closed to a finished version. Some stories take a lot of polishing, and others just come out polished. I like the way this one turned out.