A Tough Editing Decision

The most recent issue of One Story magazine (issue #166) showcases the story World's End by Clare Beams. Below are two versions of a short excerpt from the story. One version is exactly as it is published. The other version, I've altered. I'm wondering if you can guess which one is the version actually published.

To set the scene, Robert Cale, a wealthy businessman, is talking to an architect he's hired and is meeting for the first time.

Version one:

"What I want to do is put up houses. Sell them. People said I should talk to somebody before I bring in the builders, so we put everything in the right place. You're younger than I thought."

Version two:

"What I want to do is put up houses. Sell them. People said I should talk to somebody before I bring in the builders, so we put everything in the right place." Then, with no audible pause, "You're younger than I thought."

I'm assuming Clare Beams (or her editor) recognized both versions were possible, and I'd guess Clare (or her editor) thought long and hard about which version was preferable. The second version tells you that there's "no...pause" between two sentences, but by adding the words that tell you there's no pause, the story pauses. I see a conflict between what the text says and what the story does.

If you don't believe me, then try this third version, which I definitely made up:

"...so we put everything in the right place." Then, he didn't pause at all, he just went right on talking with no hesitation, no delay, no amount of time spent being silent between words... nope, he just went on to his next sentence and you couldn't have blinked twice in the time between his previous and his next sentence: "You're younger than I thought."

You see the problem.

I also wonder about the word "audible" in "no audible pause." Why not just "Then, with no pause..."? A pause in dialogue can be only heard. It can't be smelled or seen or tasted. Imagine the author writing "Then, with no smellable pause..." Ridiculous. So I wonder if "no audible pause" in this case contains a redundancy.

By now you've probably guessed that version two, with the spelled-out lack of an audible pause, is the one the author or editor chose. I wish I knew why. The only argument for it I can think of is to prepare the reader for a change in the subject of Robert's dialogue. It's a sudden change. Version one above might surprise readers enough that they'd have to re-read that bit. So I can see the need for something to mark the transition. But why "Then, with no audible pause..."? Why not "Then he changed the subject." or "His eyes narrowed as he added," or something much better written than either of these suggestions? There has to be a better "beat" available than one that blatantly contradicts itself, especially since self-contradiction plays no role in the story, thematically or otherwise.

See what happens when you take editing seriously? I can't just read stories anymore, I have to play around with the parts that bug me.

Sentences Within Sentences

With the publication of Issue #17, the OTP blog returns!

A writing technique I've seen few authors get away with is the placement of complete sentences within other complete sentences. Below is what I consider a particularly telling example of what can go wrong when you try to put too much information into one sentence.

The quote comes from Statistical and Machine-Learning Data Mining: Techniques for Better Predictive Modeling and Analysis of Big Data, Second Edition, by Bruce Ratner.

(Don't worry if you don't fully understand the technical content. Just examine it as one huge sentence. And it's a real shame this sentence had the same effect on my reading that a speed bump has on my driving, because for the most part, I thought Ratner's book was well done. In fact, his explanation of CHAID and related techniques is the best I've read to date. All that aside, I wish someone had revised this next bit before it went to print:)

CHAID is a popular technique, especially among wannabe regression modelers with no significant statistical training because (1) CHAID regression tree models are easy to build, understand, and implement; and (2) CHAID underpinnings are quite attractive: CHAID is an assumption-free method, meaning there are no formal theoretical assumptions to meet (traditional regression models are assumption full, which makes them susceptible to risky results). 

That was published as one sentence! I count five distinct sentences in all that text. Here's how I'd rewrite it. For clarity, I put a number in brackets in front of each separate sentence.

[1] CHAID is a popular technique, especially among wannabe regression modelers with no significant statistical training. [2] First, CHAID regression tree models are easy to build, understand, and implement. [3] Second, CHAID underpinnings are quite attractive. [4] It's an assumption-free method, meaning there are no formal theoretical assumptions to meet. [5] (Traditional regression models are full of assumptions, which makes them susceptible to risky results.)

I see such beyond-run-on-sentences quite frequently, especially in technical and academic writing aimed at audiences with a specific educational background. I know it's easy to get carried away with long sentences; I do it myself. When revising, examine those long sentences carefully and ask yourself if splitting them into shorter sentences would work better.

(As a real example, I considered removing the semi-colon in the "I know it's easy..." sentence. After some thought, I decided "I do it myself" is attached enough to the prior idea that the semi-colon works. However, the prior two sentences were originally one long one. Yes, that's right, I violated the very rule I'm talking about while drafting an example of not violating the rule. That's how ingrained long sentences are in me! Sad, isn't it?)

Having My Own Work Edited, Part 4 of 4

Finally, I'll talk about specific edits that were made to the draft of "Fourth Wish" I sent Cliffhanger Books. Underlined parts show what changed.

Original: "the imps had attempted to put on five different plays since going to the human world"

Revision: "the imps had attempted to put on five different plays since returning from the human world"

Why the change? I wasn't sure at first, since the imps did in fact go to, and return from, the human world. But they spent just enough time there that I figure the editors wanted to make clear what time frame I really meant--the clock started ticking when they got back, not when they left. Honestly, I don't consider this edit worth making, but I also don't consider it worth arguing about. Part of taking a professional attitude towards writing is picking your battles carefully.

Original: "[Skragg] summoned a window into the human world. Specifically, Candace's home."

Revision: "[Skragg] summoned a window into Candace's home."

This one made me say "Duh." The only time shorter is worse than longer is if every word in the longer version adds something meaningful to the reading experience. The underlined part adds nothing because we know Candace's home is in the human world. There is no such thing as a neutral word or phrase that has no effect on the reader. Every word, phrase, and sentence either makes your story stronger or weaker.

Original dialogue: "So when she turned twenty-one I said, sure, I'll be a guardian, and I had the house inspected and did all the lawyer things..."

Revised dialogue: "So when she turned twenty-one I said, sure, I'll be a guardian. I had the house inspected and did all the lawyer things..."

Candace is under significant stress as she's talking. In my original, she's rambling with long run-on sentences. As usual, I spoke all the dialogue aloud and acted it out in the way I imagined Candace would say it before sending my story to the editors. I'd gotten locked into a way of seeing this scene. The simple edit Kevin and Karen came up with (this one was Karen's) changed my view of how Candace was saying her lines. Now when I act out her lines, I think her dialogue sounds more believable. Why? Because it takes me less effort to say it. I don't need to take such a long breath because her sentences are shorter.

So writers: try speaking your dialogue in more than one way before sending that story out! Try putting pauses in weird places, just to see if you stumble into a pattern that sounds better than your original. It really works.

Having My Own Work Edited, Part 3 of 4

Now that I've covered the high-level changes I made to a story I recently sold, I'll go into some of the embarrassing line edits the editors suggested or made. I say "embarrassing" because while some edits were of the "personal taste" variety (like suggesting two short paragraphs should be combined), others are better labeled as "Tarl, you should know better than to submit prose this clumsy."

Here are two writing faults that appeared several times in the story I submitted. 

First, I use "that" too often. Several times sentences such as "She knew that genies normally didn't..." got edited to "She knew genies normally didn't..." and I agree with 100% of those changes. Sometimes I think I have a "that" key on my keyboard and just enough obsessive compulsive disorder to feel great stress if I don't press it at least once a paragraph. I catch most of them in my own rewrites, but not all. 

Solution: From now on I'll use the search function to find every "that" in the whole document, and delete or rewrite the ones that serve no purpose. (There's one: "ones THAT serve no purpose." You might say that particular "that" is necessary, but I could have written, "and delete or rewrite the pointless ones," which I think is stronger. Even when "that" serves a real need, it's rarely the strongest way to say what you're trying to say.)

Second, my readers are having more trouble than I'd expect understanding who says what line of dialogue, especially when three or more people might be speaking. (And I write a lot of group interaction scenes.) 

Solution: Change my strategy from "avoid dialogue markers unless absolutely necessary" to:

1) When two characters are conversing, use some kind of marker at least every fourth line.

2) When three or more people are conversing, use some kind of marker every time it is not painfully obvious who is speaking.

No matter how many people are engaged in the following example of a conversation, do you really need a marker for the second line of dialogue?

J.D., Elliot, and Turk stood by as Dr. Cox asked Carla, "Dear GOD will you please stop making that noise?"

"What noise?"

Since the second line is in direct response to the first, and the first addressed a specific person, readers can assume the second speaker is the one being addressed by the first. 

Now consider this next example, which represents the kind of error I make all the time.

J.D., Elliot, and Turk stood by as Carla ran her fingernails down a blackboard. Dr. Cox asked, "Dear GOD what is that horrible noise?"

"What noise?"

In my mind, Carla's speaking the second line, but it's at least theoretically possible someone else said it. Maybe everyone else is pretending not to hear it for some reason and Turk said it. Anyway, since Dr. Cox's question was asked to the group as a whole, readers can't assume Carla's responding.

Next time, I wrap up this little series of posts with more embarrassing line edits.

Having My Own Work Edited, Part 2 of 4

"The Fourth Wish" is a short story that's part of a connected series of stories. It's the second one to get accepted for publication and the fourth one to be written. Now that a second one has been accepted, I believe enough in the idea's commercial potential to commit to writing the rest of them and trying to sell them as a novel-in-stories. However, I don't think I'll try to sell any of the other stories as self-contained pieces of fiction, and this post is about my reasoning.

These stories are about the world's last wish-granting genie and his human master, Candace. In this world a bond between genie and master is for life and the master gets one wish every ten years. Candace has her first wish at age six (that story is already published). "The Fourth Wish" is set 30 years later.

You see the problem. While the first story requires no background because the characters are new, "The Fourth Wish" carries ideas into it from the previous ones. Candace's prior wishes matter, because one of them has a substantial effect on her current life. Yet nothing would have killed this story faster than a flashback explaining the previous stories. So what could I do?

My answer was to pretend, to the greatest extent possible, that there are no other stories. When I couldn't avoid some bit of background, I presented it in a way that develops a central character. 

Specifically, the genie hates being enslaved to a human, and the rules say he can be free of her if she wishes for something greedy enough—some kind of wish that would ruin her life if granted. In this internal monologue, we see how her refusal to abuse his power drives him crazy:

She’d wasted her first wish on ice cream. Her second was for help deciding what college to go to. Her third was for “enough” money. What kind of human wished for “enough” money? When was she going to get stupid like the rest of her kind? If he had to be chained to her for another fifty or sixty years…

In my view, the keys to this monologue are (1) it's in character for the genie to complain to himself, (2) it's short, and most importantly, (3) it appears at a point in the story where readers ought to be wondering what Candace's prior wishes were. So I'm not boring the readers with information I want them to know, I'm telling them information that (I hope) they want to know. 

Still, I don't go on for long paragraphs, and I do not employ a flashback. I say it in as few words as I can, then get on with the story.

Finally, to make "The Fourth Wish" stand alone, I eliminated some critical facts about my fictional world and changed another. The change relates to the creatures called "imps." For Cliffhanger Books, I made the imps male instead of saying they're magical creatures that don't have, or require, gender. And I don't discuss why the genie calls himself the last wish-granting genie. Were there others? What happened to them? And why does the last genie live on a desolate plain with only three annoying imps for company? The novel-in-stories answers all of these questions. The stand-alone story treats them as facts, not questions: He's the last, he lives on a flat plain, and three imps live there too. And to make it possible to ignore those questions, I changed their answers. The "real" answers have implications that can't be ignored.

That's why I don't think I'll try to sell more of these stories by themselves. I have to abandon too much material to make them work independently.

Having My Own Work Edited, Part 1 of 4

I recently sold a story called "The Fourth Wish" to a paranormal romance anthology being published by Cliffhanger Books. I don't know much about paranormal romance. In fact, as much as the editors liked my story, my ignorance of the genre caused some problems, and they've asked me to change a few story elements to better fit what readers expect from such stories.

I have no problem making those kinds of changes. Why? Because even though the money I make from occasional short story sales is negligible, I pride myself on a professional attitude. My personal opinion of what "professional attitude" for writing means can be summed up in this pair of phrases: 

Amateurs write for themselves. Professionals write for the people who pay them.

If you're serious about having your work published by others, sold by others, and marketed by others, then I think you need to be serious about letting others have some say over what you write. I'm friends with a couple of people whose primary source of income is freelance writing. Do you know what those people write for a living? Whatever their paying audience tells them to, that's what.

Oh, they can reject assignments that go against their ethics or religion or something. They're freelance writers, not minions of some evil overlord. But if these people were asked to write 2,500 words about litter on the Atlantic City boardwalk in exchange for their going rate, they'd do it, even if they aren't all that personally interested in boardwalk litter. And if the editor read a draft and said "This is great, but can you focus more on the north end of the boardwalk?", they'd rewrite the article. They wouldn't go off on some bombastic tirade about artistic integrity.

Now some people say writing fiction is like any other artist creating any other art: the artists have to follow their muses, the crowd be damned. That's fine, if you honestly don't care whether anyone ever sees your work. Me, I'd like people to read my stories. Otherwise I'd never send them to magazines. I'd just hide my stories under my bed and go around calling myself a writer, and I'd cough in embarrassment any time someone asked where they could read anything I'd written.

Because I want others to read my stories, I will accept help from people who know my intended audience better than I do. Kevin from Cliffhanger told me even though it was perfectly in character for my sarcastic genie to use the word "retard," Cliffhanger's audience wouldn't like it. So, I changed the wording. Karen from Cliffhanger told me my story worked fine as it was, but her readers would want the female in the romance to appear sooner. So, I started revisions that introduced her in the first sentence.


"The Fourth Wish" is part of a series of connected stories that I intend to sell as a novel when it's ready, and I might reverse a couple of Kevin's and Karen's suggested changes when that time comes. But for Cliffhanger Books, I'm trusting my editors and following their guidance because they know my audience better than I do, and because I want that audience to read my story and like it.

Next time: the challenge of taking a story that's part of a larger tale and making it stand on its own.

Not Knowing Key Facts

Few problems in a short story can be more jarring than an author who seems ignorant of some fact that's important to the story—or would be, anyway, if the author knew that fact. For instance, imagine a murder mystery in which the most important clue was the "fact" that the iPhone was invented by Radio Shack in 1962. Of course it wasn't, and most readers will know that, and they'll stop believing in the story's fictional world right then and there. 

One of my favorite short stories will forever be marred for me by a fact that seems to have slipped past one author and at least three different editors. The story is How to Talk to a Hunter by Pam Houston. Here's the paragraph, which shows the hunter trying to apologize after cheating on the protagonist:

When you get home in the morning there's a candy tin on your pillow. Santa, obese and grotesque, fondles two small children on the lid. The card will say something like "From your not-so-secret admirer." Open it. Examine each carefully made truffle. Feed them, one at a time, to the dog. Call the hunter's machine. Tell him you don't speak chocolate.

The problem, in case you don't know, is that chocolate is poisonous to dogs. (And this character would never deliberately harm her dog.) The next thing that should happen in this story is an emergency trip to the vet. True, a huge dog can take a small bite of chocolate and just get a little sick, but still, chocolate and dogs are never a good combination. I've never owned a dog, and even I know that.

Who doesn't seem to know that? 

* Pam Houston, the author. (Although maybe, just maybe, she does because later in the story she describes the dog as "nauseous." I think that's a gross underestimate of the problem, though.)

* The editors of Quarterly West magazine, who published the story in (I believe) 1989, who should have asked Pam, "Are you sure you want the protagonist to feed a poisonous substance to her dog? That seems highly out of character."

* Shannon Ravenel, the series editor for Best American Short Stories who selected the story as a candidate for the 1990 edition of that series.

* Richard Ford, who selected Pam Houston's story out of all the candidates Ms. Ravenel had chosen, ensuring that the story would appear in the 1990 BASS edition.

* Any of the editors at W. W. Norton, who published her story in a compilation of Pam Houston's works called Cowboys Are My Weakness. Even if the BASS rules say stories must be accepted exactly as they appear in the original magazine (and I don't know if that's true), stories get re-edited all the time when they appear in later compilations. 

Either back in the early 1990's no one knew chocolate and dogs don't mix, or a whole lot of people weren't paying attention to that particular line. And that's sad to me, because it's really a trivial detail in a story I think deserves its placement in the 1990 BASS. That detail could have been removed or adjusted without losing a thing.

Not just redundancy...

In the last entry, I talked about the significant redundancy in a paragraph from an otherwise terrific cookbook called Cookwise written by food scientist Shirley Corriher. Even fixing the redundancy doesn't entirely solve this paragraph's problems, though. To prove it, here's a version with the redundancies edited out:
 
Mixing methods play a major role in cake texture. Frequently there are no real rights or wrongs in cooking, as "right" is often a matter of personal preference. From the very beginning you may as well do some soul searching and decide what kind of a cake person you really are. Do you love... [various styles of cake are compared].

What is the purpose of the first sentence in that paragraph? The first sentence is about mixing methods. The rest of the paragraph focuses on the idea that there are many different kinds of cake and it's up to you to decide which kind you like best. If you're not convinced yet the first sentence doesn't belong where it is, look at the next paragraph:

If lightness is your first concern, you should choose a mixing method...that gives prime importance to volume and aeration. [...] On the other hand, if you are a texture person, you should choose the two-stage method....

I think the first sentence of the first quoted paragraph belongs at the beginning of the second quoted paragraph instead of where it appears in the book. If you rearrange the text that way, you get:

Paragraph 1: There's more than one way to make a perfectly good cake, but different methods produce different results.

Paragraph 2: Mixing methods play a major role in how the cake comes out, so if you want a specific kind of cake, you'll have to pay careful attention to the order in which you mix the ingredients.

The rest of this cookbook is, in my opinion, much better written. I have to wonder if these two paragraphs are the result of a last-second rewrite, or something. They have a quality I associate with first drafts: good ideas presented in an order that feels awkward and disconnected from each other, and from the surrounding material. In short, it's writing that says, "I put this sentence here because that's where the cursor was when I thought of that sentence." In a first draft, that's fine. In a published book, I consider it embarrassing.

Redundancy

Earlier in this blog, I said we'd discuss some of the edits we made to the stories we chose for publication in Issue #16. This idea didn't work for two reasons. First, I forgot to ask permission from the authors, who might not want us talking about the clumsier parts of their original entries. Second, none of the stories required all that much editing. Sure, we found an unnecessary "that" or two, but most of our editing came in the form of questions. 

For example, maybe one character had a line of dialogue that we thought was too harsh, or maybe too stupid or too smart, for the character as presented in the rest of the story. Or maybe there was a critical detail in a story that we thought could have been presented more clearly, because it confused at least one of our judges. 

So for now, it's back to examples of prose I think needs some editing even though it was published somewhere reputable. 

Food scientist Shirley O. Corriher wrote one of the best cookbooks and cooking instruction manuals I've ever seen. It's called Cookwise: The Hows & Whys of Successful Cooking. If you cook or bake and you're not already teaching food science somewhere, you can probably learn quite a bit about cooking or baking from this book.

But in places, the prose could have used tighter editing. Here's an example from a section on cakes (p. 141 of the hardback edition).

Mixing methods play a major role in cake texture. Frequently there are no real rights or wrongs in cooking. As the saying goes, "One man's meat is another man's poison." Many times "right" is a matter of personal preference. From the very beginning you may as well do some soul searching and decide what kind of a cake person you really are. Do you love... [various styles of cake].

Could you finish that paragraph without wanting to shout, "I get it already"? I couldn't. The second, third, and fourth sentence all convey exactly the same information. Sol Stein, in his book Stein on Writing, says that in prose, 1 + 1 = 1/2. He means that, in prose, saying something twice is half as effective as saying it once, and I agree.

If I'd edited Cookwise, I'd have numbered each of those sentences and asked the author to tell me the one she wanted to keep.

Bad Ambiguity Strikes Again

I love the restaurant review book Eating Las Vegas by John Curtas, Max Jacobson, and Al Mancini. I think I'd keep buying the annual editions even if I never went to Las Vegas again, just to stay in touch with their views on restaurant trends.

I wish the book had been more thoroughly edited, though. Here's a line that doesn't work for me at all. It's a one-phrase review tucked into page 142 of a section called "Cheap Eats." The note about the  restaurant says:

Popular with locals who wouldn't know real Spanish tapas if they bit them on their Iberico.

(Iberico is a Spanish ham, in case you don't know, and "tapas" are small-plate dishes like appetizers.)

What bugs me: I can't parse the "if they bit them" bit. Normally that phrase would be used like this:

"You stupid editors wouldn't know a good short story if it bit you!"

In the second example, the short story is obviously biting the editor. And that works. But the original text is about food. How do you eat food? Quite often, by biting it. So "if they bit them" can be interpreted both ways: if the tapas bit the locals (the traditional joke sense), or if the locals bit the tapas (the literal sense). 

I suppose you could say that since both interpretations could work, there's no problem, but I disagree. I say that since both interpretations work, the writer has to clarify which one he (meaning John, Al, or Max) means. Which is a lot of work to put into a one-phrase dismissal of a restaurant, and might make the phrase less sharp and amusing. But I'd rather have a slightly less sharp line than one that makes readers wrinkle their brows and wonder what the author's talking about.

The Bad Kind of Ambiguity

A problem I run into all the time with both my own writing and other people's is that some text can be read more than one way, and sometimes the various ways have different meanings. This kind of ambiguous writing can be easy to spot, as in the following example:

Susan told Kelly she didn't know where her shoes were.

You can see the problem. Whose shoes are we talking about, Susan's or Kelly's? On top of that, who is the first "she" referring to? You could mean:

Susan told Kelly that Kelly didn't know where Susan's shoes were. 

(As some strange kind of insult, I assume. "You're so dumb, you don't know where my shoes are!")

Most writers can spot these kinds of mistakes and fix them almost as soon as they're written. But here's a subtler one I ran across on Slate, a news/opinion site:

We disparage things we don't approve of as phony.

Here's the article I saw it in if you're interested.

I can tell the author's trying to say that if we disapprove of something, we call it phony. But can you see the other way to read it? Try this:

"If we don't approve of the level of phoniness in something, we disparage it."

I know the author doesn't mean us to read the sentence that way. But you'd be surprised how many times I run into contest entries that contain a sentence that could be read more than one way. When that happens, I can guarantee you the author doesn't want anyone reading the sentence the other way.

I can also guarantee that if you have enough readers, some small percentage of them will read it the wrong way.

Here's how I'd revise the Slate sentence: 

If we disapprove of something, we disparage it as phony.

So, when you're writing, read over your material once in a while and try to deliberately misunderstand it. If you find you've written something that's easy to draw unintended conclusions about, consider rewriting it to make your intention clearer.

A weird double negative

The only time nowadays that I see grammatically incorrect double negatives like "don't have none" are when writers deliberately break rules for effect. I can't remember the last time I saw anyone, published or not, write such a double negative while thinking it's grammatically okay.

So, that's not the kind of double negative I have qualms about. This next kind is. My example comes from Eating Las Vegas, 2012 ed. by John Curtas, Max Jacobson, and Al Mancini. This book talks about 50 "essential" restaurants in Las Vegas. Keep in mind that despite how this particular quote (from page 44) comes across, I'm taking it out of context. The reviewers admire this restaurant (named Bouchon).

Bouchon is a copy of a copy and has exactly the soul of one. That doesn't mean the food isn't fabulous, but it does mean...

Look at that second sentence. Why use two negatives to express something positive? Because the author, John Curtas in this case, is trying to make a point that even though this restaurant is a terrific French bistro, one aspect of it bothers him.

Had I been the editor, I'd have asked John if he really wanted to start out text that's supposed to be praising the restaurant with quite that much negativity. Also, I'd ask his opinion about whether the double negatives might make his thoughts harder to follow than they have to be.

I'd have suggested:

...and has exactly the soul of one. Yes, the food is fabulous, but... 

Some might argue that the "Yes" in that revision is unnecessary, but I think putting it in captures the feel and intent of the original better than just saying "The food is fabulous, but..."

Sometimes using negatives in this way can enhance a text, but I'll save my favorite negative-to-express-positive example of all time for the next post. Hint: it's from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Any guesses?

Editing a chess master

If you want to practice editing, go find something written for a fairly narrow audience by an expert in a field other than writing. Such publications usually don't get the degree of editing you'd expect for books or magazines that sell many more copies. 

Today's "needs editing" entry comes from what might be the best advanced chess instruction book since... well, maybe ever. So please understand I'm not giving How to Reassess Your Chess, 4th Ed. by Jeremy Silman a bad review. It's a terrific book for chess players. But I'd have edited it more tightly, especially in the areas that don't relate to chess.

In this excerpt from page 45, Silman talks about things we like that are bad for us:

The hot fudge sundae that makes your taste buds scream in bliss--it also carries about two million calories. My wife's favorite old (but classic!) MG sports car--it's fun to drive but tends to catch on fire from time to time for no reason in particular.


"scream in bliss" doesn't work for me. I think of bliss as a quieter state of mind than the word "screaming" evokes. I can see screaming "in joy" or "with delight," maybe, but not "in bliss." Still, I wonder why Silman's reaching for such exaggerated effect here. I think he's trying too hard.


On the other hand, the "two million calories" line doesn't bother me. I think that exaggeration works. 


Now look at the last line. "tends to catch on fire" implies that the car doesn't catch on fire every time, so "from time to time" is redundant. "For no reason" is also implied to me, since no reason is stated, and "in particular" strikes me as useless in this sentence. In my opinion, every word you write makes your text either stronger or weaker. So if the words aren't making your text stronger, "weaker" is the only remaining option.


Here's my suggested revision, with help from co-publisher Bethany:


The hot fudge sundae that makes your taste buds sing carries about two million calories. My wife's favorite old (but classic!) MG sports car is fun to drive, but tends to catch on fire.


Co-publisher Bethany points out "carries" might not be the best verb for the sundae. I think it's good enough that I'd rather stick with the author's original wording, even though I agree "packs" makes more sense.  On the other hand, I agreed that "scream" should be replaced with "sing." Bethany likes putting "for no reason" back in. I disagree only because in this case, I think shorter is funnier and the reader's imagination gets more involved without those three extra words.

I think our revision is less cluttered and flows better. If you've got different ideas on how to revise the original, I'd love to see them.