Favorite Game, not so favorite cereal.

Growing up (and yesterday) I loved Mario.  Mario was the coolest game that I was awful at.  It was the end bosses that got me.  And the water levels.  But I was pretty good at all of the levels that just ended with a flag.  None of this is pertinent except:  Mario.  Or, more specifically, Super Mario.

Over the weekend I found this sitting in the Kroger grocery:

Of course, I had to buy it.  It is SUPER MARIO CEREAL! How could I not buy it?

But, for the rest of you:  Don't buy it.  Is was Super Not Great!  I'd give it a 2 out of 5.

It tasted kinda like Frankenberry Crunch, but with less overt strawberry flavor, so it wasn't as awesome.  It also had a hint of Smurf Berry Crunch, which was THE best cereals from the 80s that turned to mush in 3 minutes.  But if you ate it fast it was delicious.  Super Mario Cereal was something of a blend of those.  My guess is this cereal could not stand up to Frankenberry or Smurf Berry because they were trying to make it pseudo healthy.  That'll ruin a good sugar indulgent cereal every time.

If you take a look at the fine print under the name you'll see something that struck me as odd.  "Naturally Flavored with OTHER Natural Flavors."  WTF does that mean?  What are the "other" flavors?  And what are the flavors other than the "others?"  I'm confused.

Also, and this is just a guess, but I think Kellogg's might be ashamed of this cereal.  They didn't put their name on it.  Usually the company name is plastered across the front of the box, but look for yourself.  It isn't there.  They must have known this was a poor effort.  I was halfway through my third bowl when I realized I had no idea who made this cereal.  For all I knew it was made my Inspector Arsenic.  I suddenly felt an urgent need to know whence came the foodstuffs I was stuffing into my food hole.  Finally I found it, clearly printed on the bottom of the box and in the fine print on the side.

I don't know.  It wasn't great.  I probably won't buy it again.

Editing

So, you’ve finished your first novel and you want to get it published.  What next?  As it happens this is exactly where I am.  I will document my efforts to accomplish this very thing and hopefully we can both learn from it.

Let’s talk about editing.  This is the most tedious part of the writing process, but it is necessary.  I read and reread my book until I had found and corrected all of the errors.  Most of this is part of the writing process.  When you are writing a novel you don’t write it all in one sitting and boom, you’re done.  You writing until you hit a wall and then you go back and you read and reread what you have written until the next piece comes to you.  While you are reading, you are editing.  However, after I was finally done with the last chapter and I was satisfied that everything flowed and made sense, I still had to read my novel three times before I found all of the errors.

Once I thought the editing process was over, I was still worried so I went through it one more time using MS Word’s search function.  I was looking for all of those homonyms that are technically spelled correctly, but are used incorrectly:

there/their/they’re

you’re/your

its/it’s

whose/who’s

Once satisfied that all of those were correct I scanned the entire story looking at every place where Word suggested my grammar or spelling was wrong.  Just because Word says it’s wrong doesn’t mean it is.  Word hates contractions and long sentences and passive voice.  Sometimes you cannot get rid of those without ruining the feel or flow of your text.  So take it with a grain of salt.

If you can afford to, hire an editor to read your book.  No matter how good you are, or how hard to try, you cannot be expected to find everything.  Neil Gaiman loves to joke that when he gets the first copy of a new book he wrote he opens to a random page an invariably finds an error.  It happens.  If you cannot afford an editor, but you have friends that can read quickly and know how to edit, ask for their assistance.  If you are financially capable, give them some kind of gift for their services.  Something to expedite their reading.   

If you don’t have friends, or your friends cannot be motivated to read the manuscript you gave them two months ago, then you simply must move on.  Time waits for no one and, it is my belief, that if you don’t publish your work soon someone else will.  By this I do not mean that someone will steal your work.  I mean that ideas are in the ether.  They are in the zeitgeist.  Your idea may seem brilliant and original, and I’m sure it is, but it is also someone else’s brilliant and original idea.  Reference “The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia,” by Samuel Johnson and “Candide” by Voltaire.  Both were published in 1759.  Both are relatively famous and original pieces.  Both are basically the same friggin novel. 

Now, let’s be clear.  Candide and Rasselas were very different.  Rasselas was a mind numbingly boring novel about a nobleman searching for happiness by going on an adventure to exotic places and ultimately finding none and returning home.  Candide is an incredibly entertaining novel about a nobleman searching for happiness by gong on an adventure to exotic places and ultimately finding none and returning home.  The novels were very different, but there were huge similarities that led people at the time to think that one of them had ripped off the other.  They had not.

I have never been blatantly ripped off before.  However, I have found kernels of my ideas in other works.  Ideas I thought were too unique to me to be repeated anywhere else.  But there they were.  More embarrassingly, I have written something I thought really funny only to find later had been in someone else’s work for years.  Oops.

My point is, the ideas are out there.  If you don’t get your book published soon all of those ideas will show up somewhere else.  Perhaps a little bit here and a little bit there, but each time it happens it will hurt you.  Because you will know that you sat on your book and let the world pass you by.  DO NOT DO THAT.  Get it edited and then get it out to publishers.

Getting Published

I have had this blog “tobecomeawriter” for about 12 years now (off and on).  In the beginning, I discussed my efforts to do just that – become a writer.  Primarily my posts focused on getting a job with [adult swim], but they were not limited to that.  In fact, I actually got a job with Florian Satzinger, an Austrian cartoonist. If you have been reading this blog for long, you are probably aware of all of this and you recall that the Florian Satzinger job fell.  Anyway, over time my writing here slipped away from my goal of becoming a writer and focused on just writing.  That was not so bad because, I believe, the writing was, for a while, still entertaining.  Then I slipped away from writing at all and I stopped posting.

Now I have returned to posting, but I still find myself divided.  I find that I don’t have a lot to write about.  In my free time I do a lot of writing, but I cannot post most of it here because I intend to submit it to various magazines for publication.  They do not like printing articles that are already out there for publication.  But I want to post here.  So it occurred to me: go back to posting about my efforts to get published.  So, henceforth I will tag all of my posts about getting published with “getting published”.  This will be for short stories, poems, novels and any other creative work I attempt to get recognized.

Your support, comments and advice is always welcome.

Frustrated, but not too much.

Ok, so I go to the store every morning to get something cheap and relatively healthy to eat for lunch.  I've been eating a lot of soup at work because no one in my family but me likes it.  I used to have a wide selection of choices from the Campbell's Soup selection, but recently I've gone Pescetarian, which means I don't eat meat, except fish.  I will eat cheese, eggs, milk and other animal by-products, but nothing that requires the death of the animal.  

For simplicity sake, I generally look for vegetarian meals, especially with soup.  I like fish soups - clam chowder, shrimp gumbo (provided there is no sausage).  But generally I have to be in the right mood for those.

Anyway, my reasons for why I have gone pescetarian are not important to you.  But for this very short post it is important because Campbell's does not have any strictly vegetable soups that I can find.  Not even a regular vegetable.  So I've switched to Progresso, who do make six or seven different vegetarian soups.

For the record, I love Split Pea soup.  So when I saw the above can I was instantly excited that I'd get to have split pea soup for lunch.  But as I was about to grab the can I noticed something wrong.  Did you see it?  If not, here it is:

Now, I know that "Vegetable Classics" does not say, explicitly, "Vegetarian," but I don't think I'm the only one who would've assumed it was vegetarian.  And for those of you who haven't made the connection yet - this includes you Progresso - Bacon is not a vegetable.  So this Vegetable Classic is flavored with meat.

Oh well.  That's one less soup I can enjoy.