Plus I don’t want it to be too serious because to me my mother was just effortlessly hysterically funny. I still draw on that.
Example: I was at the store today watching a good natured clerk having an exchange with this morbidly depressed woman who was trying to deluminate the room and it reminded me of an exchange around 1985, I was seated at the dinner table, I’d helped my aunt who was about 95 at the time (the one who for those familiar had lost her twin a couple of years before) and my mother asked her
as she piled some on her plate.
I loved my aunt, I felt sorry for her, but just the timing, the non-sequitur, the sweetness, the completely undisturbed ‘ever onward’ pacing, everything, made me spit peas across the room. I have no idea if the humor in stuff like that makes it onto paper though.
Sampiro, reading your posts over the years has me convinced that you are the reincarnation of Tennesse Williams, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, etc. I’ll bet that if you did a search on all of your posts here on the Straight Dope, you could sell them as a collection of essays. You’ve got a rare gift of producing long, involved posts that are fascinating to read. Good for you.
So, Sampiro your parents helped set up Chambers Academy? I infer this based on knowing where you grew up and knowing Chambers Academy. Also, with relatives all over West Central Georgia and East Central Alabama, this just seems logical to me.
Well, hell, for all I know we’re some kind of cousin even.
You left out Twain, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Truman Capote. I can’t wait for this book.
And as far as embarrassing people, dead and living, my advice is the write the whole story, the good and bad as you saw it, not as you want people to see it. Your writing on SD is extraordinary because it has your special brand of hyperbole. Your sister will get over it, and yo mama is past being offended.
Yep, Chambers Academy, LaFayette (which for benefit of those who didn’t grow up near there is pronounced lah-FEH-it or lah-FETT locally, and near to LaGrange, GA, both towns named after stops on the Marquis’s “quelle the fuck far is it to the next comfortable tavern?” leg of his tour). Still a very pretty town, though what they’ve done to some of the old houses in recent years is a near crime. Cousin wouldn’t surprise me at all as I had a lot of hyperfertile ancestors from WCG and ECA.
Sampiro, I know my posts here don’t show it, but when I’m paying attention, I’m a damn good editor.
Send the book to me and I’ll do what little clean up work is needed. It’s a win-win situation, I’ll be able to read it first (neener neener to all the other dopers), you will have someone to argue with about commas and such and finally the world will be able to enjoy a fascinating and well written book.
I honestly do know what you are doing now because I’m in the process of doing the same thing. The first draft flows well, but there are some mistakes. Most of the mistakes are fixed in the second draft, but it doesn’t flow as well. The third draft has all of the extranious stuff removed, but now its stiff and not worth reading. At draft number 97, the whole thing is so furbared that its better to just toss everything into a shredder and start over, but now I’m sick of it.
So…give me your book to edit and I’ll send you a copy of my first draft to edit. We might never have anything to publish, but at least now we can blame someone else
“Well-written” should be hyphenated.
“Extraneous” is misspelled.
“…but now it’s stiff…”, not “its”.
I think it’s FUBARed, not “furbared”.
“…that it’s better to just…”, not “its”.
Hey! Are you trying to get your paws on the book first??? :dubious:
Sampiro, don’t listen to a35362. I’m typing on my phone and have a cat helping me. I’m much a much better editor than a typist, which is why I’m on revision 197 or something.
Not to mention that I’m offering to allow you to use your red pen on my first born. We will both suffer and argue and cry. Nothing brings people closer than shared misery, right?
I did mention that I’m better when I’m paying attention, right? I came to the Dope typing l33tspk and not owning a uppercase key.
What a story! I am sad to see how this whole keeper thing works, and it hardly seems fair, depriving a select person of a life, and loading them up with the needs of others like a pack mule. I might be the anti-keeper as, after reading your story, I realized that I rescued my S.O. from his well established position as family keeper. Oh course, I am not very popular with his family to say the least. But he was frequently expected to save his three sisters from their drunken husbands, to make room in his house for a number of full grown unemployed nephews and nieces, most with drug problems, to manage his self destructive alcoholic brother, and first and fore most to care for his emotionally incesting, master manipulator mother. Even now his family considers me to be the wicked witch of the west for putting my foot down and kidnapping their primary care giver and slave.
