Because my mind is blank...

...in terms of words of my own except the ones I'm vomiting into the rewrite, I thought I'd put up some recent words of other people's, that have jumped out at me because of the discussions over at Deb Biancotti's blog.

Jimmy Webb, composer, in the Weekend Australian:

I think it's very charming to make mistakes when you're a teenager, it comes off very winsome and charming, but I don't think it does so for mature adults.

Christopher Cyrill, fiction editor for Heat magazine, in an article, 'Turning a Story', in Australian Author's August issue:

My job [as a fiction editor] is basically to carry away the sand while the author raises the object. My work after that is simply to disappear.

Cyrill also quotes novelist and former New Yorker editor William Maxwell saying that 'it was not the job of the editor to teach the writer how to write'.

And novelist John Gardner: 'Most rejected fiction is rejected because it is bad.' Or, I'd add to that one, because it's simply been sent to an unsuitable publication.