just minishorts.

Oh, don't mind me, but I am, in real life, a very disliked person to work with. Being an editor is a cruel, cruel curse, because you are paid to say bad things about people. Most of the time.

Actually, the criticisms that I make are all in good will, and with one purpose. My job as editor is to help you improve your work so that the market will accept it, and so that it will sell, and so that, finally, you will earn much much more money than I am and become so rich that you will turn your nose down at me.

Sad, very sad, but someone has got to do the dirty job, and I'm here to take the victim's seat. As usual.

So, behaving 'better than the rest of the world', I am today, free to provide another huge advice for those who aspire to earn a buck or two from your wonderful written works of art. It's not that huge actually, maybe its been spoken about too much already. But well, I still want to dish it out. So here it is.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you ever want to get published, please remember the golden rule of writing:

'Less is more.'

Okay. Now. Got that? Memorized it? Internalized it into your system? Don't believe me and still want to opt for the lane of malapropism?

I have examples for your viewing.

*TOO MANY ADJECTIVES KILL THE INTEREST*

'There was once a courageous boy who loved to go by the name of Dickory. Dickory believed with all his will that he was the bravest boy in the entire city of Dick. Because he was such a courageous boy, he decided that he would attempt to save the devastatingly beautiful princess of the wondrous voice… yadaa yadaa yadaa..'

Professionally, I choose to cut all of the above to…

'There was a brave boy called Dickory, who lived in Dick. He decided to save the beautiful princess of Dick…'

Sorry, I'm sorta running out of name-ideas today, so bear with me on the stupid names, yeah?

*DON'T PULL A MR BOMBASTIC ON YOUR POOR READERS*

Gawd, the horrible thing about this country is many, many teachers and parents never learn. They associate speakers of good English to be those who are 'very clever at using a lot of important and difficult words'. Me? I cringe at the sight of things like this:

'The poised and elegant swan-like ballerina flawlessly executed a heavenly, breathtaking, once-in-a-lifetime performance. '

Because I was too stupid to say big words, I asked my friend Elaine to give me a bombastic version of 'The ballerina made a fantastic performance.'

We thought about blogs, then, and she came up with, 'Kindly spare some of your precious and valuable time to come and validate the existence of my site as often as you could possibly without inconveniencing yourself.' That, in exchange for 'Please visit my site regularly.'

And then imagine if the comments link to some blogpost read like this, 'Place forth your reaction…' (This one was by Ed.)

I told you it would sound stupidly silly to be bombastic. I mean, the morale of the story is, 'Say so many big words for what?'

You'll end up making yourself look and sound too clever to read instead.