Fanfare, please!  Ta-da!  We have two winners of John Jodzio’s signed short story collection, If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home.

They are, in no official order:

Dani Rice & Jess

[If the two of you would e-mail me at comment4elissa at gmail dot com (or FB me) with your address, I’ll gladly mail away this afternoon!]

The heartiest of congratulations to the winners!  If you didn’t win, I’d be writing down the names of all those delicious books that people have listed as favorites.  I know I am.

Thanks for entering, everyone!

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Benjamin Percy has a great article on revision (“Home Improvement”) in the May/June 2010 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine (which, sadly, P&W is only offering in print, so you’ll have to buy the issue if you want to read it).

Of interest to all you artists out there (who know the trials and tribulations of revision), here is a pearl of hard-earned wisdom:

“So much of revision, I’ve discovered, is about coming to terms with that word: gone.  Letting things go.  When revising, the beginning writer spends hours consulting the thesaurus, replacing a period with a semicolon, cutting adjectives, adding a few descriptive sentences—whereas the professional writer mercilessly lops off limbs, rips out innards like party streamers, drains away gallons of blood, and then calls down the lightning to bring the body back to life.”

When Percy originally sold his latest novel (being released by Graywolf Press in the fall), his editor Fiona McCrae asked him to change his point of view and to alter the story so that all five plotlines came to a head at once.  It took him a year to make his changes, and when that was done, she said, “Fantastic.  Exactly what we wanted.  Now would you mind cutting several of these subplots?  And maybe we could add another in a female perspective?  And while we’re at it, how about let’s rethink the ending?”

Percy’s response?  “And then I got back to work.”

Yeah.  That sounds about right.

[Post image: Partial of If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home by John Jodzio cover]