Reading and Writing and Re-Writing

And I suppose I could have said re-reading too. First of all One Dog and His Boy was a beautiful book. It was written for children but I couldn't put it down, and we all know I'm not a child anymore. Why couldn't I put it down? Because it's a good story well written. It has humour, emotions, adventure, loyalty, a good cast of characters and some great dogs. I hope that Eva Ibbotson knew what a beautiful book she had written. And reading it reminded me to aim higher myself - to make sure my stories are everything I want them to be so that readers will enjoy reading them.

The re-writing I'm doing right now is on my musical Hanukkah in Chelm. Yes, Kol Halev is re-mounting it in December, but we have a few new cast members and I've changed the script a little bit here and there, and added a new song. I wrote a couple of monologues for the auditions and one monologue was funny enough to convince me to put it into the script. Of course this script is not the only re-writing that I'm doing. There's a pile or two of stories waiting for some heavy re-writes and some subtle tweaks.

Re-read all your work, over and over again. But also re-read some of your favourite books. A good book is a friend you want to keep visiting. So what are you waiting for? Visit.