Barr and The Orb Weaver

I'm sitting in the university library supposedly finishing my assignment and instead find myself goggling pictures of leviathans on ancient Greek pottery. I’m not normal, I am aware of this.

In other news the ABR short story is due at the end of this week and I am sending "The Seagull". Mind you, it barely resembles the mess of several weeks ago due mostly to the edits of a good friend and sometimes college (when his football injuries allow) who tore it (not quite literally) to pieces. My poor friend (who I will hereafter refer to as Barr Fletcher) was so concerned that I would have a hysterical girl moment that he presented me with only one page of my three page story just to check that I would be okay for him to continue.

I looked at the spotted, scrawled over sheet of paper that had once been my short story with a kind of Patrick Bateman disregard. Almost as if I were being handed my own severed hand bleeding lead pencil. I stared at the page and the Scottish fist that passed it towards me.

Here it is, I thought, judgment day. Finally, someone has torn the still beating (seaweed covered, barnacled) heart of my writing and flung it, shot-put style, into the sea.The thing was, Barr had noticed my seamless, cobweb-like propensity to overwrite things. I had expected him to become just as tangled in editing my writing as I occasionally do in actually writing it. Many before him had attempted the task of chopping through my prose and it always ended badly. Scores of friends and writers have suffered the same fate; stumbling around a dark Queensland backyard, drunk on XXXX, surrounded by low hanging mango branches swatting away spider webs with one of my short stories.

Thing is, one has to keep an eye out for Orb Weavers and their tricky webs.

Cause that’s what I am. I’m the literary version of a big fat Orb Weaver. By night I weave my tangled word webs only to have some poor Scottish football aficionado get tangled in my prose by the dim dawn light. Mind you, this Scott was not going to fall pray to the web. Barr set aside his copy of “Soccer Duels: A History” and like some tartan-clad Achilles he unsheathed his lead pencil (I imagine this to be to the sound of a light saber activating) and cut through my prose like it was butter. One, two, swipe, stab… and the Scott was through while I (imagine me now in some kind of spindly Aragog form) sat shocked and somewhat placid before the bleeding first page.

“Wow.”

“Yeah sorry, I havenae got to the end yet. I can stop if ya want but I thought I better check before I keep going” (only imagine this in an Ewan McGregor-usque accent)

“Nah. Keep goin. I’m not going to freak out” (Now imagine an accent akin to a girly version of Bryan Brown in the “Shiralee”)

“Yaalrighthen.”

“Pardon?”

Ahem…

My friend Barr edited the entire three pages and each suffered the same lead treatment. Clumsy phrases were emphatically cut from between the branches of the mango tree and glistening silver pieces of web wafted to the ground where they disappeared into the dust. Standing, pencil saber in hand, was Barr, triumphant. The Orb Weaver glanced around her web. It seemed cleaner, less cluttered. She could get from one side to the other without tangling her many legs in the diamond shaped cross braces. All in all, it felt like the literary version of a trip to Ikea. It was like looking out over the ordered, meticulous show rooms and wondering how you are ever going to get the red wine stains out of your carpet. (God, I have to remember to throw out the empty wine bottles!)

So, from the much changed (but far less cluttered) web of the Orb Weaver (now nicely ordered and free of wine stains), this post goes out to my friend Barr and his sharp, ruthless pencil saber with much (if somewhat over-written gratitude). I have a copy of my novel with your name on it buddy! Only not literally… cause it still has my name on it.