The Creative Joy of a Cold, Dead Winter Val McDermid’s new book evokes an earlier Scot’s love of the bleak.

"Winter trees were a poetic lodestar for Burns"

'Ev’n winter bleak has charms to me,
When winds rave thro’ the naked tree;
Or frosts on hills of Ochiltree
Are hoary gray;
Or blinding drifts wild-furious flee,
Dark’ning the day!'

#RobertBurns #ValMcDermid #Winter
#NickRipatrazone #HenryFarrer

Is Line Editing a Lost Art? “Extraneous baggage”—that was how Albert Erskine, line editor of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, described slow sections of the submitted manuscript. McCarthy listened. He spent months revising and cond…

lithub.com/is-line-edit... Sharing this little treasure by #NickRipatrazone with those of you who still believe in edits like the ones he illustrated this article with. I would never have found it if someone hadn't shared it from the LitHub archives, which is why I still hang around on Social Media.