From: mdhangton@gmail.com   
      
   I found a book in a public library that I never encountered before.   
   The title is _The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist_, by   
   Thomas McCormack.  It's a book of the Eighties.  As I understand it,   
   it's about a methodology for publishing editors to learn to be   
   competent publishing editors, but doesn't teach them to be publishing   
   editors.  It has a few examples of what publishing editors should do   
   embedded in it.  It is not an expecially well-organized book.  If it   
   were printed today, one would assume it was an agglomeration of blog   
   entries.   
      
   Nevertheless, I found the following quote from somebody else within a   
   chapter of high-diction blather:   
      
   Here's an example of a principle from a celebrated editor of a   
   generation ago, William Sloane:   
   "The enemy of fictional density is the one-thing-at-a-   
   time scene, that simply shows you, the reader, one of the   
   facets of the story, whether it be something about the   
   characters or about the action or the setting, or whatever.   
   All too often this thin scene is invented to convey a piece   
   of factual information to the reader-a tea party where   
   the characters talk about their ancestors and their fami-   
   lies, and, perhaps, as an added fictional bit of icing on the   
   cake, announce that a new teacher is coming to town.   
   [But in] a good piece of fiction ... all parts of each scene   
   are working: characterization of the people, creation of   
   the physical world of the story, narrative motion, whet-   
   ting of anticipation, resolution of the mystery, characteri-   
   zation of the author-style inevitably does this-all the   
   dimensions, and all at once."   
      
   When I first saw it, I thought it was speaking to me about those   
   expositions in the form of dialog, where one character is a mentor   
   lecturing a golden child on Spaceflight as it came to be and currently   
   stands inside some worldbuilt setting while he's cooking spaghetti.  I   
   scanned the pages with this quote on it for OCR to keep it before I   
   return the book (because it's giving me a headache), but now that I've   
   been looking at it for a while, the quote doesn't seem to apply as   
   much, nor does it seem so profound a quote...but there isn't so much   
   activity here so here are my electrons.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)