Man, this past week or so has sucked on a level which is starting to reach comical proportions. First my novel collapsed. Then my bicycle got stolen. Then I got food poisoning on Wednesday night which caused me to spend most of Thanksgiving weekend puking. Then this morning I woke up to a shitty review from Kirkus. Actually, it wasn’t so much a review as a reductive and dismissive plot summary. Are they supposed to do that? Pepper their careless assessment with spoilers? It doesn’t seem very sportsmanlike.
Anyway, I spent the afternoon in bed feeling sorry for myself. Then I thought about how magical punctuation is. More specifically, the power of the ellipsis. Check it out:
“Metafiction … culminate[s in]… […]remarkable… literary…romance … [T]he book is a… goldmine.”
—Kirkus Reviews
I was all bummed that I couldn’t use the word “gifted” because it didn’t come in the right order until I saw that the word “remarkable” (even better!) was positioned correctly, as long as you removed that pesky “un.”
Pretty sweet, no? Worthy jacket copy, I would say.
Elena Mauli Shapiro 