So, small update. Fishy Riot has escaped it’s second round of editing. The whole editing process has been quite a revelation, mostly because of the control an editor is given over a work. I’ve had two editors look at the book now, and each had entirely different opinions of it. The first left my thinking no one would ever read the book and that my entire culture was in some way barbaric and unrecognizable in literature. The second left me wondering if the first simply had no sense of humour at all. Which leaves me wondering about humour. Sometimes I read a book and I think it’s hysterical, but it’s always a subtle thing. Often the book hammers you with slapstick that leaves me rolling my eyes and wondering if anyone would ever behave like that in real life. My first edit removed much of the subtle humour from my book; there is no cleverness left in the humour, and I no longer think that’s a cultural misunderstanding so much as a personal thing. Australian humour requires a combination of intelligence, social understanding and perception and decades of it being misunderstood evidences how rarely that understanding crosses cultural boundaries. I think it’s becoming more common, but it saddens me greatly that no one else will ever get to see the unfiltered version of these characters; the aussie version, as opposed to the American sterilized version. But thus is what we learn in the editing process 🙂