In spite of the false summer that leaves an errant bloom amid dying leaves, January is the time to prune roses in Southern California. I have always been tentative about slashing the throny branches to the bone, leaving a gray skeleton to sit in the slant of the winter light. Last year I learned to be merciless and my prune led to a multiflorous spring filled with more rosebuds than I could have ever imagined. My timidity reminded me of editing my own writing, slashing that beautiful sentence hurts as much as beheading a hardy rose. Yesterday as I wielded my pruning shears, I found a shoot of a bush that must have been eight feet long trailing up a nearby orange tree. Like a rambling paragraph that does not move my story along, it had to cut despite the possibility that a flower or two might appear in a few months.
This morning I found one of my favorite on line reviews of The Goodnight Train. A mother wrote that the book turned her 21 month year old son into "a cuddle muffin!" The magic of words, 273 to be precise. So many lines were thrown to the side of tracks as I wrote this book. Maybe if they stayed the cuddle muffin would have turned into a squirm bucket, annoyed by the author's self indulgence of a pretty turn of phrase. Like rose bushes, all growing stories long or short need to be pruned.