A successful marriage is one where no one gets killed

So my wife and I have made a decision. We're not going to kill each other, and we're not going to divorce. We are going to respect each other's point of view. But damn was it close for a while there.

My wife has her copy of Roja, and is going through it with me, one paragraph at a time. She read it by herself first, making some notes and sending me a text that said, 'I hate you,' when she came to a particular point in the plot. That lets me know that I did that point right.

We started editing it together as soon as I got home from work Friday night. It took us less than an hour to reach the point where we were glaring at each other, staying silent to keep from saying things we would later regret. We have been married nearly ten years, and we have never had an argument like the one we had Friday night.

My beloved knows the rules of grammar better than I do. She has a very clear idea of what parts go where. She busted her butt to learn all this, and she has edited fiction before. Me? In my own humble opinion, (stop laughing) I know the story. I have a sense of not just the story we're working on, but the living, organic thing that gets into your head and makes a home there. I also have the opinion that you can wibble the rules a bit, if it helps tell the story.

It does not help that I am a native Texan, and my wife is from up north. Most of the dialogue in the book is spoken by natives, and so there are a lot of 'Texasisms' being used. Where dialogue is concerned, you go with how the person speaks. When a character uses 'got' where 'get' would be better English, my poor wife gets a twitch in her eye.

Also, most of the characters are male, and not bothered by coarse language. My wife isn't bothered by it, but she didn't understand the logic of the nuts. When a man has to swear on one of his testicles, he uses the left one, not the right. There is an unspoken but near-universal belief that the right nut is primary, therefor if you risk losing one, it's the left. My wife gave me one of those looks when I finished explaining this.

No one's dead, so we still have a good marriage. Also, I'm still writing.