Saturday, June 1, 2013

"Exquisite skeleton."

Starting in on the fourth week of writing on Led to the Slaughter.  Originally I envisioned a very short novel -- around 40,000 words.  It appears I have another couple of weeks of writing to do, at the least.

I suppose I should just stop worrying about any of my novels being too short.  I always end up at 65K words or above.

Today's chapter was the raggedy-est yet.  Kind of a mess of duplicated words and repeated ideas.  I'm going to try to fix that before I call it a day.

Linda found a neat quotation on a bookmark she found in a book.  I don't know where it comes from:

"A rough draft is a first writing, a sketch or an outline.  It's not the final polished product, but an exquisite skeleton that shows scribble marks, half-erased words and notes in the margins."

That's very nice, except my skeleton isn't so much "exquisite" as one of those skeletons that dinosaur hunters used to construct when they didn't really know what dinosaurs looked like.  All in the wrong postures with the wrong bones wired together.

Other than that, I really like the sentiment.




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