I killed 3000 words today*. They had to die. They were all wrong.
I have replaced them with other, better words. But it still hurts. Inside.
The daily word count is an artificial thing and it doesn’t work for everyone, but it gives me a yardstick to prove that I have accomplished something, that I am making progress, one sentence at a time towards the end.
But there are those days when you realize you have spent hours and hours and hours on something and it’s just not working, but you had to get it on the page to be able to see it.
Sometimes being a novelist is high architecture; soaring Gehry-Gaudi constructs of complex beauty.
Sometimes its demolition and salvaging.
(*”Today” being in November 2013 when I wrote this blog post but forgot to press publish)
(Image by Inaki Miranda from our NYT-best-selling graphic novel that I wrote and he illustrated, Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom )