Revision

 June 18, 2026

My rictus of revision continues, a great slaughter of adverbs and helping verbs, by thousands of words reduced. My initial preference for the construction, “was working” over “worked” needs to be examined. I think I want to prolong action rather than freeze it in the minute, but that’s good only for one sentence in fifty. Like a poet, I pay attention to the music of a line. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes it must be corrected. Also, the odd conviction that everything must be attributed to somebody in the story. I have to take out, “Sam saw Rhys walking out of the near woods” and replace it with “Rhys walked out of the near woods” about 100 times. But I finished, and wept as I was finishing.