Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Whacker Smacker

I managed to move a huge chunk of the ms. to a better place. The whole now flows better (I hope). There's one more such move that might need to be made. I'd been fretting over both, so now I only have one to fret about. I think that once the second chunk has been moved, I'll have prose tweaking left and finding places to insert Important Plot Points that somehow got left out and which I now have in a Notes file.

I worked at home today, so I spent my lunch time trying to break up the wall of ice that separates the driveway from the street. It's amazing what a couple of weeks of snow and warmth and melting and refreezing can create. I worked at it with my ice whacker smacker (I don't know the proper name* for the tool; it looks like a hoe that's been straightened with a sledge hammer), assuming that it would break apart easily. Hah! I got the top few layers off and revealed a few inches of solid, granite-like ice. That stuff really grips the road beneath, too. Well, it's exposed to the sun now, when there is sun, so maybe by, oh, Sunday it'll be more responsive to whacking smacking. Or I'll whack smack one of my toes off. Which would give me a good excuse to lie on the couch and write on my laptop, while feeling sorry for myself. That almost sounds appealing.


* I bet it's something unimaginative, like ice chipper.

2 comments:

Chris said...

Funny you wrote about editing and ice-chipping -- I think I took the whacker-smacker approach to my first draft. Glad to hear the ms is shaping up!

John A. Karr said...

There's a metaphor in there all right, ice-chipping and smacking away at the manuscript.

Thanks for post at my site, David. I've added your to my links. Great to hear from writers keeping up the good fight.