Untitled novel News, and Fun Literary Criticism

[hobgoblinn]

26,591 + 4,391 (16.5% more)

I'm switching now to the zokutu meter, since with the nano craze over, it should be reasonably stable until next November, and it has this cool extra functionality-- to mark progress past a given threshold. The threshold is what I had completed as of midnight on November 30th. And now there's no arbitrary word count-- it'll end up whatever it ends up, however long it takes. And I'll of course pare it down considerably.

I'm going to go over the next few scenes with more care before inflicting them on the unwary world at large. But in the meantime, I encourage my friends to drop by liz_marcs journal tonight for a fascinating link--Mark Twain flaming James Fennimore Cooper's Deerslayer series. If you thought flames were an invention of the Internet Generation, you'd be a few years off. But it was heartening to me, to see that, as bad as I sometimes feel I am, I am not quite to this level.

A taste of the whole essay, which every writer and critic should read: In one place in "Deerslayer," and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.

Brilliant. Ah well. I'll be Lessoning and Caroling tomorrow, but if I can beat something into shape, I'll post the next bit. Night, all.