About 3 hours on The Heart of the Beast this evening. I added roughly 3,300 words to the draft, more than half of them new-written, to 37,700 net.

Wound up taking the pages out of Jeff's mss which didn't have soft copy equivalents and running through an OCR process. Somewhat to my surprise, this was reasonably usable. However, I'm at a section of the book where even though I'm still (largely) preserving the earlier scene structure, I'm really working over the language. I'm not sure if it might not have been simpler just to retype from the paper page into the electronic file, as I'd considered doing.

Live and learn, learn and live.

And a bit more WIP:

Already she knew how intensely private the moment was. Though to her this man was a bonfire amid wet moss, the remnants of the crowd moved past as indifferent as if he were invisible, the shuffling, shoving line not even glancing their way all.

Moot shook herself back to sense, taking his measure as if he were a found thing to be reported to the Can Man for consideration and cataloging. He was the Scarred Man, undeniably. If you took away his sinews and bones, the frightening black eyes and the yellowed ivory of his teeth, if you subtracted his visceral presence and the palpable force of his will, if you eliminated his place at the center of all things, still those scars would stand proudly telling their own story of pain and damnation and a sharp, fiery creation which could only be worshipped by the maddest of the mad.

Originally published at jlake.com.