Novel Revisions — Danger: Book May Bite

Writing is a timid thing – right?

Delicately crafted with feathered pens by a dainty woman unused to the outdoors. Cough, sputter. Fantasize.

No fear. No wild things lurking. All purple ink and soft whispers.

She’s being ironic, the guard mutters as the wild thing rattles its cage. Writers do that, he nods, proud of the knowledge – and hoping, soon, such writer will step out of the shadows and tame this unwieldy thing, growing daily, hourly as it waits release.

The beast itself. Braced to resist domestication, eyes glaring in resistance against such things as braiding of manes, tying of ribbons in its tail.

I’m a wild thing, it purrs, snarls, gnashing a bone. I’ll be ridden, perhaps. But not a trot. Not an amble. Climb aboard, if you dare, and gallop raw across the veldt.

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Today’s post is provoked by Wordsmith Studio’s weekly Take A Picture! photo challenge — this week, the theme is “signs.”

While with my sons at Harry Potter World at Universal, I saw this sign above the caged Monster Book behind Olivander’s wand shop and couldn’t help feel it summarized my summer: taming my novel from first complete draft through second and third revisions.

Danger: book may bite.

My mother once questioned why a tiger shark lurks just out of view in the background photo on my website and I had to say it represents the danger I sometimes feel in writing. I love the rush of creation, yet so much is at risk — pride, talent, loss of that perfect image just at the tips of your reach. Novel drafts are not docile as rabbits and kittens, but bull sharks, boa constrictors, pacing tigers — unwieldy things within our reach, yet with a life of their own.

Or at least, for the sake of today’s photo challenge, this is nod to the days they feel that way!

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