Readin', Ritin' and

One of my daily joys is waking in the morning and reading in bed next to my husband as we sip tea until maybe nine give or take. 

No rush to get to work. 

We are gentled into the day.

As writers we share bits of what we read to each other.

Yesterday I read this to him from the Sept. 12 New Yorker by Burkhard Bilger.

"They came to Cologne from every corner of the county, pulling their past  behind them like rattling oxcarts. They came because they couldn't sleep at night and their marriages had foundered. Because they'd lived in the same town all their lives, yet never felt at home. Because they were undone by loud noises and tight spaces, uneasy with intimacy and desperate with solitude. Because they were seventy years old and still waiting for their lives to begin."

What strong, visual writing.

Later he read to me from Anne Hunt's Modus. "Writers lie."  She added they invent.

Sometimes his readings are longer than mine. It depends on how much we get caught up in the words.

As writers we manipulate words, sentences, paragraphs until we express our thoughts in the strongest possible way.

I'm in the process of a final edit of my novel. So far, I've cut over 1,000 words. There's no counting substitutions and rearrangements. 

We do readin' and 'writin' but no 'rithmetic.