Nancy once told me that being a writer is like being a dress maker. That at first you have to weave the cloth, lots and lots of cloth. After the cloth is made, you cut out the pattern, sew it together, then do the final detail work.
The weaving cloth stage is writing by hand, the free flow of words and images and ideas. Cutting out a pattern is when I come to the computer, cropping and editing to see what might fit. Then comes the detail work, the rearranging of words that move to an internal rhythm, the fine details of a comma here, not there.
Whenever I go to Field Days I think of Exploratory, the class we had to take in eighth grade, where we learned a new subject every eight weeks. I loved Exploratory, it was like a Sky Bar to me. One of the subjects we had to take was Agriculture, and in it we learned cow judging. Whenever I go to Field Days I wish I'd paid more attention in that class because I really don't remember how to judge a cow, and I think it would be cool if I did.
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