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The Walrus
The Walrus
Richard Kelly Kemick

I Tried to Finish a Dead Man’s Novel

There are numerous drafts. Some parts are written in pencil, some in pen, some on a typewriter, and some on a computer. Several pages were printed on old-timey paper attached to each other along a perforated edge, unfurling like a scroll, and some were saved on a 3.5-inch floppy that can now be retrieved only as a file of randomized numbers, like code in the Matrix.

The progression of technology seems to imply a hierarchy of edits—that the pencil draft is superseded by the pen draft, the typewritten pages supersede the longhand ones, and the perforated paper supersedes them all. However, scenes rarely appear in more than one edition, meaning that each ensuing draft was more addition than revision.

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