Refining my technique

Another beginner blacksmithing class at Arizona Metal Arts, another hook!

This time Smith Logan was our instructor. With a smaller class size he was able to give us more personal attention with an emphasis on technique - such as using peening (get your mind out of the gutter) to draw out the material faster and more evenly. The resulting hook is simpler than my first, but more elegant and tapering.

Logan remarked that, with many projects - he was talking about knifemaking IIRC but it seems to me it applied to my humble hook as well - most of the intermediate forms the iron takes as you're shaping it look nothing at all like the final product. In fact, it can look like a complete mess up until the very last steps.

Now that I have a little sample of hands-on experience, I've gone back to my manuscript in progress and started ripping it apart. In the best possible way. I know what's happening in this chapter, but I'm still figuring out how to tell it, and the way to do that is writing. Right now it's a mess of dissociated, conflicting and redundant scenes that I wouldn't want anyone else looking at, but when it's finished, and I've trimmed the bird's beak and filed and brushed and burnished... oh then it will be a thing of beauty.