An Incredibly Encouraging Scribble

Well tonight my dears, the internet for my laptop, Herbie, is NOT WORKING, and I sincerely do not understand why.  Therefore I am writing to you all from the family desktop, which is large, bright and fairly impersonal especially because it is nameless.  The point that I am finally getting around to making is that what I would have liked to say was all plotted out on Herbie, and I cannot access it.  So tonight I am "winging it", which is a whimsical new phrase I picked up which basically means "improvising".  I came across this image a couple of days ago and was immediately interested.  If you are at all like me at heart, it will give you shivers, too.

This, my dears, is an extract of the original manuscript of The Woman in White and what's more, it is in Wilkie Collins' handwriting.  I think that this single sheet of script is a beautiful confirmation of the humanity of authors.  I struggle with writing, and I used to always think that other writers didn't; that they were streaming with vital creative juices - never faltering, always filled to bursting with names, places, phrases, words that bubbled from their consciences and splashed onto their notebooks.  But it was a very 'candied' idea, that was.  They are absolutely not like that at all.  And here is proof.  Great Wilkie Collins!  Is that an entire sentence I see scribbled out?