Some cool book news for Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn fans.
Mark Twain’s autobiography is finally going to be published 100 years after his death. The autobiography has been kept locked in a vault at the University of California at Berkeley since his death 1910. Twain’s autobiography will arrive in bookstores in November.
“Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
You can read more about Mark Twain here on the official website from the Estate of Mark Twain.
Beckie
Andrea
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Restless Writers 
Here is a fine preview of what you may find in Mark Twain’s Autobiography. I found it on http://www.twainquotes.com and it speaks to your topics very well… you restless writers – you! (Check his words-per-day ratings… and don’t forget, that was without using a modern keyboard…
“I wrote the rest of The Innocents Abroad in sixty days and I could have added a fortnight’s labor with the pen and gotten along without the letters altogether. I was very young in those days, exceedingly young, marvelously young, younger than I am now, younger than I shall ever be again, by hundreds of years. I worked every night from eleven or twelve until broad daylight in the morning, and as I did 200,000 words in the sixty days, the average was more than 3,000 words a day- nothing for Sir Walter Scott, nothing for Louis Stevenson, nothing for plenty of other people, but quite handsome for me. In 1897, when we were living in Tedworth Square, London, and I was writing the book called Following the Equator, my average was 1,800 words a day; here in Florence (1904) my average seems to be 1,400 words per sitting of four or five hours.”
– Autobiography of Mark Twain
Several other great (relevant) quotes from Mark Twain sourced from http://www.twainquotes.com —
“You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God’s adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.”
– Letter to Orion Clemens, 23 March 1878
“To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself…Anybody can have ideas–the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.”
– Letter to Emeline Beach, 10 Feb 1868
“Let us guess that whenever we read a sentence & like it, we unconsciously store it away in our model-chamber; & it goes, with the myriad of its fellows, to the building, brick by brick, of the eventual edifice which we call our style.”
– Letter to George Bainton, 15 Oct 1888
“I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English – it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.”
– Letter to D. W. Bowser, 20 March 1880
(That last line is a gem.)
My Fave:
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. ~Mark Twain