March 24 Friday – Joe Goodman arrived in Elmira for a visit. He would stay several months. He wrote along side Sam and critiqued the California Book (Roughing It) [MTL 4: 379n2]. Joe was a Godsend. He gave Sam positive reinforcement on the work just when Sam, after such a difficult year, doubted its worth. Sam pressed to build a long enough manuscript of the type that subscription sales demanded—folks in the boondocks thought a good stout volume was a better bargain, and Sam calculated he’d need 1,800 manuscript pages (he claimed his handwritten pages at 80 words each) to produce a 600 page book. Years later Sam developed a technique of putting a work aside when the words did not flow and waiting until “the tank filled up.” At this point in his writing, Sam, with a long background of journalistic deadlines, and with a contract deadline staring him in the face, felt he had little choice but to press.