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Wednesday 10 September 2014

Here's a rarity! An apology

I'm revising my third novel, Blest Redeemer, not a task I've looked forward to. It was hard to write and hard for Joe to advise on. I’d put Blest to one side; the MS was huge (450 printed pages) and, I suspected, junk. I'm the wrong age to be writing junk even if recognising junk is a valuable experience.

An ambitious sub-theme, never mastered, was cut and that seemed to help. This bit seemed encouraging:

Adopting a cloche, an urchin or a bob would have been an admission of defeat. She was – always had been - a woman with long hair. Hair defined her and she was satisfied with that definition. She consulted an elderly stylist who was said to distrust scissors. Redeployment was the answer. “Bring it together, gather it up from the nape of your neck, coil it on your head and create a chignon. No one will say you have short hair.”

I plunged on, often on auto-pilot, blogging, emails, commenting sloppily (ie, writing too much). Breaking off to attend to VR's laptop. Careless about techie stuff too. It seems Blogger allows you - at a single keystroke - to  create a post consisting of precisely nothing. This I did but without realising. Three faithfuls in effect chided me (very mildly).

Angry at being such an asshole I inserted a line in the empty post - the first thing that came into my head - and returned to Blest.

In the circumstances the line I inserted not only meant nothing, it was open to grievous misinterpretation. I pondered deleting the post but that meant killing the comments - which I have to say I deserved.

Best to apologise. I AM ABJECTLY SORRY! Back to the Blest comfort blanket.

4 comments:

  1. Tempestas in poculo, it seems! Missed it all and still thinking about Zara, vicarious dentistry, sloe gathering, various excuses come to mind, I will have it with you by the end of the day.

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  2. No need to apologize to me.
    You know that being puzzled by your writing is nothing new with me.
    And, whatever Lucy and you are up to is intriguing.

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  3. Lucy: Hey, you mustn't treat neurasthenia sufferers like that (especially if they're into Proust). Your poculo is my mare nostrum. It's remarks like that that encourage Ellena to come up with comments as below.

    Ellena: It is my firm intention that you will live to see through my puzzles. But now I'm faced with one of yours. What exactly do Lucy and I get up to? Perhaps you shouldn't even guess.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Apologising is one of those skills that is rarer than it should be. It should be taught in schools ... but then, so many things should and are not.

    ReplyDelete