I posted a link on Melinda yesterday to a short story of mine on another site, in the hope that I'd get some comments, but nothing so far
http://www.authspot.com/Short-Stories/Eagle-Flight.107861
Bank Holiday Monday. It does have a slightly different feel, though I don’t know why because I will just be sitting in front of the computer, as always. Might take some time out to do some housework, as I didn’t get round to it yesterday. Hubby will be around, of course. We were talking about possibly getting the barbecue out, if the weather was like Saturday, but that doesn’t seem very likely.
Why do I do this every day, sit and write about the trivia of my life? I don’t really know any more – well, actually, I suppose I do – apart from habit, it’s because if I keep on writing when I think there’s nothing to say, sometimes that is when the gems appear. Not that that has happened much lately.
Sometimes I know in advance what I want to say, sometimes it comes to me in meditation (when I’m trying to stop the thoughts from coming altogether.) Sometimes I have to sit here with the keyboard under my fingers before anything will come at all, and then I have to keep going with nothing to say and sometimes, just sometimes, something worthwhile will emerge.
There is no quality control, no editing (beyond the obvious, typos, spelling etc). There’s an interesting thought. Does ‘typos’ have an ‘e’ before the ‘s’? As a child, I was taught that words ending in ‘o’ always have an ‘e’ before the ‘s’, no, change that ‘always’ to ‘usually’, because there are exceptions. Anyway, the Microsoft spell checker doesn’t like ‘typoes’.
I digress. And somehow, I don’t think that particular digression is going to turn into a ‘gem’.
Five hundred words is really too much for a blog entry. But this is my journal, and 500 words is my discipline. To cut it down to something more coherent and succinct would be far too much effort. Some famous writer (possibly Dr Johnson?) is alleged to have said: ‘I’m writing you a long letter because I don’t have time to write a short one’. I know exactly what he means. Far easier to ramble on than try and think how to cut it down to what you really want to say (assuming you know what it is that you want to say).
Which reminds me of what I was doing yesterday morning. From our two workshops, my European group are producing a document to be presented in Brussels next month. The contributions from the rest of the group have come in, and the organisers have produced a combined text, but it’s going to be up to me to edit it into ‘good’ English. This is a challenge, because how far do I go? I must be careful not to take away the flavour of what has been said. This has been produced by 27 people from 27 different countries. And apparently (I discovered yesterday) I am supposed to be incorporating the results of an online survey of the 27 as well. Might have been nice if they’d mentioned that to me in Paris. Well, maybe they did and I’ve forgotten; if I’d been asked, my answer would have been ‘Sure, fine, no problem’. I love doing stuff like that. All unpaid, of course, but I am trying to get some paid work out of them at some point, so it’s a good opportunity to show them what I’m capable of.