What
year are you in at the moment?
“I
try to leave out the parts people skip” ~ Elmore Leonard
It
is my intention this autumn and winter (but please may we have a summer first)
to work on the book I have written. It
is a murder mystery set in Victorian England. I have concluded that it is too
long and my objective will be to substantially prune it. (Oops – split
infinitive – that should read “to prune it substantially”.) I know where I went wrong in writing it – I
tried to be too clever. Instead of concentrating on the story I threw in all
the odd bits of information about Victorian England that I find
interesting. I was just showing
off. There’s no doubt that they are
interesting to most readers of historical novels but at the same time they slow
the pace of the story down. So once
again Partner-who-loves-tea can be expected to be sitting opposite me in the
conservatory, as I stare glassy-eyed out of the window, and she will ask “What year are you in at the
moment?” as she constantly did twelve months ago when I was writing it.
How
old are you?
It
occurred to me after I had written Wednesday’s post that I had mentioned the
age of Daughter-who-takes-photos. My
Mother would have been horrified. It was
bad enough mentioning a man’s age but one certainly never mentioned a lady’s
age. A similar comment was made by a
friend of mine who recently had her eightieth birthday. Knowing she had fairly old-fashioned views I
sent her a card with 80 on it and said I hoped that prior to 21 and after 80 it
was allowable to mention a girl’s age.
She appreciated the card and said that was fine but she didn’t want
another one mentioning her age for the next ten years!
Last
year we had a discussion about this on Lewis where the first thing a person
asks is another’s age. It was explained
to me that in a reasonably closed community the objective was to be able to
place when a person was at school and therefore which of one’s other friends
they would know. The concept that it was
in any way improper to ask a person’s age just never occurred to an islander!
Pictures
of London
Would
you like to see the best pictures of London that I have ever seen? Then click here and go either forwards or
backwards (it matters little, they’re all good). The photographer is Kayode Okeyode.
Blog
Off
Is
it just me or is Blogger having a total nervous breakdown. I am getting so fed up of being unable to
leave comments because it won’t go to the comments page from people’s blogs. And
when it does I type a comment only to find it then won’t load again so I lose
the comment. I can’t be bothered putting
every comment into a word document so in the end I may just stop bothering altogether. And the blogs themselves are often taking an
age to download. One kind soul suggested
I clear out my cookies to see if that sorted the issue but it didn’t (though it
did help with Typepad comments a few weeks ago). If it were not for the disruption to my
followers and the hassle of setting up a whole new blog I would move my blog to
Tumblr. I’m not having any problems with
other sites or blogs so it’s definitely only Blogger that is the problem. I want to scream….
hmm, I haven't had any problems leaving comment, but I may have jinxed myself now. I looked at a few of the photos you recommended. I saw some stunning ones. thanks for that! age, huh! I'm just so glad to have lived longer than my momma and several of her relatives, that I don't mind telling how old I am!
ReplyDeleteNo problems leaving comments for me, either.
ReplyDeleteAs for the age question - I've never felt it improper if anyone asked my age, and still don't. Age is not something we "do", it just happens to us, and none of us have chosen the time of their birth, so what's all the fuss? We age from the day we are born, full stop.
I'm not having that kind of trouble with Blogger either (although like Scrappy Grams I feel like adding a "touch wood" to that). I see that you've been able to put in comments on some of mine, of course I can't see how many attempts behind it ;) Just wondering if ALL Blogger blogs are equally troublesome or some worse than others. (Maybe you should try to make notes for a couple of days to see if you see some pattern?) I try to remember to click ctrl+a/ctrl+c before I send a comment (esp. if a long one, or if WV is on), then if it doesn't go through I can make another try.
ReplyDeleteI stopped having big birthday celebrations after 40 ;)
Friends arranged a smaller celebration for me at 50.
I have a few years yet to decide what I'll do about the 60th!
Good luck with you book. Sounds like a Time Traveller's Wife experience for Jo there... (You read that one, didn't you?) It's hard to prune one's own texts.
I feel like I go time travelling every time I dive into my family history documents and old postcards.
Well I have to say that I didn't think your book was too long at all. In fact I was very disappointed when it got to the end. It might have been, though, that I was enjoying all the bits about the city in which I grew up.
ReplyDeleteIt's a while since I had any problems with Blogger as well. Certainly no problems commenting. Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean, of course, that Blogger isn't picking on you. After all it knows your IP address!
I forgot to say what a fabulous set of London photos. That's the sort of photos Gaz takes. It makes me feel that I really should make more of an effort sometimes.
ReplyDeleteI am sure your book will be interesting. Always tempting to overdo the details I guess in such a book.
ReplyDeleteMy Aunt was so determined that nobody should know how old she was that even her death announcement did not say.
The London pictures were interesting.