I am avoiding my story.
This is because I sent to my tutor yesterday, and she has responded by saying that it is far too long, and that I need to cut thirty thousand words before she dispatches it to her agent.
This is not, she has explained, because thirty thousand of them are rubbish, although I am prepared to accept that it is more than possible that they might be, but because paper is expensive and no publisher is going to risk spending a lot of money on buying half a ton of costly paper on which to print the prolonged and vague ramblings of an unknown author.
I have considered this.
I could, of course, cut bits out of my story, but it seems a bit like taking bricks out of a wall. It needs them all in order to stay up and to be thoroughly functional.
I am contemplating my position. I have got two options, which is either to take the ruthless scissors to my story, or simply to write something else and come back to this story One Day, if the Something Else succeeds.
At this moment I am undecided.
I contemplated it this afternoon, and decided that the best thing to do would be the ironing.
Hence I am very pleased to announce that I have done the ironing at long last, which had a considerably mitigating effect upon my dispiritedness. It took ages, but it is finally and thoroughly done, down to the last newly-flattened handkerchief, and once again we have got a wardrobe full of flatly scented clothes.
In the end it did not turn out to be the impossible task I had supposed that it would be. In the end it turned out that all it needed for me to want to do the ironing, was for there to be something that I wanted to do even less, what a marvellous thing the human mind is.
I did the ironing because I did not want to start cutting my story to pieces, obviously. I will have to come back to that little difficulty tomorrow. Alternatively I could make a start on my tax return. In fact, this could be a very splendid opportunity for getting all sorts of horrible things done. I could even hoover the living room and bath the dogs.
In the meantime I can tell you that much of the day has been really rather splendid. The sun has beamed down benevolently on my washing for the whole day, and I have brought it in, not freeze-dried, but warm, and smelling of soil and of the Great Outdoors.
I was pegging it out in the garden when I heard an odd sound coming from somewhere above me, and eventually identified a crow, banging the end-house scaffolding with a stick. It was evidently enjoying this very much, because it kept on doing it, and setting its head on one side to think about it, and then bashing away again. It was not very rhythmic, but it was no worse than Oliver was when he first started playing the drums.
It made me happy to hear it. It was lovely to think that the crow had allowed itself to become diverted from the serious and pressing business of home-construction, and taken a small break to become a musician, although that was because it was a crow, I would have been rather less impressed if it had been one of the children, or Mark, which would have been even worse.
Fortunately Mark is not taking a holiday in order to develop his drumming skills. Mark is still busily mending leaky holes in oil rigs. It seems that the current hole is pretty well bunged up now, and so he might even be coming home on Monday.
That would be good.
When Mark is home I am always far too busy to faff about writing stories.
I will just have to put it off until he has gone away again.
