I am sitting on the taxi rank having a little worry.
We are setting off to collect Oliver on Wednesday, and the august Daily Telegraph, publisher only of unvarnished and undeniable evidence-based truth, has announced that on Tuesday, we are expecting another storm, very probably on the massive and terrifying scale of the last.
It will bring with it high winds and snow, affecting especially Scotland, especially high ground, and especially anybody travelling on the roads.
I am instantly anxious. I do not wish to be trying to navigate our way up through the storm-wrecked Highlands, desperately searching for a road not blocked by fallen trees and massive snowfall, all in a terrible hurry because of wishing to be at school in time for Oliver.
I have handed the problem to Mark and told him to think about it and decide what we should do, but so far he seems to think that it is probably nothing to worry about and we should just get on with life.
Sometimes you can be too unflappable.
The problem is that he never believes anything he reads in the newspapers.
I wish I didn’t. How much simpler my life would be.
He has been left in charge of the house by himself today, because I have been doing my university course all day. I have liked this very much. We had an authors’ agent come in this morning to talk about how we ought to write to agents. This was absolutely gripping, and very sensible. I will try it all, next time I have written something that I think might sell. We had to write a blurb for a dust jacket, in the break. It had to be without cliches or boring sentences. This is harder than you might think.
We had already had to write a piece for the afternoon, which had been given in last week. You had to read your piece out, after which it was pulled to pieces by the rest of the group, as everybody explained what you had done wrong and could have done better.
I am not very good at this. I can take a piece of work apart line by line and say that this word was wrong, and should have been that, or that this sentence is badly structured, but when it comes to nuance of meaning and subtleties of metaphor I am, in authors’ parlance, screwed. I am myself about as subtle and nuanced as an advertisement for a bat-flu injection, and notice these details not at all in other people’s work.
I had to make up for it by writing a piece that sent us all up, and making everybody laugh when I read it out. When I am reading I like to be cheered up, and I think that secretly most people think the same, even if they tell us that they like pages which are visually interesting and characters with unplumbed depths.
We have learned about this in class.
A page which is visually interesting looks like this:
with all the
writing
in stupid shapes
in the middle
of the page.
Also this has the advantage that the book looks nice and thick from the outside, but actually has only got about four quid’s worth of story although it still costs £8.99. I do not purchase books like this for that very reason. They might be artistic and project the reader into the intricacies of the character’s world, but they are still a jolly waste of money.
All the same I know how to do it now, and so if ever a story is running a bit shorter than it should, I will know how to make it look thicker.
Hurrah for education.
I really am learning new things every day.
