Ok. Enough with the angst for a while. Please note that this period ‘while’ is undefined, both by me and by Bill Bryson (in the highly enjoyable Troublesome words of the title). And please note that reading what is essentially a dictionary for pleasure is not the same as reading ‘It pays to improve your word power’ in Reader’s Digest. Ok? One’s for bed and one’s for the doctor’s surgery.
As penance for all this angst (see the last couple of posts), I will simply rip up the few words that I did manage to add to God’s Cobbler in the past couple of days (for anyone new to the blog, GC is a novella that I’m using as training wheels before launching into a concerted attempt at finishing a series of novels) . I think the angst is masking a general unhappiness with the chapter I’ve been rewriting, and I’ve been passing that anxiety down the mental food chain.
I will also, as more ‘expressive’ penance, be going on a business start-up course run by Hounslow for Business to help me get the creative consultancy properly airborne (or should that be mindmapped?). I have to do something to keep my creative / non-creative time in balance. Otherwise I may simply explode with misery, and I wouldn’t have anyone to hand my just-arrived duck-faced moo cards. While I’m exploding. I think I may take a long time to explode — hence the ‘while’. I have visions of my hands flying off into the bullshitsphere, dripping in blood, fingers wrapped tightly around one corner of the card in classic ‘flick’ pose. Perhaps one of the aspirational chicken cards would become lodged up a nostril as well, in true Charlie Brooker style. Who knows. I digress. Bloodily.
In other self-flagellation news, the copy-editing course I’m on continues to set new highs in exasperation — both in my inability to spot basic mistakes and in the way that it’s turning 17 probably-normal people into proto-pedants. And what’s worse than a pedant? It’s a half-correct pedant. In all senses of the phrase. But never mind that now.
This little postette has just given me an idea for a book though — Troublesome Thoughts . I think I might have a heptagogy’s worth. No-one would read it, mind. Perhaps if I made it a coming of age tale, wore glasses and carved a Z on my forehead.
Ok, bedtime said Zebedee. Feel free to stop by and say ‘hi’. In the comments. I don’t think there’s room in the bed for more troublesome things.…
