Burning the Midnight Oil

The last 3 nights I’ve been up all night. I’d love to say writing, but that doesn’t happen. I was editing. Editing the produce of the last 18 months or so work. My hours have been erratic – talk about unpaid nightshifts – but by goodness they have been put to good use for once.

In three night’s work I've only written one original paragraph of new prose (apart from forewords, indexes and endnotes), which was to finish off a short story which had been canned for over six months. Oh, that’s nothing, it once took me 10 YEARS to finish off the last page of a book. I simply have a hard time doing anything that NEEDS doing. It’s that subconscious leap of getting stuck in that perturbs me.

It could be a phone call, or a chore, or, God help me, changing the bed*, or anything. If I HAVE to do it, I have TROUBLE doing it. Some people are incapable of sitting and doing nothing – I’m not one of them. Give me a kettle, Radio 4, Freeview, and I'm EaZy.

Most of the nocturnal burning of the midnight oil was editing, like I keep saying, and basic presentation formatting. It was tedious. Setting fonts and sizes to headings and so forth. Indents and tabs and all the rest of it. It wouldn’t have been half as bad but my mouse is crud and my mouse pad is crud so the process was jerky and repetitive and it was made twice as hard because the PC has a mind of its own and does certain things that defy sense and logic to peev you off. There's only so many tunes you can listen to on YouTube as well.

All done though. Big print off on Tuesday and a bigger one coming up this afternoon. It’s amazing the difference an artistic front cover makes, as well. Plastic spines for the binding and job's a good'un. Talking about Job, I never really read him in The Bible before. Just heard about it and stuff. It's a cracking chapter, you know. Awesome language. Call The Bible what you like, from a 'pile of crock' to the 'living word', but one thing for sure, parts of it are written with profound poetic power.

Profound poetic power...you see what I did there?

*Fresh linen is a winner.