I sent a story out to a certain mag yesterday. It’s another flash fiction hovering just above 300 words. That leaves me with only one of the May 2009 crop left to work on, and for that I’m waiting for a certain other magazine to open its doors for submissions. Meanwhile I hope to forget the story so it delights and intrigues me next time I see it. No chance. It’ll just mean another hundred words hit the floor.

I just checked the MS Word Properties for a story just published. It said Revision 92, Total Editing Time 336 minutes. That’s significantly longer than a football match. Each time I rename the file, it resets the stat to zero, so this is only half the picture of how a story gets riddled down to nearly nothing.

At some point I must return to a novel I started back in August 08. The effort expended to date is putting me off. Seeing that I started several 1500 word stories in May 09 which were finally published as 300 word stories a year later, that means I must start with 600000 words to get down to a 120000 word novel and it would take about ten years Total Editing Time.  Or I could just leave it at 600000 words and hope no one reads it. Actually, I only have 67000 words to play with and every time I edit it (which takes three months beginning to end) I lose thousands more. It’s grains of sands between my fingers. You should have read it last week. It was brilliant, but not this week. Now I’m about to reduce it again.

In one day I poured rancid milk (use by 10^th) onto my cornflakes, I took a pack of green beans (use by 10^th) out of the fridge and there’s white mould all over them and then the wheel fell off my lawnmower irreparably (actually I think I can fix this).