Once Works Well was pure technology. Now it seeks merely to divert.
Pansy subjects - Verse! Opera! Domestic trivia! - are now commonplace.
The 300-word limit for posts is retained. The ego is enlarged

Wednesday 21 April 2010

Cleanliness and delight

The BBs both read through their ablutions and are not shower people. The unused shower is in the en suite and therefore denied to guests. To ensure their cleanliness a shower is being installed over the bath. As the photo shows (awkwardly shot prone on the bathroom floor) further readjustment will be needed since the bath is equipped for readers not showerers.




MORE ABLUTIONARY EXPENSE Imperially I am 6 ft 1½ in. tall; metrically that’s a nigglingly precise 1.8669 m. The en suite hand-basin is 800 mm high, standard for such fitments and well below that part of my body indelicately referred to as my groin or crutch – take your pick. Rinsing my face I must bend down like a croquet hoop. This irritation will shortly be addressed so here’s the “Before” pic.

TOUCHED BY JOY For months the final chapter of the novel (carrying two contrary options) has been clear in my head. But getting there from the penultimate chapter was a blank. I spent three days thinking. An idea and, more important, a technique based on event compression arrived and I rushed upstairs to turn them into words which were a delight to write. Time to rush downstairs to the exercise bike and to plug myself into the Ulysses audio. As luck would have it I’d reached the Castle of the Winds section (officially Aeolus) where Bloom visits the newpaper offices and the text is presented as series of cod news reports topped by headlines – which the actor-reader shouts aloud. Nostalgically hilarious. Double delight so I am twice blest. Bless you all

Novel progress 25/4/10. Ch. 22: 3890 words. Chs. 1 - 21: 94,115 words. Comments: Final third of final chapter remains. Or will it do a Topsy?