On a lighter note...

The last couple of times I blogged, it was a bit angsty. The problem hasn't gone away, but I'm determined not to worry about it until it raises its ugly head again, so for the moment all is relatively serene in the Collins household. (Unless someone asks me how the writing is going, in which case they are almost literally knocked backwards by a gale of ranting. But people are rapidly learning not to ask...)

And yesterday I spoke to my lovely hopefully-soon-to-be-agent (don't worry if you're getting confused about how many agents/editors I have - it doesn't really make any difference to this story) and she really made me laugh. Partly because of what she was telling me about my book - I was making notes, and one of them says, and I am not making this up, 'try to write good prose' - and partly because she said, 'You know that Mitchell and Webb sketch, where one of them is an editor and keeps saying, "How about doing like this? Well, not like this, obviously, but maybe a bit like this - well, not really like this, but..."?' 

But mainly because she said that when her assistant put Edward Leigh onto her Kindle to read it, she accidentally loaded the Word document with tracked changes.

Now. I didn't know this. But apparently when that happens the Kindle isn't equipped to deal with it. So it loads everything, original and final versions combined - so all the deleted bits, all the new bits, all the comments - without any kind of formatting or signposting... I.e., in this case, all the cut 10,000 words and the new 15,000 words. Not to mention the occasional moment where I'd lost my temper and put in a note-to-self like (and I quote) 'Yes, but where the hell is the PLOT?!'. 

Apparently, the assistant, when asked her opinion, said, 'I'm enjoying it, but the narrator does seem to do a lot of things... well, twice.'

It reminded me of the time I listened to Mozart's Requiem for the first time*. It was on vinyl, and I put the turntable on the wrong speed. I told my parents I thought it was brilliant but... maybe a bit high-pitched. 

* I am not going to tell you how old I was. Suffice it to say that I was at secondary school - old enough, you might think, to realise that the music was over in roughly 3/4 of the time one might have anticipated.