We interrupt . . .

 

. . . the scheduled programme continuing our discussion of life, art, performance and Good Enough* . . .

. . . to moan.

I’ve only—pretty much just this minute—got the copyedited SHADOWS back to my editor’s assistant’s (virtual) desk.  It’s in the contract that your copyeditor will be from another planet and imperfectly drilled in earth mores.**  This one was, in fact, better behaved than most.  I thought I was getting off easily*** until . . .

Part of the problem is that trying to produce anything but the plainest of plain text on a computer makes my brain flurg into bread pudding.  I can’t deal with electronic notes in the margins.†  So my editor’s ever-patient assistant printed out a hard copy and sent me that. ††  It took me a while to realise that those little faded grey streaky things are actually what significant house-style††† changes look like when electronic marginalia is forced onto paper.

My style is not house style.  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH. . . .

I took Wolfgang in for his yearly legal-requirement MOT test on Monday.

He failed.  He’s seventeen years old, it takes a little while for the parts to come in.  I got him back today‡ . . . just in time to howl out to Ditherington this evening to return my sheet music from the concert I didn’t sing in with the Muddles, which if the librarian doesn’t return all of he can’t check out the music for the next concert . . . which, yes, I am going to try to sing in.

All of this would pass as fairly standard Life Stuff.  However.  Remember The Wall?

Somewhat against my better judgement—but it’s always easy to be wise in hindsight—I was talked into agreeing to the fellow who started work on Monday.  He’s built dozens of brick-and-flint walls.  Hundreds.  Millions.  He knows EVERYTHING about building brick-and-flint walls.

He poured in a lot of concrete on Monday and covered it up to set or jell or coagulate or whatever cement does.  He was going to start again on Wednesday.  I heard a lot of talking going on Wednesday morning, but then hellcritters and I set out on our double commute to get all of us down to the mews without benefit of Wolfgang.

That evening my neighbour rang me to say THE WALL BUILDER HAD QUIT.  HE’D DONE ONE DAY AND HE’D QUIT.‡‡

My neighbour now wants to go with some other frelling friend of a friend of a colleague’s cousin’s small-appliance repairperson’s mongoose.  I want to hire someone we know something about.  She and I had nearly half an hour on the phone tonight, talking at total cross purposes, because she wants her way and I want mine.  She’s already booked this joker to come talk to us tomorrow.  He’s very nice! she said to me.  You’ll like him!  Whether I like him or not is beside the point.

I am very tired. . . . ‡‡‡

* * *

* I meant ‘good enough’ as a positive thing.  I apply it positively.  I make myself crazy—you may have noticed—I wind myself up, I force myself to fail by setting the bar too high.^  Good enough means I can achieve something and recognise it as achievement and not some flavour of failure.  I personally feel it gives me room to have both good and bad days:  on the good days it’s a springboard and on the bad days it’s a support.

My affection for this approach may partly be my age again.  I remember when the concept of good enough hit the media and the self-help racks.  I was raised to believe that anything less than A-plus, 100%, a gold medal and a Hollywood Walk of Fame star^^ was not good enough and that sackcloth and ashes and a life of social exile and sixth-rate chocolate were the only alternative.  Good enough was not only a HUGE relief but it also meant you could try stuff without ruining your reputation (if any).

And possibly your grade-point average, depending on the school.  This is one of the things that even at the age of seventeen or twenty and going or going back to college, and I was not a subtle thinker at seventeen or twenty, made me kind of nuts.  Here you are attending full-time an Institution of Higher Learning and . . . you only dare take stuff you’re reasonably sure you can get good marks in, because education isn’t really the goal here, having a good-looking transcript is.  This was in one of the eras when a liberal-arts degree was about as useful as a rubber pogo stick^^^ so you didn’t want to smash the poor flimsy thing up any further by taking risky classes.  I’m not sure what quantum physics looked like in the early 1970s but I totally wouldn’t have dared.  I did however weaken my poor sad BA by taking music, which I did not get wonderful grades in.  Fortunately I subsequently found a way to escape my doom of sackcloth and ashes and the sixth-rate chocolate.  . . . Social exile?  Eh.

But Good Enough came along before I had permanently crippled myself by the weight of the chip on my shoulder.

^ Yo, I’m a Shetland pony, not an Irish hunter.

^^ If they can give stars for walking on the moon, I’m not too fussed about how they define ‘entertainment industry’.

^^^ Although I’m not sure even a proper steel and titanium pogo stick can be classified as useful

** It’s either that or the questions that have no connection with reality as you understand it are some kind of plant, seeking to discover if you have dangerous hidden personality traits that might lead you to go suddenly mad with a banana frappe at a crowded shopping mall.

*** Aside from an extreme case of Not Able to Focus on These Words any more

† My editor handles this just fine, and she’s nearly as old as I am.  I tell myself she does a lot more of it than I do.  She’s, you know, an editor.

†† I think I told you about the FedEx man not delivering it when there was no one home despite the fact that it said PAPER and MANUSCRIPT and ZERO VALUE and PLEASE LEAVE and NO SIGNATURE REQUIRED all over it.

††† Ie Chicago Manual of Style or whatever.  Grammar and punctuation and all are somewhat mutable and publishing houses usually have a standard way of doing things, although the choices Teacosy Press makes may be somewhat different from those of Zombie Revolution Books.  Aside from their contrasting approaches to acquisition.

‡ I am VERY GRATEFUL to the weather gods for giving us two non-sequential good days for walking.  Hellhounds and I enjoyed the walk back from and out to Warm Upford very much.  Something went right.^

^ But the question is, will there be four of us shepherding Wolfgang to and from his MOT next February?  SHE’S BEEN HERE FOUR MONTHS.  DON’T YOU THINK WE COULD ALL START TO GET ALONG?

‡‡ He’s decided he can’t do it for what he claimed on his estimate.  Is this spectacular incompetence or a spectacularly crude attempt to jack the price up?

‡‡‡ And I haven’t even told you how copying seven pages of Zerlina’s Vedrai, carino^ took ten minutes because every page jammed.  Some of them several times.  Feeding pages in one at a time didn’t work.  Fanning them between each page didn’t work.  A whole new trayful didn’t work.  I.  HATE.  MY.  PRINTER.

^ If I like it, or anyway Nadia likes me singing it, I’ll buy the book.  I worry about copyright even when the bloke’s been dead hundreds of years.