Errors show that learning is taking place.

You would hope, as you get older, to be able to avoid some of the rubbish you perpetrated when younger. You would aspire to distance having leant enchantment to the view, so that you did not rush headlong into inadvisable situations as heretofore but employ the wisdom of age to ensure that every action was considered.  You would hope in the course of a life to have acquired the knack of standing back, so that standing back had your back, so to speak and that you were not chopping yourself off at the ankles before you even got started by inconsidered and rash actions.

This is what we would wish, dear, does it eventuate? Does it heck!

I had been frustrated for months because I had finished the novel and the illustrations, had proof read the lot and was ready for ‘Houston, we have a go, we are cleared for take off, the weather is looking good, we are firing on all boosters.  I have clearance to begin the countdown.  TEN, NINE, EIGHT, SEVEN, SIX, FIve, four, Oh blast, the computer’s fallen over.’

As you know if you visit regularly.  If you visit regularly and have kept the faith during the weeks of my absence due to computerlessness, and kept coming back until I reappeared, well what can I say?  If we didn’t live so far apart I would visit with cake.  (I do a good Victoria sponge and gingerbread men that my grandchildren say are the best, I could show you a photograph of their endorsement but it fell overboard with the computer.)

So, new computer.  S&H arrive, put on basic programmes, insert antivirus, go away.  Oh dear, can shop, no programme for writing words.  Visit S&H pay through the nose for entire officey prog will probably never use, though a completely unsuspecting friend, who thinks I am intelligent, has offered to instruct me in the use of a spread sheet.  Pity, I was enjoying the friendship.  Heigh ho.

Having a computer connected to the net I removed extract, and novel from other, unconnected computer and as per instruction from S&H inserted to new computer, composed letter and submitted submission submissively and then breathed out.

Fool!  Idiot!  Nincompoop!  Halfwit!  Nellie!

I have proof read, extensively.  I am good at that.  I proof read the OH’s master’s degree essay thingy and he got a special mention for the excellence of the proof reading. One of the reasons I was so readily employed by magazines is my proof reading, I sent it, they printed it, nary a mistake dearie, always print perfect.

I had actually proof read the entire novel for spacing mistakes, that’s the gaps between the words.

So, at the writer’s group meeting, reading aloud, I found a mistake.  DAMN!  A word repeated, repeated.  Wrote twice twice.  Like Neanderthal with hairy knuckles draggin’ on the gravel and snot dribbling.  HOW LONG HAVE I BEEN DOING THIS WRITING LARK? WILL I NEVER LEARN?

So I went back to the novel on the new computer and discovered that the new computer has a different system and had bunged wiggly lines under everything it thought was a mistake.  They weren’t, they were invented words and people speaking in assorted dialects and they were EVERYWHERE.  And I had cockily without looking sent it off like that.

I am going to extend my gym routine to incorporate knee flexions. Thus I will be able to kick myself up my own arse to save anyone else the bother.

Keep reading, no doubt it will get wurse, wurserer and wursererer. The awfullest thing is that the novel celebrates the second rate and I HAVE JOINED IN.

Next one’s going to be about Pulitzer Prize winners.

Der.

Also still don’t go shopping here.  I will not know if you have done so.  I’ll tell you when it’s fixed, I appear to have left a password in the same secluded location that I left my thinking ability, if I rediscover either, you’ll be the first to know.  For now just believe that I am a person in need of knuckle bandages, the person I submitted the submission to knows, so you’ll be in good company.

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