Ink capable

Much as I am enamoured of Inkjet printers for their versatility and economy, the one I have has an unerring sense of bad timing. Yesterdays farce saw me running out of ink twenty pages into a fifty page document. Result; I have to spend valuable time away from day job getting refills done. This entails a fifty kilometre round trip and over a valuable hour out of my working day. It also meant that the MSS samples due for despatch yesterday didn't go until lunchtime today.

The upside is that it got me away from my desk for a while. Wife remarked at how crabby I've been getting lately and that it was a good thing for the whole household that Mr Grumpy had got off his backside and away from the keyboard.

Writing the initial manuscript is the easy bit. The thing I find frustrating and what drives everyone else completely crackers, including Dog, is my tendency to revisit every damn paragraph in 240,000 words and fiddle with them. Change the metaphor, delete a simile, tone down the hyperbole, alter the key descriptive terms, and occasionally even delete a character while generally behaving like an obsessive compulsive with a bad case of the fidgets and attention deficit disorder. The MSS samples are now, for better or worse, out of the door and I am forbidden by Wife upon pain of agony to revisit them until I get a reply from the agency that wanted to look over my work.

"Get on with the next one Jones." Wife has laid down the law and I defy her at my personal peril. Just as well she keeps me on the straight and narrow because I'd never have gotten even this far without her.

The other edict Wife has decreed is forbidding me to write about the Weather, as I only get uptight about the whole global warming bullshit. "Everyone around knows it's a load of crap to line politicians pockets." She vouchsafed unto me. "You have better things to do with your time." She's right of course. I have a trilogy to finish. One must complete the tasks one begins, or what's the point?

We were promised sunshine today but I didn't see any.