So. I have a 100k novel to tidy up and make presentable. I’ve done little to none of it, and the honest reason for that is I believe it is beyond me. I am stupid. Yes, stupid, like lose-a-winning-lottery-ticket stupid. Like pull-my-own-finger stupid. Like stick the pen in my eye stupid. I routinely handle heavy goods when it should be outlawed, and I’ve even become a Mum, when I honestly should be parented myself.

So. Stupid. And so this task which should be given over to Atwood, or Alberto Manguel, or Umberto Eco, or Neil Gaiman, these people who have books and libraries and time and effervesce and ability and jesus just the talent for it. The pitying looks from colleagues and the thud-thud-thud of my own brain makes the suggestion of it falling to me as nonsense. The book should be crafted into baroque plaster work, something intricate and smart and new each time you read. Instead I’ll make it into a holiday read with oversimple English because no one understands me anyway and a metaphor that is LIKE THIS IN CASE YOU MISS IT and a subplot that no one will see because see paragraph one, I’m an idiot.

Something like this that you can take with you as you go, unadorned by attachment.

So yeah. Idiot. But if I leave this to languish, no one else will care about them. No one is going to hurt when they do, or fight for them to keep going, or even think about them after I’m gone. No one will give a damn. So yeah, I’m an idiot. But I’m the only idiot attached to this thing.

Jaysus, this is what it must have been like with Frodo, a minnow in the face of overwhelming odds. And we have similar feet, so there’s that…

Right, have to get dinner on. Gwan with ye.

What?