All sorts

Dead Tree

Aaargh… Those of you “friended” to me on Facebook will know that I’ve been fighting with my manuscript of late – akin to chasing a ball of rapidly unraveling wool which is traveling down a hill at speed. It’s strange, I thought I had the darned thing pretty much wrapped up and then realised there was a major “incredibility” in the story. This struck me at about 3am on Sunday morning. Why these flashes of insight come at such ungodly hours is beyond me. I plotted out the thing in my head, figured what I needed to do and come Monday, set about putting things to rights. Only it was one of those things that had knock on effects. Change one thing here, must change another thing there. I swear I’ve written business strategies for start up companies and reports for the city council that have been considerably easier!

I am now in a state where my brain has turned to sludge and it’s taken me the better part of a day to get just one paragraph to read the way I want it. I used to scoff at writers who laboured over a single paragraph in this way – and now I are (sic) one of them. Whaaaaaah! And all this whilst periodically dashing off to check Sky News to see if the world has gone belly up yet.

You know, she said rambling on from one thought to another, I can honestly say that it strikes me that as unpleasant as it may be, this global economic crunch is in fact much needed. For the past fifteen years too many have indulged in an unsustainable life of greed and excess, trying to outdo the Jones’s and insisting on living in homes that look like wedding cakes while driving vehicles that screw up the environment. The ecological pressure we put on the planet with this kind of lifestyle is fatally destructive in the long run (and that run might not be that long really). I’m kinda hoping that the crunch, if we learn from our lessons (do we ever learn from our lessons?) will put an end to nonsense like overpaid and over-rated executives, celebrities and those daft “islands” and similar such things in Dubai and elsewhere. I’m sort of hoping too that a recessionary mindset will also foster a move to more traditional values where people, rather than money and “stuff”, come first.

Finally, all this credit crisis thing and muddling manuscripts got to be too much, and so I hived off and procrastinated in the digital darkroom. I know that when the going gets tough the tough supposedly go shopping – well not this tough, this one goes off to get creative and to play with colour saturation, tone mapping and other such digital wizardry.

Old Slave Bell

Rusty Gate

Harbour Wall

Old Window