We All Have Our Albatrosses to Bear

I'm in the final, exhausted stages of Peculiar Lives now, printing out, reading through, noting changes, making changes, printing out again, etcetera ad infinitum or until I go STARK RAVING MAD, whichever happens first. Except that my printer has run out of ink, so I may be stuck with noting the remaining changes electronically.

This final stage is always frustrating, because I'm too close to the text to be able to assess it with any kind of objectivity: by now I can scarcely read a single sentence from it without groaning. I know, with all the certainty with which I know that I am not Pope Pius XII, that as soon as the damn novella is in print -- no, as soon as I get the proofs back from the publishers, as soon, in short, as it's too damn late to make any substantive changes -- that huge egregious errors in the writing will leap from the page and dance up and down in front of my eyes, twirling their ragged skirts and singing "Knees up Mother Brown".

Excuse me. I think I may have, as previously posited, gone STARK RAVING MAD.

In other news, there is no other news. There is is no possibility of other news. There is only The Novella. The whole of the rest of existence has receded, and is barely a smear on the horizon of my ocean of self-obsession.

And now I must plunge back in.

All together now: "Readers of my earlier book, The Peculiar, will recognise in the current volume the sequel and conclusion to its remarkable story. Like The Peculiar, Peculiar Lives is not fiction, but a true chronicle..."