Jacey Bedford's Journal

So it's Friday and I'm sitting at my desk struggling with some bloody stupid formatting Word has decided to stick in the middle of the chapter I'm revising and I call my neighbour to see if she can suggest where this odd little row of dots has come from (she can't) and my parting shot is, 'See you tomorrow."

"Tonight!" she says. "It's the quiz night."

Frollocks, I think to myself. By this time it's 7.45 and I have to be washed and changed and down at the village hall by 8.15. I can't get out of it because I'm on the damn committee and once one of us starts 'not feeling like going' it opens the door for excuses from everyone. So I'd planned to spend all night on revising this particularly sticky bit of book and... instead I spent it in our local hall answering quiz questions. It was a good quiz, though, and our team almost won (not that there are prizes for coming second).

But I'm still stuck on this particular bit of revision.

I made a change at the beginning of the book and for the first 80% of the story it didn't really make too much difference but as I got closer to the end I realised that there's a point when the whole story needs to diverge... because I now have to follow on logically from the new parameters.

What did I do? Instead of making my central characters natural telepaths I gave them a cool techy neural implant that generates psi-like abilities.

It had been my original intention to maroon the psi-techs on the planet along with the colony they save, but suddenly my reason for doing that (a follow-on idea) has evaporated and so I can let my psi-techs use their considerable skills to save their own asses as well as the settlement's. In addition, if I wish to commit sequel (or even trilogy) I have a fun bunch of rogue psi-techs to play with when they are let loose on the galaxy.

PS I solved the Word formatting problem by asking the collected minds of rasfc but heleninwales came up with the solution... it was borders... who the hell would have thought a single dotty line might be a border?

I'm going down to the Village Hall again tonight, this time to see the lovely Liverpool-Irish singer-songwriter Anthony John Clarke. He writes lovely intelligent songs and delivers them with a nice dollop of humour.

I've been organising concerts at our local hall for the best part of twenty five years, but over the last few years our audiences have started to decline slowly. I don't think we're upsetting them with anything specific, they just reduce by natural attrition. It's only when we get a big name guest like John Tams or Vin Garbutt that we have a full house, these days.

Maybe it's time to stop doing the events, but that seems like giving in and I don't do that so easily.