I blame the X key and dirty glasses

Oil painting filter of my three-hour distraction

46. Monday 16 March 2026

I did it! I finished the highlighting on Saturday and today I started the big edit. When I got to my desk this morning, I realised my glasses were dirty, so I looked for a lens cleaner and gave my glasses a good clean. Oh no, the X key is a bit sticky, I’d better go and get a cotton bud, prize off the key and clean it … so, yeah, I didn’t start editing for quite a while. Then a friend messaged to see if I was free for a walk. Well, it’s good for the mind, isn’t it, and I’d already seen the afternoon’s weather forecast was solid rain.

                Overall, between 7.30am and 2.30pm, I didn’t get past page 1. Really, that bad. And not just because I went out and prioritised cleaning things. As anticipated, I struggled to get beyond the changes I needed to make on page 1.

                It’s now almost 8.30pm and I’ve made it to page 8, which has been a slog. However, despite being adamant I wouldn’t continue until I’d dealt with every highlighted section, I have highlighted some sections in my version 6 file and will have to come back to them. For example, one small paragraph is about the small town where most of the story is set and I can't get it right.

In other news, I baked a sourdough loaf and ate two slices of warm, buttered bread. A friend and I had a restorative off-path walk in the woods and drank tea with water heated on a Kelly Kettle (I love that the kettle is basically a chimney that heats the water around it by lighting a fire in the holder at the bottom, then feeding it with twigs through the top of the chimney – very satisfying). Earlier this evening, I forced myself to endure three more chapters of a cosy crime novel I’m reading as research. I can’t think of anything positive to say about it and it’s so bad I don’t even want to say who wrote it or what it’s called, but it is both depressing (that it has been published) and inspiring (if that can get published, surely mine can too?). I don’t know that I can finish reading it. I have zero interest in any of the characters, in fact I don’t like any of them. I don’t care how or why the woman was murdered. I’m fed up of grimacing to myself because it’s so cliched and unfunny despite trying to be funny (I assume that’s what the silliness is supposed to be). I’m also annoyed by the fact I’d have highlighted more of that author’s sentences than I have of my own. And this book was published. And is one of a series FFS. Grrr.