In a Labyrinth of Books
When
studying, I inevitably carry more and more books over to the table/couch where
I’m sitting. (“I’m sure I read something about this somewhere…” Proceeds to walk to bookshelves and pick up
any and all books which may contain that “something”. Make a new pile and go
through them. Start typing away again and forget about unused pile of books
until about five cups of tea later when I realise there’s no space left to put
the cup down.) I like to think of this as organised chaos; which will be
cleared away as soon as I’ve had a cup of coffee. My cat (the very cute Sir T
featured in various Tweets) likes to think of the piles of books and papers as
his own playground; helping me to type deep insights like ;;;;;;;;;;;;;kkkkkkkkkkkkdhyaaaaaaaaaaaaa
while walking across the laptop.
At the
moment I am busy with rewriting and editing a piece of about 11 000 words and
trying to shorten it a bit as well while I’m at it. As I last worked on it some
months ago, I can really look at the piece with new eyes. This sometimes also
involves some face-palming – most recently when I found that the translation of
the text I was quoting was, in fact, not translated correctly. But hey, taking
almost 45 minutes to do your own translation and rewriting nearly 1 000 words
is not that bad. Not. At. All. (This is usually my cue to make tea/coffee and
listen to something like Linkin Park and not The King’s Singers.)
In Other Writing News
Got some
feedback on a story I submitted a while ago – I just need to do a bit of
rewriting of a scene or two and then I’ll resubmit. I also submitted another
flash piece and am really holding thumbs for that one as well.
Tumbling around
My page onTumblr – Coffee Stains and Brainwaves – is starting to look a bit more like a
page, with quite an eclectic mixture of content. After a comment left on my
other (Kammastories) blog, I was wondering whether I should make a separate
Afrikaans Tumblr page or just keep everything on Coffee Stains. My main reason
for making a separate page is that it would enable me to place content in
Afrikaans, English, and Dutch and that most of the readers would be able to
understand all three. I don’t want to alienate my “English readers” by having a
mixture of content of which they can’t understand half. (This is also quite a
dilemma on Twitter – do I translate everything? Do I leave some stuff only in
one language, especially when I switch between languages during one conversation?)
After some
deliberating, I decided on rather making one, integrated, page. I’ve also
changed the name of the blog – from “Coffee Stains and Brainwaves” to “My Pen in My Hand”. I decided on this name because it means exactly the same thing in
both English and Afrikaans (how cool is that), and should leave me free to
share a wide variety of content.
