Predictable questions tend to generate predictable answers.
Fifteen years after I departed from the workforce, when I run across someone I haven't seen in a while, one question tends to recur.
So how do you fill in your time these days?
With travel removed from the equation due to COVID considerations, that's hardly surprising.
There's an almost invariable answer. I've been doing a bit of writing.
I could add and putting it up on my website, but other issues come into play.
One of them is quality control, a.k.a. proofreading.
By and large, it's not something that authors do well. It requires a little distance and, preferably, a second opinion. Fortunately, in the absence of a human consultant, software can come to the rescue.
Everything hereabouts has been fed through Grammarly. It's a handy package that continues to evolve. Unfortunately, as it does, it seems to detect new issues in text that an earlier version of the app has already checked.
At least, that's what I think happens. A text that has been checked now emerges with many issues.
A visitor who landed on the doorstep in September 2020 casually asked if I had finished the novel I had been working on around twenty-five years ago.
Yes, I replied, and it's up there on my website.
Which it was.
Unfortunately, a missing hyperlink meant visitors couldn't proceed from The Fiction Projects to Dirty Work At The Crossroads.
That was easy to fix. However, while I was there, I thought I might as well run the text through Grammarly. When I did, numerous issues emerged.
As I set about addressing them, dissatisfaction with the existing text set in.
That, in turn, invalidated the published version of the text.
So, within The Fiction Projects, Dirty Work At The Crossroads now appears incomplete but in reworked sections.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Much of my writing tends to fall into several forms of writing exercise.
Dirty Work includes an almost blow-by-blow account of a cricket match. That account is not strictly necessary for the rest of the plotline, but it represented a challenging exercise. The new reworked publication arrangement allows readers to step right past the gory details if they wish.