Finished?

Right, I've finished Chapter probably-the-14th-and-last (unless I lost count somewhere or other along the way) of "An Outsider and a Foreigner", on Hertha's forlorn sentiment that she can't possibly tell Raoul how she feels about him. I hope her motivations for this are sufficiently clear; I'm not at all sure that they are. But I couldn't seem to fit the extra explanation in to the prose for the ending (I had enough difficulty steering a way to the ending at all), which means that it's only covered in her dialogue with Christine several pages earlier on, and in a couple of fragmentary sentences at that: "And hurt us both all the more? I don't want his pity. [...] He has the right to be left in peace -- by both of us."

No, I'm really not sure that's enough :-(

I mean, it seems to me painfully obvious that a one-sided confession, especially under these circumstances, is just going to make things exquisitely uncomfortable for both of them and imperil the relationship that they do have -- speaking from bitter experience -- but Hertha doesn't explicitly address that anywhere...

I'm also very much in two minds about whether I'm actually going to write the planned epilogue at this point. ( Read more... )

I've almost completed the sides-to-middle operation on the sheet -- I thought I had, but annoyingly I discovered some more holes near the top edge. They are small rips in otherwise sound fabric, dating back to the era of the rats and caused by climbing up the corner of the bed, and I never bothered with them while they were near the hem of the sheet and always securely tucked in. But turning the worn centre to the outside has unfortunately turned out to result in bringing all those little crescent-shaped tears to the centre of the 'new' sheet, and in a prime location for me to catch a big toe in them and rip the whole thing to shreds :-(

So each one needs a flat darn, taking up to an hour each. ( Read more... )