The Blot

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Sometimes I wonder if the universe is trying to tell me something... Having stubbornly embarked upon writing up my AU Yellow Poppy idea despite the total lack of readership for the first one (having finally found an workable conclusion for it, I decided I wanted to write up the material that I had been turning over for so long in my mind after all), I woke up this morning to find a slice of my new manuscript obliterated by a giant ink blot that had soaked all the way through a dozen or so consecutive pages :-O I think my pen, which I had just refilled, must have leaked somehow... although that does not explain how there can possibly be *two* blots in apparently the same location, four pages apart, with a smaller soaked-through section on either side of them and between!

I have just been —successfully I think— reconstructing the blacked-out wording from context and memory; fortunately I had spent most of last night rereading and battling with the wording of the next sentence, so I had at least seen it all fairly recently. I suppose this is the hard-copy equivalent of a 'cat on the keyboard' moment... as opposed to losing the manuscript altogether, which would be more of a 'corrupted hard drive' moment. And in fact quite a lot of the text appearing at that particular location on the page happened to be in sections that had already been crossed out, although that may simply reflect how high the proportion of deletions in my work tends to be nowadays :(

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