The Blot

[igenlode]

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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 :(

However, I had excised one long passage that simply wasn't working (in the current state of the manuscript, Artamène's state of health is still deemed to be parlous after the canon events at Hennebont, but I decided it was better not to go into details):

Indeed Marthe, who was as ardent a partisan as any and had been by her brother's bedside when in those dark days he finally awoke, was adamant that it was the good news about M. le Duc that had sustained his recovery over the long weeks and then months that followed... for there had been a time, though the family did not speak of it now, when the doctors had doubted whether Artamène would ever be able to stand without dizziness, let alone walk or ride.
But thanks to his own determination and obstinacy he was walking again now, even if he seldom ventured far beyond La Vergne

[edit: and even sizeable chunks of this text —and fortunately all the most obliterated bits— turn out to have been already abandoned attempts at constructing the passage, so it isn't nearly as long as I had thought!]