3 October - Too Many Words

Sent an email to a friend the other day about my w/end, covering the short period of Fri to Sun. Yes, some of it ends up on the blog but not all of course and because there were things I wanted to cut and paste in the blog, I cut and pasted first into a word doc, as you do, to weed out obvious grammar blunders. Even I noticed that this time I had written a lot. Granted, 48 hours in my life can often be crammed with stuff, but I'm hardly the secretary for defence on a whirlwind trip to Afghanistan. This friend and I are notorious for surpassing each other in length of missives and god help you if you get caught in the crossfire of our rat ta tat conversations when we meet. And of course we test each other as in ‘As she read it all? Was she paying attention?’ And so in our replies we make references to what the other said and sometimes almost run down what's mentioned point by point as if replying to a legal document. Women, such capacity for holding lots of information! Something this time made me use word count and my email conatined a staggering 2,700 words. In some quarters that passes for a short story to read on Radio 4, or a short story period, or a chapter of a novel. I hung my head in shame at the worthlessness of those words and my ability to actually write that much in one go. To compound the feeling I’m wasting valuable words, I realised that wasn’t even the only email I sent to a friend that day. Merely one of several.