Draft Dodging

If you could see into my computer (that’s not a challenge, don’t bother) you’d be able to read the drafts of all the posts that should have gone up since the last one, which was more than a week ago.

None of them work.

It’s probably happened to you. You put time and effort into something. You craft it with care. It doesn’t come out.

What do you do?

My first thought is how much I like this bit or that bit. I may excise the bit and try to shoehorn it into something else. That never works, but what the hell, it was a really good bit, right?

Maybe not so much.

For example, I have a bit about a Dutch novel I read recently. It was published in 1961, but is set in Amsterdam just before World War II. The story is about a young lesbian whose estranged father is Jewish and whose mother is an ardent Nazi. The ending is not a surprise.

I don’t know if it was a particularly good bit, or if I just wanted brownie points for finishing the novel.

Another bit was about a sweet and young friend who was singing along to “Killer Queen” but left out the line about Khrushchev and Kennedy because of course she doesn’t know who Nikita Khrushchev was. Why should she?

That bit was a set-up for the line: If you lived through it, it ain’t history.

(I’m sure somebody else said that before, probably many somebodies. It’s too true.)

The problem is that both those bits were in the same post. No, I didn’t live through World War II, though my parents did. Auntie may be old, but I’m not that old. I had written a lame segue that made no sense when read it this morning.

See what I mean about something not working? I was afraid to delve further into the draft files, and wrote this instead, thus shoehorning in the bits I liked which I said above I shouldn’t do.

Don’t worry, Auntie will avoid all those partially written failures (get it? I’ll dodge those drafts. Har har) and start fresh.

Check back later.