On Stories and Scents.

I just read another of my old stories (blogger stats tells me that somebody in America read a lot of them today.) I always have mixed feelings when I read things I wrote between eleven and twenty years ago. On the one hand I’m pleased to discover that I wrote reasonably well for a novice, but I also find that they need a little editing here and there. It can be a naïve piece of sentence construction, or a lack of balance in the arrangement of clauses, or a staccato style that makes it less comfortable to read than it should be. And I wouldn’t use punctuation now as I did back then.

So should I edit them? Hardly, since I don’t see there would be any point. Nobody is going to offer to publish an anthology now, and if they should get ‘discovered’ after I’m dead, the discoverer can do the editing. I doubt I would care very much. Caring for a reputation is something I feel is only pertinent to the physical manifestation of a life, and the physical manifestation will have ceased to exist.

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Tonight brought another bout of unaccountable nausea and light-headedness. And I’m still smelling things that have no right to be there. I gather it’s officially called phantosmia, and can have various causes ranging from temporary stress to a ticket for a box seat in the knackers’ yard. This morning it was fried bacon which has had no place in my house for twenty five years. I ignored it, just as I ignore the frequent smell of jasmine. What else is there to do, and why do I never smell my two favourite scents – frankincense and sandalwood? There’s the mystery. I’m happy to say, however, that the sickly stench of pheasant crap on the bird tables has a perfectly rational explanation.