My Latest Story

I have finished my latest story, except that the ending that worked the best for me was ‘happy but tearful’, let’s put it that way until you’ve read it. Then feel free to send me your opinion and we can discuss it. This, my latest story made me cry anyway, but not in a sad way. Perhaps the closest I’ll ever get to crying because I was ‘so happy’ as women often express those tears that few men ever experience or show anyway.
I enjoyed writing my latest story, although I still don’t know what to call it and that is a first for me, the title usually comes before I start writing, as I said yesterday. Oh, well, it’s all experience, eh?
I think I’ll try to get a publisher for this novel, as it’s been eighteen months since I last tried. I forget, you know…  I finish writing and editing, then I’m straight off to Kindle and CreateSpace and then it’s too late again 🙂
I had allowed until the end of this month to finish the first draft of my latest story, so I have two weeks in hand, although I did start a little earlier than I expected to. I used four hours of my free time to do a job that has been waiting for ten years.
Yes, ten years! I used to be heavily into finances, stocks, shares, spread betting and all that sort of thing. Well, you probably won’t believe this, but, I walked away from it all when I moved to Thailand ten years ago.
Completely – in one fell swoop.
However, I didn’t close or merge any of my twenty or so broker and bank accounts. I just abandoned them. Today I have found that about half of them no longer exist. I am not worried too much about the money having disappeared because of financial regulations, it will be locked into various frozen accounts, but can I prove that I am entitled to it? I wrote eight letters this afternoon seeking more information.
However, the records that I have are patchy and nobody has been keeping letters from those institutions for at least five years. Not only that, but the one person who could have helped is unlikely to.
Happy days are here again!
All my own fault, I am the first to admit that before anyone wants to jump down my throat just to make me feel worse about it. Ten years of procrastination is hard for anyone to excuse away, even me, the arch-casuist, but I am still happy about having written those eight letters, because it means that I can get on with editing my latest story tomorrow 🙂
Oh, and a comparison for you! In 1988 I bought my first house and had the aerial replaced. When the man had finished and proved that it worked, he commented on my renovation of the house.
“You’ll never guess what my last job was before coming to you,” he said.
“Putting up an aerial?” I guessed.
“Yes, of course it was,” he replied, “that’s all I do, but the man of the house showed me a yellow piece of paper. There were dozens of items on it with a tick against them. ‘You are the last one on my list’, he said. ‘My house is complete after seventeen years!”
I also sailed down to Gibraltar once with a guy on his home-made ferro-cement yacht called  Tenrag (his name backwards) and that took him seventeen years to build in his back garden too, so ten years is not really all that bad, is it?

All the best,

Owen

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