A charming young fellow called Keith
Dressed up as a holiday wreath:
He sang “Deck the Halls”
With some twigs on his balls
And nothing above or beneath.

My neighbours’ new bright decorations
Provide such intense lumination
That they render me blind,
So that I have to find
My front door by echolocation.

…Tomorrow, the rude one that one me third prize at my writers’ group.

My writing group is having a Christmas limerick competition tomorrow. I’ve written two, which I can’t publish yet as the contest is anonymous.

Do you have any? (They can also be about any other holiday, or just winter.) Go on, give us a laugh. I’ll put my efforts up tomorrow after the contest, which I don’t expect to win because we have some mean rhymesters in our group.

So the next thing I did was to analyse the content for repetition.

In my word document, I highlighted all the bits that were about the romantic relationship, and tried to see whether they had the same structure. I noticed that two chapters began the same way, with my narrator summing up the fact that time had passed, in a similar fashion–so I changed that.

I noticed that the hero kept on meeting up with the heroine and offering her food (he’s a pastry chef, yum), and while I like that in a man, I decided to change one of those incidents so that it happens somewhere else and he doesn’t offer her food–instead she has to grovel a bit (hooray!). Altering the pattern there actually makes the character arc better, because before the hero came to make the peace, whereas now the heroine has to do it herself.

I’m going to go through it again looking for more structural similarities.

Mostly right now though, I’m tired. Fecklet was up from 3-5 am with teething troubles and itchy skin and although it’s only 8.20 pm, I’m wrecked. I’m going to bed to read a book on eczema. (How exciting.)

Oh. And it’s Shakespeare’s birthday. I could quote some Shakespeare for you, but as I do that on a daily basis in my day job, I’ll skip it. Instead I’ll offer you a great joke:

Shakespeare walks into a pub. The barman takes one look and shouts, “Oi, you! Get out of here! You’re bard!”