It’s Wednesday again, and another day off. I have, as usual, a packed schedule and list of jobs to do. I am going to enjoy ignoring them all. It’s what I do best. If you have a talent you should nurture it. If I had my life again I might try to nurture a talent other than procrastination, but for the moment that is what I will work on.
It’s an intriguing subject. If you could have your life over again, would you, and what would you do do differently?
I will have to make one obviously impossible assumption here – that I could go back to being a baby again. If I just restarted without knowing anything of my past life the chances are that I would do nothing differently, be directed by random chance and, eventually, end up writing a blog post about how it could all have been different.
That would make a bleak book wouldn’t it? A man who gets a second chance wastes it in the same way he wasted his first life…
(I’ve just been reading a style guide (by accident rather than because I meant to) and now feel guilty that my ellipsis has not been preceded by a space, does not have a space between each dot, and lacks a space after it.) I didn’t even know that there was a style guide for an ellipsis. Or there were British and American styles of punctuating when using brackets. I just slap the punctuation where the cursor happens to be when I press the key. Life is too short to worry about dots.
Alternatively, you end up with a story about a man who is reborn knowing all his previous mistakes and trying to correct them. That would probably be even worse. Can you imagine being eight years old, for instance, and thinking “I must write to T S Eliot and Siegfried Sassoon to gather quotes for the book I intend writing in twenty years time.”
It would be a strange sort of life.
There would also be the problem that I would have to be in Preston in 1980 to meet Julia, and the worry that she wouldn’t like the new me.
That would be a good story – it has all the makings of a top class rom-com and has fame and fortune written all over it. Now all I need to do is go back in time and remake myself as a Richard Curtis clone. I was tempted to use the new style ellipsis at the end there, but I resisted.
It sounds like you have the makings of a good novel there, Quercus! 🙂
I’m not sure I can writ anything hat long. I will have to break it down into poem-sized bits…
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I am appalled by the fact that there is a style guide for ellipses…
. . . but it probably won’t change my life now that I know that there is one.
You say that, but it will always be at the back of your mind . . .
I bet you checked that one, didn’t you?
Good work there.
🙂
There have many stories that have been based on the premise “What if I could start over?” Most famously, “Groundhog Day.” Sometimes it ends well, sometimes it doesn’t. When we were publishing our magazine, “The Chicago Manual Style” was my bible. As a matter of fact, it became the basis for the Books of Everything. With quite a few changes, of course. 😉
I’ve never thought of Chicago and style before. Chicago and Cubs, Whitesox or pizza – yes. Style, not so much. 🙂 I’m always shocked at how badly I write when I read a style guide. That’s why I like poetry. 🙂
Ok…first off, I don’t know if I would change anything, because any change means I wouldn’t have my daughter. But, probably work harder in school
I couldn’t alter anything in case I missed Julia, but from 1980 onwards I would save more money and buy gold. 🙂
Yeah…I’d buy google or Amazon….
That is a great idea. 🙂
You can think too much, you know 🙂
It all started when I got up to early and it followed on from there…