Where DO they go?!

        The days. The days the weeks the years, zooming by like F1 revheads.

        I can't quite believe it's been over 3 weeks since I got to this on my list. Definiltely compounded by the age of my old PC. I change it over every five years on principle, nice shiny new Hewlett Packard desktop with all the latest clobber to drive you crazy. Thought its time must be coming up, checked the box of tricks, found it's actually over six and a half years old. Geez where does the time go?

        So, last ten days have been a non-stop wrestling match with HP and Microsoft and Adobe and Canon and more. NEVER seem to have the right driver for anything. AND MS doesn't support the previous version of Office anymore, so new one needed. AND HP doesn't have a disc tray OR an SD card reader built in anymore, so new peripherals needed too. Which have to be installed. AND the built in Windows 11 magically doesn't play the audio of MP3 home-made videos. It took me three days to finally ask Google the right question, thankfully just before I was about to fork out $80 for a software update, as what I really needed was a freebie download from the MS Store. Took 30 seconds. Job done.

        But at least now I have an enlarged vocabulary of swear words.

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        So, back to the fun stuff.

        Between the bouts of chaos I've been getting through my collection of Pascoe's short story publications - I had 5 of them in my last Xmas box, thought I'd better clean them up before the next lot arrives - and somewhere along the way it occurred to me that of the 20-odd stories in each, on average I find 4 great, 4 unreadable, and the rest okay enough to pick through. Then realised it's the great 4 and the unreadable 4 that are most important to analyse, to ask - why them? What makes - for me - a great story, and an unreadable story. What's the lessons? And again, this is just ME.

        First, superficially, size matters. It's a rare story over 3,000 words that can suck me in. A short story should be short, longer ones tend to wander about too much. Then there's - an old hobbyhorse of mine - paragraph length. I like short paras. No less than 3 on a page, preferably about 5. It gives the sense of action. Things happening.

        The only other things are the subject matter - there's a bunch of stuff I struggle with - politics, gratuitous sex, excess violence, drugs. Most other things can be woven into a decent yarn. Lastly the writing style. I won't say writing "quality" as that's way too subjective. And it's far too varied to pin it down any better. You know it when you see it, but one thing it has - I said it a couple of weeks back - is surprise. I love some unpredictability, in words and themes.

        Okay, that's it. My old PC is in the wings waiting to be wiped clean and passed on to a mate, as it's been a great workhorse and has a lot of mileage in it still.

        Cheers.....

                T.R.E.

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