Day three of the edits, and the world outside the window has faded into blurry miscellany. There are only two tasks for the day: hunt down and kill every last semi-colon and ellipsis, and drink tea.
One task goes better than the other.
Crippled with cold-mouse-hand, the writer spots another ellipsis lurking in the text. Flexing her wizened muscles she dives, gets it into a chokehold and ruthlessly slashes it from the page. But then another, so quick on the heels of the first it must be a co-ordinated attack and she’s so tired, her vision blurring, her gluteus maximuses (maiximi?) numb from sitting, and this one slides from her weakening fists.
It’s time to end the hunt for the day. There’ll be plenty more to kill on the morrow. For now, there is food to cook and a nose to press to cold glass, looking out in dazed wonderment on the world beyond the room.
The room where she battles daily against the forces of obsolete punctuation, suffering her wounds in silence, driven slowly mad by the endless ticking of the clock. Voice echoing in her head and then, as the days go by, aloud. But there’s no one there to listen.
Except her characters. And they’re even more heavily armed than she is and, she suspects, some of them quite like the punctuation.
The fight goes on.
Anna Stephens, word seeker 