I feel guilty because I hate wasting paper. I feel sad because I’m like the woman who arranged for a professional family photo to be taken, popped a copy in Christmas cards to friends, then wrote to them begging them to destroy it.
I see nothing wrong with the photo above, and neither did her friends. Well, there was the odd one or two things they spotted when holding the snap up close to their face, but all in all, they appreciated the effort she made in thinking to bless them with this surprise gift.
Similarly, you may have received a free copy of one of my books back in 2019 or 2020, and likewse, it was a total surprise. However, I must ask you to forgive me for sounding rather blunt. Please bin it.
“Why on earth would I do that?” you say with fathomable alarm.
I hang my head in the shame of having been too impatient and too unobservant to have noticed errors or things that just didn’t seem right. Maybe I’m a perfectionist like the woman in the photo, but if something is amiss, I have to correct it.
Typos have been found and grammar mistakes corrected, but more significantly, changes have been made to the content whereby several passages or chapters have been added or edited. Therefore, unless it says on the ISBN page, ‘Revised Edition: Dec 2023’, it’s an old copy.
That is why I’m politely asking you to throw it in the garbage – toss it in the trash.
The beautiful lady on the far left is called Clara. Her daughter is Emily and her husband is Arthur. Most people call the old lady, ‘Grannie’. Clara seems reasonably content and that fur stole looks stunning on her frame. But like me, she’s fretting over that freebie she sent out last month.
Firstly, she wanted to be indoors. It was a chilly January afternoon, but there was a ray of sunshine overhead and it was reflecting on the camera. This made everybody squint and she doesn’t like it.
“Why oh, why didn’t I notice this before I sent out all those copies to my friends?” she wails. “My Arthur looks Japanese!”
The background was wrong too. She wanted to be standing in front of a wall decorated with a light strip of flowers.
She was not keen on her hat either. It was too far down and cast a shadow that made her look sleepy – and she forgot to remove the feather. Flapping about in the wind above her head made her feel like a giant ostrich searching for pilchards.
It had been her daughter’s suggestion to let Grannie join them for the photoshoot, but she wasn’t satisfied with her mother-in-law’s pose because she had insisted on holding her umbrella. Why couldn’t she just put the wretched thing down? When she had confronted her about it, the curt reply had been that her son was doing the same, so why wasn’t she bothered about him? It almost caused an argument. Arthur was holding an umbrella for a totally different reason. It was his cane. A gentleman looked distinguished when he walked along with a black sticking swinging in front of him, but she just couldn’t get his mother to understand that.
Then there was her own face. Others would have said it looked fine, and indeed, that was true, but she felt pasty and wished she had pinched her cheeks before the picture was taken. She had removed her gloves to do just that, but the photographer had shouted at her to stop moving. The flash made her wince and she had to steady herself by holding onto her husband’s shoulder. Thankfully this was one aspect of the photograph she didn’t mind. It made her look more loving. But, how she wished they had all positioned themselves in a different way. Given the chance to do it again, she would have made Emily lean against Grannie and moved Arthur to her right hand side.
It takes time to get things right, and I guess this highlights my haste in pressing the “publish” button too early. Please forgive me for my *promptitude. Thankfully for you, there is no need to replace your copy because you can now read all my chapters online, right here. You also have the advantage of having learnt a new *word, which I could have not shared with you had I not needed to write you this little note.
“I already knew what that meant.” you reply rather wrly.
That’s great. You’re more learned than me, because I confess that I had to look it up. It’s not a word I have been familiar with. I don’t like to use big vocabulary at all, and I have an article on that. But I’m going off topic – this post was just to let you know that I have failed in being able to produce a perfect copy of any of my books the first time around. Or the second. Or the third. And now I am paying the price by having to ask you to discard your freebie to the rubbish cart and placate you by suggesting an alternative action would be, to make paper aeroplanes. Origami is a fantastic way of easing one’s guilt for disrespecting trees.
There is one consolation for me in all this woe. I love to laugh at myself and I enjoy learning from my (many) mistakes. Also, thankfully for me, I do not suffer from kakorrhaphiophobia.
Happy shaping.
Much love,
