For the one or two of you who read the Ruminations

I have started writing again. 

You may have wondered why the Ruminations ended so abruptly, or perhaps you were glad they did.  But there was a reason why. 

My story was about how everything that did happen almost didn't.  I wove together many different stories from the past in a Tristram Shandy sort of way, explaining why and how something that happened was caused by something that happened before, and so on.  My problem was when I started with a series of stories about why we lived where we did, and why some others lived there too, and what happened because of it and how much of life is determined by simple location.  I was about forty pages into that when I realized that I was going to get into some trouble.  Though  I was deeply involved in this, and it had a huge affect on my life, not every story in that story weave was my story, and I had no right to tell it. Too many people were still alive, unfortunately. I scrapped most of the forty pages from the story, and put a copy in an envelope to be given to my children after my death to read, if they care to do so.

But this left  big gap in my story.  Taking some inspiration from Tristram Shandy, I simply announced that the events following this point in the story are not to be told, and shall be left concealed behind an impenetrable veil.  I then inserted a copy of Shandy's famous, or infamous, black page.

I then tried to veer off and do another weave and promptly ran into the same problem, to which I gave the same solution.  And again.  And again.  And again.  I had five black pages by then, and I realized I couldn't go forward with that.  It ceased to be funny and seemed more and more of a cop out. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any other way to go forward, either.  And so the project got shelved.  Last year, when I decide to publish some things that had been sitting on my files for years, I decided to let the Ruminations out into the public minus the problematic sections, so it was merely mine and my father's stories that would see the light of day.  But that meant the story ended with my father's return from the war, and me nowhere near the table in the bar. 

So I have started fiddling with it again.  It looks like it might be a fairly short addendum, as I am trying to keep others out.  I may simply end up publishing it serially here in the new year.