Day 10 – “I can get them for you in a couple of weeks”

Roadblock… there are two really key documents that I need to read before I can really say that I’ve covered everything I need in my background work.

Unfortunately, they’re in Paris, and I don’t have an electronic copy in my (vast, but sadly missing in this case!) electronic archive.

I have a colleague there who has them, but they are at their country house (!) and they won’t be able to get there for a couple of weeks.

So I need to be patient, and work around the hole for the moment. Which means tweaking my plan.

So, instead of being able to close up the reading this week, I’m going to have to leave it open, and start writing with the gap in mind.

I was always going to need to fill in gaps anyway, but I was hoping they would be small and incidental, and not great yawning holes that might eat me up.

But I’ve got no real choice.

I’m simply grateful that I don’t have to go to Paris… which I’m doing anyway at the end of May, but that’s a bit late, unless I find that I simply have no other way to work. In which case, I might have to finish everything else off using writings about the documents rather than the documents themselves, and then pause and hope that when I get my hands on the originals, my arguments don’t burn up in a blaze of glorious misunderstanding.

Suddenly, there’s a risk that I hadn’t foreseen, so I also need to keep in mind that that might happen, even if it’s unlikely.

I mean, it’s not risk like ‘stunt performer at 150 mph into an exploding car accident’ risk, or ‘tree surgeon playing with chainsaws’ risk, or ‘huge personal investment in a dodgy stock market deal risk’, but it’s still a risk, with several months of work at stake.

This is what passes for jeopardy in the world of writing folks…