I’m going crazy over here. My eyeballs are jumping out of their sockets in befuzzled dismay. When will it ever stop? they are screaming. Give up on the flipping tweaking, woman. We can’t take it any more!

There are several definitions for this word. Mine is the last on the list: to make a minor adjustment to.

Minor? Major, more like. To what, you may be wondering? Or maybe not. To yet another text that I plan to submit to yet another contest. Yup, the scratching goes on. But unfortunately this one isn’t flash. This one can be up to one thousand words. That’s a lorra, lorra words to tweak, I can tell you. One hundred words get tweaked in a jiffy. When there are ten times that amount of little buggers on the page they take hours to all fit into exactly the right place. Well, mine do anyway. I have read and reread and rereread that bloody piece and each time I’ll just add a little adjective here, or take out a little adverb there, or realise I have used the same word twice in the same paragraph, oh horror of all horrors. 

When will it end? Will it ever end? Will I ever be satisfied? Or will I just have to decide that enough is enough. It’s done, dusted, tweaked till it squeaks. I suppose so.

What if everything in my life was this tweakable? Maybe for some overly compulsive people it is. Straightening cushions for hours a day, wiping the kitchen counter every five seconds, hoovering the carpet till every strand stands the same way. I would have no time left to live.

And if I carry on like this I’ll have no time left to write. And if nothing is written then there will be nothing left to tweak. And what a pity that would be…

Photo courtesy of Keep Calm-0-Matic