I'm still editing my video stuff - as usual, there's way more to say (and thus way more material) that I can actually fit into the time span that I have. Not that I'm surprised... at all.

The thing I'm making this video for? I'm one of the experts in Danièle Cybulskie's Medieval Masterclass, which will start this Friday. It's a six-week course intended for creators who wish to use the Middle Ages in their work, and are looking for input that is hard or impossible to get from the usual sources. So I've been dragging stuff into the living-room-gone-video-studio and waving them around, and talking about them.

Tomorrow will hopefully see me finishing the cutting and editing work. There will be lots and lots of cutting... but as my German teacher back in school used to tell us, when teaching us how to abridge an old German play (which would have been performed in about 3 hours, originally, and had to be shortened enough to take place in a bit more than one): "You can always cut down by a third.".

The funny thing about that? I had already cut a third or more from the text, which was clearly visible from all the red ink on the sheet. I told him so. His reply? "You can always cut down by a third." As in... just do it again.

I did. It worked. To this day, that's what I tell myself when I need to shorten things... and I still grin, remembering that day.