Reblogged from Jim Webster aka Tallis Steelyard:
I suppose that in one way, poets and painters have one specific thing in common. We sketch out the original work, then we work away at it until it is mostly finished. Finally comes the endless tweaking to get it just right. So if I mention that Julatine Sypent can be something of a perfectionist you can imagine that this latter part of the process takes some time.
This isn’t something that ordinarily matters. A twee cottage isn’t going to get bored if you sit painting it for a full week. On the other hand when he moved to portraits, some sitters grew restive. Still it wasn’t as if Julatine hid this aspect of his personality. Nobody who hired him to paint them could claim that it came as a surprise. Everybody in society knew that if you wanted your likeness painted by Julatine, you emptied your diary for a full week.
Yet outside the circle of well-heeled patrons of the arts Julatine’s foibles were not really known. Obviously this isn’t normally going to be a problem as those less well monetarily endowed aren’t the people who tend to commission him. Yet late one morning he was in the Silk Merchant’s Repose. This is one of the better taverns, the food is excellent and the company tends to be polite. Not only that, but the owner, Omartan, aspires to keep improving it.
Julatine was dining alone and sitting at the table across from him was Bolfinch and the two Millan sisters, Winny and Saleni. If I remember aright Bolfinch was courting Winny and Saleni had come along as a chaperone. Or perhaps it was the other way about? Or perhaps he was courting both with nobody quite sure who was chaperoning whom?
Continue reading at Tallis Steelyard
Sue Vincent's Daily Echo 
As dinner invitations go, it wasn’t perhaps the success Bolfinch had hoped for 😉
LikeLike
It could have been worse. Possibly. 😉
LikeLiked by 1 person
And might have gone better if he could remember which of the two he was courting and which was the chaperone 🙂
LikeLike
A minor oversight, I feel 😉
LikeLiked by 1 person
It could happen to anybody 🙂
LikeLike
Perhaps not quite anybody 😉
LikeLiked by 1 person
I suppose it takes certain special abilities 😉
LikeLike
I’ve known a few who had them 😉
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have watched them from afar and thought, “If I stick them in a story nobody will believe it” 🙂
LikeLike
I would. I married one once 😉
LikeLiked by 1 person
I realise that a writer has to do research, but that strikes me as taking things a little far 😉
LikeLike
We all make mistakes 😉
LikeLiked by 1 person
we’d be awfully boring people if we didn’t 🙂
LikeLike
And learn little too 😉
LikeLiked by 1 person
true, we learn very little from other people’s mistakes and not a lot more from our own 😉
LikeLike
Not a ot is better than nothing 😉
LikeLiked by 1 person
It is true, but I suspect that some mistakes are so interesting we keep making them to see if they were as much fun the next time 🙂
LikeLike
You may well be right 😉
LikeLiked by 1 person
in an infinite universe even that is possible 😉
LikeLike
😀
LikeLiked by 1 person
😉
LikeLiked by 1 person