Wodehouse’s Wooster and Jeeves formula included plenty of plots, schemes, kidnappings, a pig named Empress Blandings, and lots of puns and wordplay. Americans were besotted with words like “pipped,” “bally,” “what ho!” and “toddle.” Wodehouse was a prolific writer, often writing 4,000 words a day. He began each novel by writing over 400 pages of notes, including an outline and plot. Often, he didn’t know the names of characters until he was well inside a story, so he simply referred to them as “hero” or “heroine” until he became inspired. He wrote seven days a week from 4 to 7 p.m., but never after dinner. He said, “For a humorous novel, you’ve got to have a scenario, and you’ve got to test it so that you know where the comedy comes in, where the situations come in … splitting it up into scenes (you can make a scene of almost anything) and have as little stuff in between as possible
The character of Jeeves has proved so popular that it’s now in the Oxford English Dictionary as meaning a “person of utmost responsibility” and serves as the inspiration for Yahoo’s Ask Jeeves search engine. Jeeves taught millions of Americans the difference between a butler and a valet: a butler serves the house; a valet serves the person. Once, when confronted with a bear, Bertie Wooster asked Jeeves what he should do and Jeeves replied, “I fancy it might be judicious if you were to make an exit, sir.”
P.G. Wodehouse died at 93 (1975) in his house on Long Island, a month after receiving a British knighthood. He was sitting in a chair, surrounded by the typescript for a new Blandings Castle novel.
from the Poetry Almanac Oct 15, 2022
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2022
“Brothers and sisters, whenever disease and fragility are shared, barriers fall and exclusion is overcome… When we are honest with ourselves, we realize that we are all sick at heart, all sinners in need of the Father’s mercy. Then we stop creating divisions on the basis of merit, social position or some other superficial criterion; our interior barriers and prejudices likewise fall. In the end, we realize once more that we are brothers and sisters.”
Pope Francis
The Vibrant Channeled Creator 