Sunday, August 15, 2021

Working Hard...

Burgundian scribe (portrait of Jean Miélot, secretary, copyist and translator to Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, from a copy of his compilation of the Miracles de Notre Dame), 15th century.

After a tumultuous journey down the coast of Connecticut, through the perils of the New York Metropolitan area, and the Mad Max landscape of northern New Jersey, then the relatively bucolic settings of southern New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, we had a day of rest. During said day of rest we celebrated the birthday of the youngest member of the tribe.

A good time was had by all, save the reason for the event who has been battling an upper respiratory thing for a couple of days. He was off his game as he's in the "getting better" stages of the viral attack. You know, when technically your body has successfully fought off the virus but you feel rather like crap as you hack up all that crap in your lungs.

He's a trooper though and while his doc has given him a clean bill of health, he's still a bit cranky with the whole thing. Even his first taste of cake, cupcake to be precise, didn't improve his morale. He seemed put off by the whole experience. "Sugar? What is this vile taste?"

Ah, he'll learn.

As for Grandpa, I'm slowly recovering from the Sandy Eggo adventure and the long drive down to these environs. I ain't as young as I used to be. Though a long nap on Saturday helped immensely. (I think that's the first nap I've had since I was a child, woke up bedraggled, yet refreshed.)

I have started the final editing of my WWII book, the working title of which is Almost a Lifetime, A Novel of World War II. That is going slowly, to say the least.

Some months back I began copying the blog episodes from Blogger's editor 0ver to Microsoft Word. This was done while I was still posting those episodes to the blog. Imagine, if you will, my chagrin when I noticed all of the varying formats contained in that Word document. Those of us who use Blogger can testify to their changing things almost at random. Not sure why they do it, but it's something I need to deal with.

I'm also editing parts of the story for continuity and to make things flow better. Posting it in serial fashion was easy but let me do things in a haphazard sort of way. No matter how hard you readers tried to keep me in line, I still find areas where I, shall we say, "colored outside the lines."

But I will say this, I am enjoying reading the story again. I had almost forgotten how I had grown to love the characters I created. There is almost real pain when one of them falls to the vagaries and violence of war. Something which I note that I haven't really been able to recreate in the book I'm currently working on. For some reason the old saying "catch lightning in a bottle" springs to mind. I do know that many authors produce one really good novel, then the rest all pale in comparison. I almost feel that way at the moment.

But I shall persevere and get this thing edited and ready for publication, whichever way I choose to go on that front. (I've heard that self-publishing doesn't really gain an author any "street cred." I'd appreciate hearing from those of you who have gone that route. I know a couple of folks who have gone that way and wonder what hurdles/perils/difficulties are in that.)

Eventually I'll get back to the new novel, which is the other book I always wanted to write. (The WWII one being the one I've been tossing around since the mid-seventies.) But be warned, the blog posts over the next few days might be kinda boring. For you see, I'm kinda busy...

Now, back to work.



30 comments:

  1. As long as there's a dead wood edition it'll be "Take My Money!!" OBTW once you retire you get 50% off naps Sarge, there's a e-mail with all the details...........:)

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  2. Sorry to disagree, but there is far more to "Almost a Lifetime, A Novel of World War II" than just being a WWII novel; been reading those for many years; retellings from many different angles. I'll wait for it, whichever way you want to get it published. It'll give my grandkids a good accounting of the world in which I grew up (and my uncles and older cousins - those that made it).

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  3. I agree about blogger having a mind of its own. Sometimes it gets so screwed up, I just go to the compose frame, highlight the whole post, CTRL+C open notepad CTRL+V then CTRL=c of the notepad version, and paste it back into blogger. Course you then have to re-insert photos, but that process strips out most of the garbage HTML. Well, until you start fancyfying it again.
    Glad you're back in the saddle and had a good trip.
    Mrs J pre-approved purchase of the book, so "git 'er done!"

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  4. It's good to hear that the book is making it's way down the path to published, enjoy the journey! We'll be ready for it when you get it polished and printed.

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    1. (Don McCollor)...Wonderful title, Sarge. For the survivors at the end, it has a certain subtle and ironic meaning...

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    2. Thanks Don, suggested by a reader.

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  5. You know the end of the title to the post (not the book you're working on) is "..or Hardly Working?" :-)
    I'm glad to hear you made if safely through the NY/NJ/DE mess - I always found when I got just north of the Susquehanna I started to catch my breath a bit - the river crossing was always kind of special, especially when I had time to detour over to Havre de Grace (great candy shop there back then).
    Also glad to hear the progeny is recuperating from his upper respiratory issues - me too, so my sympathies with his lingering discontent while things clear up further. Best wishes for his quick recovery.
    Also ditto on the effect of age on driving stamina - I used to make the NC to NH drive in one day - could still do it, but I'll now usually spend the night about halfway there and take two days or a day and a half... just easier on me that way.
    Enjoy your stay in MD.

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  6. I feel fortunate that we can avoid most metro areas in most of our travels, although north (Portland & Seattle) can be a challenge, but family is worth it, and they return the favor.
    Take your time with the book, and make certain you’re happy with the end result.
    Sorry the young’n isn’t entirely 100%, but if memory serves, that can change overnight.
    Enjoy yourself and safe travels on the return home.

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    1. He's improving by the hour. Full of fun he is!

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  7. Sarge, the great thing about editing is you get to re-meet all of the characters again. I am often shocked by what I read when I am doing it, as I question where the words came from. Pretty sure they were not from me.

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    1. Bingo, that's exactly what I'm experiencing.

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    2. Enjoy this "journey" Sarge! Take your time with it -sufficient time to be happy, I don't think it needs to be "polished".
      Want the paper edition, but will also gladly take 'trons
      Boat Guy

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  8. Argh, formatting.... One of my many responsibilities over the years as a staff ass(istant - a secretary in other words) was taking everyone's 'work' and cleaning it up, making it look correct, removing all of their fancy smancy formatting and stuff (especially in Powerpoint, curse the people who ever came up with that bodge of a program (though I often used it for other things than presentations.))

    So, yeah, formatting. I even have a style sheet for when I translate various e-book formats into .rtf. Why translate e-book formats into .rtf do you ask? Are you insane, Beans? Simple, yes, I am insane and it's so I can easily make format changes and fix things that are screwed up in the e-book version (sometimes when the author's editor falls asleep at the switch, sometimes because the printer just made errors, sometimes because the author made errors (like David Weber's great ship resizing about 4 books into the Honor Harrington series, which is annoying because suddenly a kilometers-long ship becomes a much shorter but fatter ship (volume expands cubically, so a much bigger ship either gets very un-dense in order to keep the length or it just gets, er, fatter as it gets longer.))

    Glad you got some sleep.

    And I know how the Grand feels. During the twice-yearly 2 week allergy attack, yes, the allergy attack was bad, but the 4 weeks to cough up the last of the lung-butter was what really sucked the life out of me. Which is happening this year, in the middle of summer, which is weird, thought I moved away from that garbage but some jackalope has decided to plant flowering ornamental tropical plants within pollen range of my respiratory system. Will have to track them down and sprinkle diesel fuel on the plants. Maybe on the person.... grrrr...

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    1. Formatting is a thing I like to keep simple. Fancy is for the birds.

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  9. I want to second the comment about "washing" text through a text-only editor (Notepad, Notepad++, etc) to eliminate weird formatting (be it from Blogger, Word, stray HTML, or any other source(s)).

    Copy the text in question into the text editor, review it to ensure only your intended words are present, then copy from that text editor back into a fresh MS Word (or other word processor) document. You will then have a clean start from which to work.

    In fact, in some cases it

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  10. Please ignore the final sentence fragment in the previous post. I have no idea where that even came from, nor what the sentence was even intended to say.

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    1. Heh, sentence fragments, I do that a lot. I also wonder where those come from!

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    2. It's a direct result of bad mouthing Blogger. It's smarter than you3wo9843..aoskkk!

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  11. Back to work? You're still on vacation! It will wait. As for your WWII story, did you conclude it here? I'm not sure I saw any finale posts. Although I forget stuff these days- lack of sleep doesn't help, and I'm not a good napper either. What I wouldn't give to get back all those naps of fought off during childhood!

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Just be polite... that's all I ask. (For Buck)
Can't be nice, go somewhere else...

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