A good Miss Marple Book, but not a keeper. We will be passing it along.
Continuing with our reading books in the house that look like they would be good to read but not necessary to keep, my wife pulled The Body In The Library from the Agatha Christie box and we read it. This was the first of her books featuring Miss Marple that we’ve read.
It’s a good book, as all of hers have been. A servant, in the midst of her morning duties, finds a body in the library of a manor house. She tells the lady of the house, who doesn’t believe her at first. Finally the lady goes downstairs and sees for herself. Before long the police are called. The lady knows Miss Marple, who is from that village, and calls her to come over. She arrives before the police do. Her reputation as an amateur crime solver is already well established in the village, which seems to have an above average murder rate for cute English villages.
Since Miss Marple will be the one to solve the crime, I figured the murderer had to be someone she comes in contact with. She’s there at the manor house and encounters three people, plus the police. The story then moves away from Miss Marple and follows the police as they do their work. The dead woman is identified as an 18-year-old professional dancer at a hotel in a nearby town. She’s newly studied at a dance school. Her older cousin has a solid position as a “mingler” with the guest of the hotel, dancing and playing bridge and being friendly with the guests, who are mainly upscale tourists.
Miss Marple has a number of other contacts. A retired Scotland Yard man is called in on the case, and he knows and thinks highly of Miss Marple. It isn’t long before another woman is found murdered—or presumed murdered—in a burning car. When this happens, Miss Marple is then certain who committed the first murder. Actually, she was pretty certain of it even in the first meeting at the manor house.
My main complaint about this book is it was difficult to tell how much time passed from one event to the next. Most of the action took place in the same day, or at least I think it did. Yet, there seemed to be too much going on for it to be happening in one day. Perhaps a second read would help sort that out.
I did not have the murderer correct. My thought process as to who it would be was correct, but I chose the wrong person. In my defense, the clues were not as well laid out in this book as they were in the previous Christie books we read.
I give it 4-stars. A good read, well worth the time it took. It’s not a keeper, however. I see no chance of ever reading it again.
First of the month, a day to discuss progress last months and goals for this month.
Perfect.
So how did I do last month relative to the goals I set? I’ll paste the goals in and say what progress I made, and we’ll see.
Continue to work on The Teachings. At the rate I’m writing now, I should write “the end” somewhere around Feb 15. I got this done. I finished it somewhere around Feb 10. I already have full comments from one beta reader and partial comments from another. I’ve been through it all the way once and made edits and my wife has been most of the way through it and given her edits. I also made contact with a cover designer who says she will take on the project
Continue to work on the 100th Anniversary book for my church. I’ve made a start with the book somewhat planned out and the writing started, now sitting at 1,675 word heading towards 20,000 words, maybe a little longer. Another goal I was able to meet. I did a lot of research this month into our charter members, and was able to learn much and write much. I’m now at about 6,000 words and feeling good about how the book is going. I think, however, the hard parts are ahead.
Get back to research into my next Documenting America book. I call this Run-up To Revolution. It’s about the period before the outbreak of fighting in 1775, so say from 1761-1775. I didn’t do very much on this. I pulled out the one main reference book I have at the house and looked over, but didn’t read, the documents in it. I satisfied myself that, between them and the ones they will lead me to, I should have no problem getting enough source material to make this a viable book. Time to knuckle down and research in earnest.
Continue to blog twice a week. Very doable. Yes, did this, including a couple of posts that I’d held off on due to the difficulty.
Continue to work on my bibliography. I started this some time ago, maybe three or four years, after I found joy working on a chronological bibliography for Thomas Carlyle’s writings. Every now and then I open it and add a few more things to it. I did some work on this, but not a lot. I’ve fallen a bit behind keeping up with what I’m currently writing. I think today, before getting on to other writing tasks, I’ll work on this.
This is more publishing than writing related: Begin to improve my books to try to 1) get more reviews and 2) improve the click through and purchasing rates on my ads. ….For February, I will plan on doing the ones advertised. Nope, didn’t do any of this.
Advertise one more book. I’m thinking it will be Acts Of Faith, but we shall see. Again, I didn’t do this. I’m afraid advertising and promotion took a back seat this month to writing.
Not listed as a goal last month, but some writing work I did, was to start on a new Bible study. Well, not a Bible study exactly. I’ll explain more in a future post, after I get further into it. I’m not sure yet if it’s a viable project.
Thus, February was a mixed bag as far as progress was concerned. Now, what’s on for March?
Make one more editing pass through The Teachings, and decide if it is ready for publishing. Get my ideas for the cover to the designer and get things rolling on that.
Make major progress in the church 100th anniversary book. I’d like to be close to 15,000 words by the end of the month. That depends, however, on getting into the library for research, or having a librarian help me.
Read for research in the next Documenting America book, including taking notes. Begin to sketch an outline of the Table Of Contents.
Continue with my current Bible study project and see if it’s something I should turn into a writing project with the intent on publishing.
Get my personal bibliography up to date for current works. This should be doable. In fact, I may go work on it as soon as I finish this blog post.
Blog twice a week. That may be interrupted if we bring the grandkids back here for spring break.
I think I’ll leave it at that. I still have work to do on my already published works to make them a little more enticing for buyers, but that may have to wait.
In our evening reading aloud, Lynda and I are reading in two books right now. One is our denomination’s Lenten Devotional book Sacred Invitation: Lenten Devotions Inspired by The Book of Common Prayer. It’s been good, though for thirty years I never once heard celebration of Lent promoted in our church and don’t understand why it is being so now. But perhaps that’s a subject for a different post, or an essay. The book is an easy read. Daily morning and evening scripture readings (which I assume come from the Lectionary) along with a couple of pages of text and a page of questions to spark spiritual growth. The text is small, 11 point font or less—I think 10 point font.
The other is A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson. This was a book of our son’s when he was in college, for it has his name and a date from his college years written on the inside. It includes marginalia that does not appear to be his handwriting, so perhaps he got it used. In that case we are at least the third owners of it. It’s 595 pages of text, plus a lot of pages of endnotes. It is also in 10 point font, so it’s a lot of reading. We’re only on page 37 after three or four days.
Whether we finish it or not is a big question right now. I’m re-reading some of the early pages which Lynda read aloud and I was a little distracted in my listening. On page 6 I ran across this statement:
Under the influence of Hegel and his scholarly followers, Jewish and Christian revelation, as presented in the Bible, was reinterpreted as a determinist sociological development from primitive trial superstition to sophisticated urban ecclesiology.
That’s a mouthful, for sure. I know who Hegel is but know nothing about what he thought or taught, nor about the “school” that follows, or followed, him. That phrase though, “determinist sociological development”, threw me. What the heck does that mean? I looked up “determinist” and had a sort of idea of what it means: the opposite of free will. I kind of know what ecclesiology is but looked it up to be sure: the study of church doctrine is the way I would say it in layman’s terms (the definition wasn’t real clear to me). So this is saying that Hegel and the folks who follow his teachings consider the history told in the Bible moves from lack of free will to something scholarly, something sophisticated, something urban.
I’m sure I’ve got that wrong, but that’s the best I can do. Now, a couple of things come to me from that. I find those kind of hard to understand statements a couple of times on each page. I spent ten minutes or so trying to riddle this one out. If I do that on every page, we’ll never finish the book. On the other hand, do I really need to understand that to understand the history of the Jews? Do I need to know that some dude (I guess he’s a man) and his minions have a complicated idea of what Bible history is teaching, that the author is getting ready to say is not correct? Probably not.
Elsewhere in the book, we’ve been running into lots of words that need looking up to understand, two examples being adumbration and aggadic. Thirty seconds on the cell phone provides those definitions but perhaps not that much greater understanding. Which makes me think this book is not for us.
Meanwhile, in other writing work, I’m engaged to write a book on the history of our church for our 100th anniversary. That happens in July, but because of pandemic fears and some major construction adjacent to the church, the actual celebration has been pushed back to a date not yet established. For that book, I’ve been researching our charter members. I’m probably doing too much research into our charter members. But given how research way leads on to way, I’ve pulled up some interesting church history documents. I have allowed myself to go down these rabbit holes. One document I was in today, a PhD dissertation, included this statement.
The manner in which nineteenth-century advocates of holiness reconstructed the Wesleyan/holiness cultural-linguistic system emphasized an imagistic religiosity which heightened individual awareness of spiritual autonomy.
Cultural-linguistic system…imagistic religiosity? This did me in. I have no idea what the PhD is talking about. This tells me nothing about the history of the church or the particular religious movement, nor does it help me live a better life. Nor will it help any Christian minister to be a better pastor of their flock. So what is its purpose? I’d answer that question, but I don’t have a spare week of continuous study that I would have to spend to do so.
All of which tells me I should do what I just read in a different book. I should stick to my lasts and leave the scholarly documents to the scholars. Back to my the Bible itself, a devotional book, books of letters, and Agatha Christie books.
So, in my last post I laid out the things I wanted to know, what I was able to learn, and what I haven’t been able to learn. In my research I’ve been really surprised at the difficulty of getting the facts. Even just the number of people at the rally and the number of attackers. That should be easy to find, but it’s not. I’m going to interrupt this post and go look for that again. Be back in a minute. … Neither the New York Times, CNN, or Wikipedia indicate the number of people involved. One Wiki reference say it’s impossible to know how many people were at the rally. Sure, estimating a number of people is difficult, but estimating ranges are possible. Why has no one estimated how many were 1) at the rally, 2) showed up at the Capitol to protest, 3) took part in violence at the Capitol, and 4) actually entered the Capitol? I think these numbers are very important to draw conclusions about what happened and why.
We know what happened: Following a Trump rally, a mob showed up at the Capitol, became violent, breeched barricades and thin law enforcement lines, entered the Capitol, and vandalized it. The various chants and statements reported indicated that they intended to do harm to members of Congress. Maybe that’s so, maybe it’s bravado. I’m glad that MOCs and VP Pence were protected from harm.
I’m suddenly tiring of discussing this. About two weeks after the attack I had come to the conclusion that the thing was pre-planned. I see now that the FBI and other groups have come to the same conclusion. Obviously, if it was pre-planned it wasn’t incited by the president’s speech that morning. That doesn’t mean, however, that Trump’s rhetoric over the period between the election and the speech didn’t move the attackers to plan it out. I don’t know if we’ll ever know that for sure.
I don’t wish ill on any MOC. But I find their indignation over the attack of their own building to be too little too late. They care about themselves, not us. When their overpaid asses are in harm’s way they demand protection. But when your little building is being burned they could care less. They talk about the Capitol being a “sacred” place and they believe it. Sorry, but it’s not sacred. Or, if it is, we have let the government become way too powerful. To me the Capitol is just a building, like any other. It’s no more sacred than Jane’s Nail Salon or Tony’s Pizza Shop. All should be protected. But that’s just violence against property, some say, which is different than violence against people. I understand that 23 people were killed in riots in 2020 and over 2,000 were injured. Many of those were business owner’s whose only sins were to be located in the wrong place and try to defend what they had taken a lifetime to build. Others were law enforcement officers, trying to keep the peace. Others were protesters themselves. 2,000 people injured, 23 dead. So don’t tell me that was violence against property.
I’m more than ready to get rid of every member of Congress and start fresh. Their hypocrisy is overwhelming. I’m so tired of them.
And tired of the news media who filter the news and keep us from learning the truth. Please understand. I’m not saying that the media is involved in a conspiracy, that they colluded to withhold any facts that might be favorable to President Trump. I don’t believe they are guilty of collusion or conspiracy, but that they are guilty of groupthink. In their hatred of Trump they all think alike, they all do the same things. So yes, I think the media purposely misled the nation.
So we have a Congress more concerned about their own house and person than your house and person. And we have a news media more concerned with their own agenda than telling the truth. And this is why I believe the U.S.A. is on its way downhill.
I’ve been planning to write this post for a long time, since shortly after the events of January 6, 2021, but I wanted to do it carefully, trying to make sure I got my facts correct, that I was interpreting them correctly, and that any conclusions I drew were correct. Unfortunately, the world has moved a long ways since then, more or less to my original conclusion. So even though I’m late to the table, I’ll write my post anyway.
It was sometime early afternoon on January 6, 2021, when I checked in on Facebook during my reading time and began to see posts that something was happening at the Capitol in Washington D.C. It soon became apparent that a group of protesters were attacking the Capitol. As I said in my previous post about this event, I elected not to rush right to the TV for more news, because the early reports are so often exaggerated or wrong. A few hours later I began checking in with news sources, and over the next few days did a lot of digging.
The main thing I wanted to do was determine what the facts were. I didn’t want newscaster, anchor, or commentator opinions. I wanted the facts. What exactly happened? Don’t give me interpretation; tell me what happened. Alas, I found very little of that. What passes for news today on television is mostly commentary.
What I wanted to know was (still is):
Why did the protesters attack the Capitol?
What were the aims of the attackers?
How many people were involved? A corollary question was how many people were at the rally just before the attack.
Was it spontaneous or planned?
What I found was none of the news outlets, either on TV or their on-line news feeds, gave me that information.
Why did the protesters attack the Capitol? According to most news outlets, because President Trump incited them to. Or urged them to. Or asked them to. Depends on what news outlet you talk with. Okay, I thought, let me listen to what he said at that rally. So I went to look for a link to his speech but—I couldn’t find one. There were links to about 5 seconds of his speech, but none to the speech itself. Why, I wondered? Were the news outlets concerned that the mere replaying of the speech would incite further violence? Did they not want to give him anymore air time? Did they realize the speech, if viewed in full, would contradict some pre-conceived notion? Even now, when I look for that speech on-line, I don’t find it. Maybe I’m not searching correctly, but I don’t find it.
The question of how many people were at the rally and how many attacked the Capitol has been equally difficult to learn. I heard a report that a million people attended the rally, but this seemed impossible to me. Such a huge attendance would have been reported. So how many attended? I spoke with someone who saw a shot of the crowd and he said he thought 10,000 or so. That sounds more realistic. As to how many attacked the Capitol, I again have had trouble learning that. The frequently posted footage makes it seem like a lot of people, but was it? Was it 100? A thousand? More? I saw a report about two weeks ago that suggested it was 400 to 500 people that actually entered the Capitol. That seems realistic.
What did the attackers hope to accomplish? A takeover of the government? An interruption of the counting of the electoral votes, a.k.a. “Stop the Steal” as it was being called? Or was there no real aim? Were they whipped into a frenzy by the president, went the short distance to the Capitol (about a mile), and, without much thought, showed their displeasure by resorting to violence? I suppose that’s possible, but do the facts suggest that? That’s part of answering the question: Was the attack spontaneous or planned?
Here are a few things that suggest it was planned.
At least two different people in or just outside the Capitol were carrying zip-tie hand restraints, the kind that police sometimes use. I doubt if anyone at the rally found a vendor selling those between the Washington Monument and the Capitol. No, they had to have brought those with them to the rally—if they were even at the rally as opposed to just going to the Capitol that day. This suggests a planned attack.
At least one person had a diagram of the layout of the buildings (didn’t see this; that’s based on news reports). Did someone bring that with them that morning, or did they divert to a bookstore or the Library of Congress and get one? More evidence of pre-planning.
At least one man had a sledge hammer. Some thing; he had to have had that when he got to the rally, because I doubt very much that law enforcement officers protecting the Capitol were armed with sledgehammers. More evidence of pre-planning.
It’s been reported that two pipe bombs were found, planted adjacent to the office wings of the Capitol. I saw photos of the bombs, but no photos of the scene. Nor have I seen any reports as to whether these were real bombs or dummies. Again, I don’t think someone was selling pipe bombs on the National Mall that day, so that had to be pre-planned.
The breaking down of the minimal barriers was horrific in the footage I’ve seen. This could well have been spontaneous; it’s hard to tell. It could also have been pre-planned. Certainly, the breaking of doors inside the building seemed to be done with whatever materials that had at hand. No one brought a pallet of bricks with them. Evidence of spontaneity, though it doesn’t preclude planning.
Almost none of the attackers were armed with firearms. I think I saw one photograph of one attacker having a rifle. I’ve not read any reports indicating other protesters had firearms. This suggest the aim wasn’t an insurrection, a takeover of the government. You don’t bring a Confederate flag or a Viking hat if your aim is a putsch. That could suggest spontaneity.
The behavior of the attackers once inside the buildings seems less of an attack and more of a lark, like a bunch of boys who broke into the school during summer vacation and vandalized the building. Maybe that’s because the Congress had been moved to a secure location and there was no one to vent their anger at. Or maybe it’s because the thing was really spontaneous and they didn’t have a real plan.
This post is now quite long and all I’ve managed to do is mention the problem, not draw conclusions. I’ll have to finish it later. Let me just conclude this much: I’m amazed at what appears to be an attempt by the news media to keep us from knowing the raw facts of what happened that day.
This morning, on the Presidents Day holiday, I was up as always around 6:30 a.m. With no stock market work to do, I decided to download income tax forms and organize the folders and files. Still waiting on one critical income form so I can’t quite start on them in earnest.
The last forecast before the snow began was for 3-6 inches. We got 5, though it took 33 hours of light snowing to for that much to accumulate.
After that I shifted to work on the church 100th anniversary book. I like the progress I made. I’m researching charter members. Wrote the short bio of the one who organized the tent meeting that got it all started then began researching another family of charter members. That took me up to noon or later.
Then it was reading time. After lunch it was reading time, walking time, and phone call time. Now here it is, almost supper time, and I’m just getting around to a post. My only excuse is: the snow made me do it.
Yes, another day, another snow storm. It started around 8 a.m. yesterday and is just about now quitting. In those 33 hours we have had only 5 inches. I went out in it around 2 p.m. Walked about 1/4 mile out and was so cold, even with several layers on, I turned around and came back. I love walking in the snow, but thought I’d better not push it in this bitter cold.
But all day, from The Dungeon window, the sunroom windows, from my reading chair in the living room, and wherever else I was, the snow captivated me enough that I couldn’t concentrate on blogging. The important post I’ve been putting off is still important, but not so timely as when I first envisioned it. I may start a draft of it tonight, after dark, because if it’s snow that distracts me…
…The current forecast is for another storm to start tomorrow evening and rage into Wednesday, giving us another 4-10 inches. Well, the latest forecast has it 4-9 inches. I don’t want to exaggerate. Tomorrow I’ll have to shovel the driveway. Not because we are going anywhere, but shoveling 4 inches twice will be a whole lot easier than shoveling 8 to 10 inches or more once.
Snow exhilarates me. I don’t even mind the cold so much. Hopefully despite the flakey distraction I’ll be able to get my work done.
[Note to self: Don’t hit the browser back button when typing a post if you haven’t hit “save draft”. Maybe the second time will be a charm.]
This is looking up the street from our house on Thursday 2/11. It is sanded (actually gritted). I believe I could get up it if I tried.
I’m looking out The Dungeon windows to a light snowfall. It’s just condensation due to the cold, 14°F. We were supposed to be in Texas this weekend, watching the grandkids while their parents were at a church event. Wednesday last was our departure day. But we woke up to a winter glaze on the roads, a freakish ice storm overnight. It had been predicted then removed from the forecast. After a quick survey of the situation, I postponed the trip a day.
If not, perhaps I could get down the hill then loop around the circle and go up the next street which, last time I checked, was free of ice.
I spent time chopping and clearing ice, spreading rock salt and sand. I was able to get the already-loaded van up to the end of the driveway. Once the City truck came by spreading grit on the road, I probably could have made it up the hill. But reports on conditions elsewhere indicated the trip would be difficult. Thursday morning was not much different. Radar showed light, frozen precipitation along our route. I delayed the trip from morning to afternoon. By noon it was clear things were no better. Reports of accidents along our route said it all. I cancelled the trip.
So were are unexpectedly home. The forecast now calls for 6-10″ of snow Sunday-Monday, with temperatures like we have now or lower. After a trip to Wal-Mart today (hopefully) for fresh items, we will hunker down. I made a large pot of soup yesterday. We have enough frozen, canned, and boxed food to get by a long time should the W-M run not be possible. I plan to write in the church anniversary book. I plan to begin the editing process in The Teachings. I will read C.S. Lewis and other things. On Sunday I will teach Life Group from home. And I will walk outside a little but get my main exercise on the elliptical. I might even get a little genealogy research done.
I realize that the last paragraph is all about me. “I plan…I will…” Obviously I will do that only by the grace of God and the strength and abilities He has given me and continues to give me.
Oh, in the last half-hour we learned that the church event have been postponed due to…weather.
My little gray cells were not, alas, sufficiently cognitive to solve this murder before all was revealed.
Once again, in the interest of reducing our possessions, my wife and I read a book we will want to read but will be willing to part with afterwards. For this we chose The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie. When we found the A.C. books in the basement, belonging to our son but being given by him to his sister (in his own effort of dis-accumulation), along with some other of her books in the house having come to us from various sources, I put them all in order based on what I thought was the order Christie had written them. I thought this one was the next.
It didn’t read like that, however. In this book, Hercule Poirot has retired incognito to the charming village of Kings Abbot. Alas, two deaths in the two most prominent families in the village—one an apparent suicide, one a murder—result in Poirot being called in to investigate. The result is an amazing story. I, of course, don’t want to give away who the murderer is. Suffice to say I didn’t get it right, though I had an inkling into it. A weak inkling.
This book is Christie at her best. Poirot speaks often of the “little grey cells” and his “little ideas”. He muses, ponders, engages other people to help him, and keeps his cards hidden. As the story unfolds, all suspicion is on one person. After the butler is ruled out that is. (It’s always the butler, isn’t it? Unless it’s the footman, but in this book there aren’t any footmen.) But other people also had motive and means. Opportunity was a difficulty, as the apparent time of the murder was fairly precise and as alibis abounded. Two people didn’t have them. One of those disappeared. As the stories are told, it looks like everyone could have done it.
While the writing is a bit old fashioned by today’s standards it is not archaic. On occasion I had to re-read a sentence or paragraph to make sure I understood what was being said in dialog or narrative.
In detective novels earlier than Christie, such as the Sherlock Holmes series, the author did not give sufficient clues to the reader for them to figure it out. But Christie came much closer to that. When we came to the end of the novel and all was revealed, we decided to go back to the beginning and read it again, to see if we missed such clues (or “clews” as this book has it). Yes, they were there, but very subtle. I don’t feel badly for having missed them.
So this book is 5-stars. I probably won’t bother to review it on Amazon or Goodreads. Agatha Christie’s reputation is solid with out my few words. The question I always ask in all of my reviews is: is it a keeper? Alas, no. Too many other books to read or re-read to pick this one up again. Once we get through the A.C. books, they will go to our daughter as our son wanted. Too many books, too little time to keep Christie on our shelves permanently.
As I said in my last post, which re-capped the writing I did in January, my next post would be about writing goals for February. On Monday I thought I might write that post the next day and have an extra post this week. Alas, that didn’t happen. But I’m here now.
What are my writing goals for February? I haven’t written them anywhere (something I sometimes do), so today I’m making this up as I go along.
Continue to work on The Teachings. At the rate I’m writing now, I should write “the end” somewhere around Feb 15. That depends a lot on life circumstances. We will be babysitting grandchildren during part of this time, and traveling two days, so that time may slip. A lot depends on how much I manage to get done today.
Continue to work on the 100th Anniversary book for my church. I’ve made a start with the book somewhat planned out and the writing started, now sitting at 1,675 word heading towards 20,000 words, maybe a little longer. Last night I did some research into one item—actually a person—that I felt needed expanding in the book. I found what I needed. I don’t have any real deadline for this book, but I would like to have it fairly well finished by July. Still much research to do, especially of photos for illustrations.
Get back to research into my next Documenting America book. I call this Run-up To Revolution. It’s about the period before the outbreak of fighting in 1775, so say from 1761-1775. I read for research before, but not a whole lot. I don’t know if this will be the next book I work on or not. A lot will depend on this research.
Continue to blog twice a week. Very doable.
Continue to work on my bibliography. I started this some time ago, maybe three or four years, after I found joy working on a chronological bibliography for Thomas Carlyle’s writings. Every now and then I open it and add a few more things to it. I did that last week and early this week. I plan on keeping up-to-date with blog posts and other writing endeavors. This is a “don’t have to do it” task, but it is becoming a labor of love. Perhaps no one will ever really care about the vast number of items I’ve written, but I plan to leave a comprehensive bibliography behind just in case someone does.
This is more publishing than writing related: Begin to improve my books to try to 1) get more reviews and 2) improve the click through and purchasing rates on my ads. I’m aware of several small-ish things I can do to make that happen. Or at least do to try to make that happen. I’ll start with the two books currently advertised, then do the others in their series, then branch out to others. For February, I will plan on doing the ones advertised.
Advertise one more book. I’m thinking it will be Acts Of Faith, but we shall see.
I think that’s it. I have no plans to work on letter transcriptions, or write any essays, or political essays. It’s getting into tax season and, right after this babysitting gig, I’ll have to take some time for that. Corresponds well with completion of the first draft of The Teachings.
Since my regular blogging day, Monday, falls on the 1st, it seems good that I give an accounting of the month just passed. My writing life, that is.
Yet another box of old correspondence pulls me away from other tasks I’d like to do, the unnecessary interrupting the important.
My main work this month was on The Teachings. I continued interest in it that had developed in late December. As that month ended the book stood at 33,455 words. I had been writing for several days to get to that point. My writing diary and saved files shows work on most days of the month, taking the occasional day off. My writing diary for today was, “Did a few more words, ending at 72,699. Very tired today.” That meant that, in the month of January, I added 39,244 words to the book, an average of over 1,250 a day. What caused the increase in production? Mainly because I got past the point in the book where I felt that I needed to rigorously needed to align with the history of the Jewish War that serves as the backdrop for the whole book. I knew the blot, so was just able to write.
Since I was shooting for the book to be 80 to 90 thousands words, I’m getting close. If I can maintain that kind of average production, I’ll be done with the first draft in just two weeks. Thinking about that, I decided to contact a couple of past beta readers to see if they were interested in doing so again for this book. Both said yes. I’m also sending chapters to my critique group, Scribblers & Scribes of Bella Vista. I’ve sent out nine chapters so far (out of 28 completed) and received at least two critiques on each chapter. I haven’t yet gone through all the critiques.
What else writing related has occupied my time? Mainly letters. Having done a lot of letter organization in 2020, including that transcription project of the letters from our Kuwait years, my mind was on letters. Early in the month I was still finding a few letters that needed to be put with letters from those periods and collated. Also, my digital letters needed work. Yes, I consider e-mails to be letters. Last year I began some work on going through e-mails in my in-box and out-box to see what needed to be saved, what could be discarded. I had also, foolishly perhaps, moved e-mails into a number of folders. My intention was to save each important e-mail to a Word document and save them in a year-by-year folder in the cloud. Well, a few unimportant e-mails as well. My goal was to start with 2020 and work backwards. First I started with the folders. I saved all those e-mails to files. Then I tacked the inbox and outbox. After saving each email from the last two, I moved them to the appropriate folder. My inbox and outbox started to look a lot better. E-mails that didn’t need saving—receipts, links, forwarded documents and photos—are simply moved to the right folder. At the moment I’m working in 2015 inbox, almost through with it. Still have the 2015 outbox to do. Then, back to 2014.
This saving of e-mails is probably a total waste of time. I’m too fascinated by letters to let mine go. The hope is that someday someone will care about my letters based on my literary career, and they will be published. I know that’s unlikely. As I get further along in life, if my career is still a pipedream, I may publish them in nice bound volumes for some of my progeny to read.
What else? I began work on a book I’ve been asked to write about our church’s 100th anniversary. The date is in July but the celebration won’t be till October. Thus, the book will have to be ready for publishing in September, probably early September. This month I: retrieved loads of documents from the church archives; went through about half of them and formed a timeline document for church history (though I have much more of that to go); made a plan for the book—a mental plan right now; and started the writing. Okay, I wrote two paragraphs. It’s a start. I shared those paragraphs with our pastor and the chair of the anniversary committee, and they both seemed to think it was a good approach. I tried to work on it a little yesterday, but found myself too mentally tired to do much.
One other thing I did in January was keep up with my blog and my correspondence. Okay, yes, that’s two things. I blogged twice a week, I think not missing a day. I wrote and received letters, mostly electronically, and saved them out to Word documents. I’m going to do my past to keep up with that all year, and not leave it to a concentrated effort sometime in the future.
Oh, just thought of something else. I did a little work on my own writing bibliography. It’s a big task that I need to do but have long delayed due to the size. I don’t necessarily plan on making a big effort on this, certainly not till my letters project is complete. But from time to time I’ll tackle this. It’s actually kind of fun though it does take me away from other things.
One other item I should note, not exactly writing related. While I have been consulting with my former firm, they wanted me to use one of their computers, for security reasons since I would have to access their network drives. This week my former boss e-mailed me that they felt I no longer needed it and would soon want me to turn it in to the office. So for the last three days I’ve been going through the files on it, seeing if I have any personal files and saving them out to the cloud. I made excellent progress on that. I should be done in about three more days. I think most of the files I need are saved, but I want to check all folders because sometimes a file gets mis-saved the first time and, if you haven’t used it in a couple of years you might now miss it.
So that’s the month. My next post may be an extra one, goals for February. Stay tuned.
