Vol 1 is published, Vols. 4, 5, 6, and 7 are written and edited. Vol. 8 is written and asking to be edited. When it will happen if somewhat of a mystery to me.
I finished writing A Walk Through Holy Week, Vol. 8 on April 1st. That’s the first draft. I need to do at least two editing passes before “putting it on the shelf” to await my writing Vols. 2 and 3. In the past I’ve found getting a little distance from the first draft to help the editing to go better. Normally I would start on the next writing project, but given that it’s another Bible study in the same series I decided not to rush into it. I did, however, take an hour or two one morning to do a little planning and programming on Vol. 2.
Meanwhile, during the last two weeks of Life Group lessons, which my co-teacher taught, I got some ideas that I need to work into the last two chapters. I think I may incorporate those either tonight or tomorrow.
My time has been taken up with my two special projects. I think I wrote about these before. One is transcription of letters from our years in Saudi Arabia. I try to complete two or three letters a day. After a slow start, I’m in a groove this. Letters from 1981-1982 are done, and I’m four months into 1983, the last year. It looks as if I have another 40 letters to go. That means I will likely finish this around early May, so long as interruptions are minimal.
The other special project is scanning and e-filing the many poetry critiques I did at various poetry boards around 2001-2009. I printed a lot of these and saved them in 3-ring binders. Most of these were at the now-defunct Poem Kingdom, but I also hung out at several other sites and critiqued. My estimate has been that I critiqued somewhere between 500 and 1,000 poems. No, that’s not an exaggeration. I saved many, but not all, of the critiques I made.
So far, I’ve scanned, formatted, checked for accuracy of the scan, and saved 106 poetry critiques. These came out of a 1-inch binder. My estimate is that I have 75 sheets left to process in this notebook, which will probably be 70 critiques—meaning 175 critiques. When I finish that, next to tackle is a 2.5-inch binder stuffed with critiques. That means I’ll be well over 500 critiques. What I can’t remember is if there is a third notebook or if this is it.
If I don’t have another notebook, I will likely finish this project some time in the fall. If in fact there’s a third notebook hiding somewhere on my shelves, then the project will likely continue into 2025.
So the question I’m dealing with whether I can get some book editing done while also maintaining my pace on the special projects. I won’t be able to test that until later this week. I have medical appointments today and Tuesday and two writer meetings on Thursday. I’m sure I’ll make a report on this in a future blog.
Genealogy papers on the left, Saudi letters (from 1982) on the right.
With the after-effects of the stoke having slowed my typing, I’ve now for just under a week been back to writing. Typing is still slow, but improving. It’s good to be back in the saddle. That doesn’t mean just on writing, but also on two special projects.
One of those is continuing to scan my genealogy research papers and safe them electronically. I’ve blogged about this before.More than half of my notebooks are culled and the contents either digitized or discarded. But all the easy parts are done. Most of what’s left are for the four family lines I spent the most time on in my research. I’m having to go through them more carefully. Some of the papers, mainly original documents I obtained, I’ll still save after scanning.
I worked on this last Friday and Saturday. I found that my electronic file saving system works, but also that I had a lot more folders to add. Saturday, beginning work on a new notebook, I realized I had in it mainly ancestors for whom I had no electronic folders. Since my folders are alphabetized first on Ahnentafel number, and also indicate the generation of the ancestor, it takes some time to get the folders properly created. Most of my time Saturday was spent on folder creation and organization, but did get some papers scanned, saved, and discarded. I also managed to scoop up about a half-dozen sheets that needed filing elsewhere (i.e. not in a genealogy notebook that’s a keeper) and got them filed. It’s those stragglers that are always a hindrance to keeping my work area clean.
The other special project is transcribing the letters from our years in Saudi Arabia, 1981-1983. I did this for the Kuwait years, 1988-1990 (and some after that) and put them in a book for family members. I blogged about that several times.
Now I’m on the Saudi letters. It’s quite different. No displacement due to war; the kids were little so no letters by them; no phone so we wrote more letters; but no computer so they were all handwritten.
I collected the letters into one bin and collated them some time ago. In early January (I think it was), I began transcribing 1981 letters. They were all done except for the two Christmas letters we sent that year, and one or two more, when I had my stroke. So, before I started back on my writing work, I knuckled down and, with my right hand still typing-impaired, got them done about a week and a half ago.
The total count for the seven months in 1981 was 53 unique letters. There were other items in the bind, but mainly empty envelopes and duplicate letters, where we photocopied a letter and sent it to several people, usually with a personal note attached.
I pulled out the box of letters for 1982 in preparation for the next phase of this task. I counted 75 letters, I think it was (some of them postcards), and some possibly duplicates. A few envelopes felt like they might have been empty. The stack for 1983 looks about the same size.
I don’t have a deadline for either of these projects. The end of 2024 is sort of a loose goal, and, I think, very doable so long as I don’t get lazy. And so long as my regular writing and home upkeep doesn’t overpower my time.
UPDATE: Everything below I wrote last Friday, in anticipation of where I would be at the end of the month. I didn’t know I was going to have a stroke on Saturday. More on that in a future post.
I didn’t really set goals for January. It took me so long to think through what my goals for all of 2024 would be that it was well into the month before I could even think about monthly goals. So I’ll state some goals as if I had made them, or pull them from my annual goals.
Attend two writers group meetings. One meeting was cancelled due to weather. I attended the other.
Blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. I accomplished this, with a meaningful blog on all days.
Get to work on A Walk Through Holy Week, Volume 8. I started this on Jan. 22, a little earlier than expected. As of the end of the month, I’m more than 50 percent done with it. So far the writing has flowed easily. UPDATE: I’m not 50 % donel
Finish editing and publish A Walk Through Holy Week, Volume 1.I finished the editing around Jan. 10th and got to work on formatting for publication. Bogged down a little on the cover, as I had to first create a template for the whole series. The e-book template was done on Jan. 26.
Begin reading in a source for the next Documenting America book. I did only a little of this. I enjoyed what I was reading—about debates in the Boston newspapers in 1774-75. But I wasn’t sure, from the little I read, that this was the right subject for the next volume.
Finalize and publish the latest short story in the Danny Tompkins series. Nothing done on this.
Begin transcribing the letters from our years in Saudi Arabia. I’m hoping to start this in February. I started this in January, around the 15th. I’m not sure why; it just seemed right. As of now, I have completed all the letters for 1981 (a partial year), and made a small start on 1982. Lots more to go. UPDATE: I still have 6 or 7 letters to go.
So, all in all a good month. What about February? Here’s what it looks like to me.
Blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays.
Attend two writers meetings.
Make major progress on Volume 8 of A Walk Through Holy Week. Based on January progress, I might be able to complete the first draft in February. UPDATE: Probably only 60 percent.
Finish all publishing tasks for Vol. 1 of AWTHW, both e-book and print version.
Make a couple of new ads on Amazon. Maybe one for There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel and one for A Walk Through Holy Week, Volume 1.
Continue transcribing our letters from Saudi Arabia.
Continue reading in some source for the next Documenting America book.
And that will do it. My typing is impaired by the stroke. Still not ready to pound the keys at a rapid pace.
Dateline: Monday, January 15, 2024, Martin Luther King Jr. Day
I was about ready to leave The Dungeon and go upstairs, grab my sledgehammer, and fix the modem that way. Fortunately, our internet came up before such drastic repairs were needed.
It’s my regular blogging day. But I woke up this morning to find we have no internet. Thus, I can’t get to the blog to type in a post. I’m writing this on my computer, and will post it whenever the internet comes back to us.
Actually, it has been a horrible weekend for technology. Friday evening our cable kept going haywire. Picture breaking up, sound breaking up, occasional total loss of signal. We suffered through and saw a few things. Wound up streaming something via Amazon Prime, which worked. Or was that Saturday? The days are running together.
Anyhow, called Cox. They said they would have a technician out between 3 and 5 yesterday, and said it might involve a $75 charge. We had internet all day yesterday, but no cable.
The Cox tech was a no-show. But it snowed yesterday, a little over 2 inches, and the temperature never got above 1°, so I kind of understand why the tech didn’t make it. A call telling us that would have been nice. Alas, service providers of every type have ceased being proactive in communicating with their customers in this age of easy communication. Will it do any good to call the office today, on the holiday?
My post today was to be about January being off to a good start. I am one or two days away from the last editing pass through A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1. Granddaughter Elise got the cover art done. So either tomorrow or Wednesday I’ll begin publishing tasks.
The first week of the year, while in Lake Jackson, I had a conversation with Elise about the next book in The Forest Throne series, and she read the prologue I wrote based on our prior conversations. She loved it, reading it aloud while our daughter was in the room and putting much drama into the reading. So a good start there on a project just a little down the road. Also, youngest grandson Elijah wanted to have a conversation about the fourth book in the series, which will be about the youngest child in the Wagner family. That book is planned for about four years from now. But we had the conversation and I got some ideas on paper. I may type them up and see what that future book will look like.
Sven months of letters from the Saudi years. The ones on the left are transcribed. The ones on the right to be done. It’s a big project.
I began transcribing the letters from our Saudi Arabia years. This was one of my realistic goals. On Fri-Sat-Sun, I typed five letters each day. I’m going to limit myself to five a day so as to keep the project from overwhelming me as the letters from the Kuwait years did. I have no idea how many total letters there are. As I look at the piles, it appears to be about 300, which is close to double the number in the previous project. But as we had no typewriter (or computer in 1981-83), the letters will likely average a little shorter.
I did a little reading for research for the next book in the Documenting America series. Not much, but a little. What I read, however, makes me wonder if I’m on the right track with this volume. I’ll discuss that more in a future blog post.
I also have made a good start on an author interview for a future blog post. Possibly today I’ll be able to pull my interview questions together and send them to him.
Well, our internet just came up, so I will wrap this up and post this. I’ll have to leave The Dungeon to go upstairs to see if the cable TV is up. I’m not optimistic. But I’m still optimistic in general about 2024. I still expect to see those realistic goals met. But we will see.
I’ve always liked to display blue lights at Christmas, but this red lights display up on the next street is very nice. We had nothing like this in Saudi Arabia—but we found a substitute.
Every year around Christmas, I try to make at least one Christmas post. You can find past ones at this link. Many of those are memories from my childhood. It’s getting to the point where I can’t remember what memories I’ve posted. I know I made at least one duplicate post.
I looked back over posts in December of each year since I started the blog, and couldn’t find any about this. 1981 was our first Christmas in Saudi Arabia. I had arrived there in June, Lynda and the children in September. Sometime around November, one of the Saudi Arabian government ministries sent a notice out to all companies, or perhaps those that were heavy in expatriate employees. The notice said that celebrations of Christmas in the workplace were not allowed. No decorations, no parties. The notice further stated that expatriates better not make any Christmas displays at their residences that can be seen from outside. It promised to be a very blah Christmas for us.
But at that time, two things happened to help cheer things up. In the souks, usually in the shops way towards the back, we found lots of Christmas decorations for sale. Strings of lights, nativity sets, even artificial Christmas trees. One shop off by itself, on a main street but not in the shopping district, was run by the American wife of a Saudi. She had lots of Christmas stuff. We were able to buy everything we needed. We didn’t put lights in our apartment windows, but inside, you knew it was Christmastime.
The other thing that happened, in late November if I remember correctly, King Khalid announced an official visit to our town, Al Khobar, to take place fairly soon, maybe just after the first of the year. The native population immediately set to work preparing for the royal visit. Every company erected archways over city streets and decorated them with much Arabic writing and…lights! They put strings of light all over these arches, wound them around the upright members and across the top. Drive down any main street in Al Khobar and you would pass lit up arches every hundred feet.
[Added 10 Dec 2023] Seems like I never finished writing this before I posted it.
So in early December, with no Christmas lights allowed, local businesses began erecting archways of lights over city streets to welcome the king. It was a golden opportunity for us. We drove the streets of Al Khobar and told the kids to look at all the Christmas lights. No, they didn’t look quite like they would at home, but Charles and Sara were young enough they didn’t know the difference. In fact, they probably don’t remember it.
So there it is, a Christmas memory. Making do in a foreign land where Christmas could not be celebrated openly. I wish I had a photo of that Christmas season. I might, but if so it’s buried deep in a box somewhere in the mess of this building we call a home.
Back on September 26, I posted about three special projects I was involved in and how they were keeping me from writing. The projects were:
inventorying the Stars and Stripes newspapers before donating them to the University of Rhode Island Library.
Digitizing years of printouts of letters, as a deaccumulation project.
Finishing the Kuwait Letters book and make it available to family members.
These newspapers, on which Dad set type in Africa and Europe during WW2, are on their way to their new home and, hopefully, permanent place of preservation.
I wrote about each of these projects in the previous post and won’t detail them here.
By a strange set of coincidences, all three projects finished on Friday, November 11.
I finished inventorying the Stars and Stripes not too long after I made that post in September. But the newspapers sat waiting on me to make up my mind whether I was going to ship them to the library or not. I hemmed and I hawed. I carried two of the three boxes upstairs. I gave it much thought. Did I really want to trust this precious cargo to a shipping company? At last I made a to-do list of all the things I have to do and included shipping them.
Dad at the truck-mounted mobile unit of the “Stars and Stripes”, putting out the Combat Edition in Italy.
When I saw the large number of tasks I must complete, I decided to go ahead and ship them. I self-scheduled that for Friday afternoon and brought the last of the boxes upstairs from The Dungeon. I loaded them in the car and headed to UPS. I wasn’t impressed with the people there and how they might handle them. They recommended re-packing the newspapers in their boxes, which provides better assurance of safe delivery (and insurance against damage). I decided to go ahead and do it.
I left the boxes there. Due to busyness on UPS’s part, I wasn’t able to hang around and supervise the transfer to new packaging. I’m trusting that they will do it right and, when they are delivered this Thursday, November 17th, the Library will find them undamaged.
See that tall stack of paper? About half of it came out of old correspondence notebooks.
Also on Friday, around 9:00 a.m., I completed scanning the printouts of emails I found in a thick, bulging, 3-ring binder. These were from 2002 to 2005, consisting mainly of e-mails and messages that I sent or received when I was a member of and later moderator/administrator of a couple of poetry critique boards. I wrote a little about that in this post. The letters were arranged more or less chronologically, but were interspersed with printouts of poetry critiques I made during that time. Those critiques, posted at the poetry boards, might be considered correspondence but I chose not to do so. I will deal with the critiques some time in the future.
That one notebook is now devoid or letters. It is full of those critiques, but they are consolidated from two smaller binders and are in an arrangement that I can tackle with less effort sometime in the future.
These are not all the letters I need to digitize, but they represent the lion’s share of them. I have one other notebook that contains letters from about 1990 to 1999, a mix of typed, handwritten, and e-mail letters. I started on them Saturday. But it’s just a 3/4-inch binder and will be short work. I hadn’t even counted them as part of the special project. Why? Because this binder is small enough that I won’t mind if it stays on the shelf for several years. It won’t, but it’s not part of the special project.
The Kuwait Letters book is done. This is the final cover—before the typo was fixed.
The other special project was my book of correspondence, The Kuwait Years In Letters. I’ve blogged about this several times, one of the best of those posts being here. When I wrote that, in June 2022, I had the proof copy in hand. My wife and I were either just starting or well along in the proofreading process. I finished that a couple of weeks ago. But before publishing, I decided to ask the family about the cover and if they wanted changes in that. Yes, they did. I put together four alternate covers, and they chose one as the best.
I uploaded that cover to Amazon, and it was approved with no changes. I again sent it out to the family. My daughter liked it, but found one typo on the back cover. I fixed that on Friday night, and uploaded to Amazon. Since the only difference between that cover and the last one was a single letter on the back cover, I knew it was going to be accepted. I went to bed Friday night knowing it was all over but the ordering. Sure enough, I started Saturday morning by looking at an e-mail from Amazon. The cover was accepted and the book published. I quickly ordered family copies. Once they arrive and are in good condition, I will unpublish the book.
So, in a 14 hour time span, those three special projects that were preventing me from doing much writing came to a close. I will continue to worry about the Stars and Stripes until I hear from the Library. I will continue to scan a handful of letters most days, probably into early December. I will anxiously await the arrival of the Kuwait Letters book and the family’s reception of it after Christmas.
But I think, now, I will feel much better about carving out time to write. When will I start? Maybe as early as today. The Key To Time Travel awaits my attention. Eddie is in trouble, and I need to figure out how to extricate himself from it.
Some time ago, in July 2020 to be more precise, I began transcribing the many letters we had written home from Kuwait, which our families had preserved for us. My original intent for doing this was to preserve the information and the letters themselves. The act of transcribing meant gathering, arranging, typing, and storage.
Yesterday, I received a proof copy of the book. I’ve gone through it and found only two typos and one formatting problem. Of course, spelling and grammar in the originals wasn’t always correct.
In that fourth post, I said I hoped to someday add commentary and photographs and make the project into a book for our family. That day finally came. Two years ago, I said I hoped the book would be 300 pages. It is 299 pages. It contains 181 letters and around 30 photographs. I’m not sure how many of the 103,600 words are the letters and how much is my commentary. I also put in the four blog posts mentioned above as an appendix.
The photos turned out better than I expected. I’m still learning how to manipulate photos. One of them is dark; I’ll need to figure out how to lighten it, preferably using G.I.M.P. rather than PowerPoint, so I can keep it at a good pixel count. The photos include some of the picture postcards we sent from our trips.
Our villa in Kuwait. I need to work on the back cover still.
Otherwise, there’s not much more to do with this. Make the few corrections, including one to the back cover, publish it, and order three copies: one for us, one for our son, and one for our daughter. Then I will un-publish it so that someone browsing my list of books won’t order one out of curiosity. The grandkids, if they want one of their own…well, that is unlikely to happen until they are older. I’ll worry about it then.
Once this project is over (and it’s really, really close), what next in terms of letters? Maybe transcribe the Saudi years letters? Or start with our juvenalia and go forward from there? We’ll see.
[Dateline 26 August 2021, the 24th anniversary of Dad’s death]
Remember the oil wells set afire by Iraq? It really happened. Here’s Lynda in June 1991 when she went back to Kuwait as a Red Cross nurse.
A mere five days ago, the Afghan national army collapsed. They’d been fighting the Taliban for years in a broad civil war, backed up by our equipment, money, and a handful of troops. Why did they cease fighting? I have a thought on why. Perhaps I’ll speculate on that in another post on another day.
In light of that, a massive air evacuation has been ongoing since then. News reports are saying as many as 90,000 people have air lifted out. If true, it’s a tremendous achievement. But it needed not have happened. Other courses wee available. Perhaps I’ll speculate about those in another post on another day.
Then, today, bombs went off near the airport in Kabul. At least twelve American servicemen are dead, and an unknown number of Afghanis and other foreigners. News reports indicate they were set off by suicide bombers, with detonation locations selected to inflict injury and embarrassment to us. News reports are horrific.
This is all so familiar to me. It was August-December 1990, thirty-one years ago, that Iraq invaded Kuwait. At that time we were residents of Kuwait, though we were in the USA on annual leave when Iraq attacked. Some of you might remember that, though because of our involvement, my memories are sharp. At that time you only had four news outlets, no internet, no social media, no You Tube. News was somewhat scarce. What had become of our many friends in Kuwait, American and foreign?
Negotiations with Sadam Hussein resulted in the release of some Americans while others were taken hostage to various military targets in Iraq, thinking that America wouldn’t bomb places where they knew their citizens were. The planes began arriving at our Airforce bases, and we watched people deplane. Every plane had people we knew on it. We even saw one of Lynda’s best friends, who had been Sara’s 2nd grade teacher, deplane in London.
Eventually, Secretary of state James Baker conducted other negotiations, and those who had been held hostage were released in early January 1991. On January 17 Operation Desert Storm began. The liberation of Kuwait was on. The occupation of Iraq, and trying to change it into a democracy similar to ours, began, Twenty-three years showed that they would never become culturally like us.
I went to Kuwait in Jan 1988, Lynda and the children joining me in March. In the six or seven weeks I was there without her, three different terrorist bombs went off in Kuwait City. I heard two of them. They were set off at a time and place where they made a statement but didn’t hurt anyone. The third bomb was being delivered when it went off, killing the two delivery men and burning a nearby palm tree.
We enrolled the kids in the American School of Kuwait for the completion of their third and first grade years. In the parents’ packet was information on where we would find our children if for any reason they had to evacuate the school property. That hit us hard. The Iran-Iraq war was still going strong. We sometimes saw tankers smoking out in the Persian Gulf. Lynda and I had a discussion: what would happen if the war spilled over into Kuwait? What could the US government do for us? We decided they could do nothing; we were on our own.
So here it is again Another Islamic country that we tried to help has blown up in our face. Iran in 1979, Iraq-Kuwait in 1990, and Afghanistan from 2001-2021. We send in our military, or our influencers and try to change them into a country that is culturally similar to ours. It doesn’t work. Their culture has been set for more than a millennium. I time of trauma followed by a decade or two of our influence is not going to change them. Once we are gone—and at some point we will always be gone—they will revert to their long term culture. If they oppressed women before we were there, stopped doing that while we were there, when we are gone they will again oppress women. We can’t change them in two decades.
They say we are getting out. I hope we are getting out. We could have done it better, a whole lot better. We should have done it better. I hope we don’t ever go back in.
Thanksgiving week is usually a busy week for us. People are coming in. Last year was larger than normal, as both of our children were here, with grandchildren, a sister, and a cousin, plus spouses. We had to set up an extra table for dinner. Thanksgiving has always been a busy time, yet a fun time.
This year, the pandemic has canceled all that. It will just be Lynda and me. Our son was here with his partner last week. They quarantined for two weeks in Chicago before coming, as did we here, so we all felt safe doing that. Charles also came for a week in October, and, if plans work out, they will do the same in mid-December. Our daughter’s family has sickness running through it. Not the corona virus, but the strep throat that kids seem to get every year in school and pass on to parents. So they will hunker down in West Texas.
Last week we had an early Thanksgiving dinner with our visitors, not quite traditional but close. We are now eating leftovers and soon I’ll be making soup and figuring out how much turkey I have to freeze, along with other things. For sure we will be eating leftovers on Thursday. So Thanksgiving will be a quiet affair.
That is actually back to normal. Life is quiet for us. Lynda’s health issues would have forced us into quietness even if there hadn’t been a pandemic. The double-whammy means we don’t go out. I still go to Wal-Mart for groceries and meds, but try to shop so as to go every nine or ten days instead of every five or six days as I used to. I still go to church, except when quarantining. We still see our neighbors on occasion. In this rural neighborhood we have more vacant lots than built-on lots, so you have to go out of your way to see you neighbors. Getting out of the house mostly means taking walks, not drives.
This week, as I look ahead on Monday and build my to-do list, looks to be a writing week. My stock trading activities are now quite efficient and don’t take more than an hour a day. I normally stretch that out to two or so. Last night I spent some time on a writing project: adding commentary to the transcribed letters from our Kuwait years. This went fairly quickly. I want to keep commentary to a minimum. At this point I’m halfway through the book with just a few hours work, and could easily finish it this week. I still have editing to do on the letters, then proofread it all and compare it to the original letters, then decide if I’m going to add photos and if so how many. I don’t know that I’m going to make this a continuous task or rather work on it in odd moment as the spirit moves me, such as when multi-tasking before the television.
I might spend a little time fleshing out the next Bible study I want to write. I’ve selected it and, having taught it twice, have a lot of beginning material. But other studies have been nagging at me, suggesting I develop and write them instead. I will have to spend some time deciding.
A letter to an old friend of my wife and me is in the offering, perhaps as early as today. Listing more things on Facebook Marketplace will also be a task quite soon, maybe even today. While I’ve been pleased with how that has gone, I’ve found it is time consuming. I plan on listing my box of JFK assassination magazines that I bought at auction some years ago, as well as our old treadmill and older bicycles. All of that will take some time. As will a few other downsizing activities.
Which brings me to my novel-in-progress. Yes, I want to get back to that. I think I know how to plow ahead with it and not be stymied by the historical elements. Ideas are floating through my mind and I need to get them written before they totally float away. It is a featured task on my to-do list, though I may need to do a few others first.
All of this is possible because of the quiet Thanksgiving. I will miss not seeing my children and grandchildren all together. But I will also feel good knowing they are protecting themselves where they are, perhaps getting some rest rather than going through all the trouble of travel. We will look forward to making Thanksgiving a busy time in 2021.
It may not look like 129 letters, but they are all there, collated by date after transcription. Now I need to figure out a better way to store them.
As regular readers of this blog know (all two or three of you), I love letters. I have a sizeable collection of published letter collections, and from time to time I pull one out and read it. Right now I have Volume 1 of The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis on my work table in The Dungeon, and am trying to get in the habit of reading one or two of his letters every day. In fact, having not read one yesterday or today, I’m going to interrupt writing this post and will read a couple, then come back…
…okay, letters read, and I’m back. I’ve never understood this fascination of mine with letters, but it’s there.
As it turns out, my own house is littered with letters—letters that I’ve sent over the years. When we moved to Saudi Arabia in 1981, we had no telephone in our flat. Using the phone at the office was not terribly convenient, so we wrote letters: to my Dad, to Lynda’s mom and dad, to grandparents, and a few to siblings or friends. When we moved to Kuwait in 1988 after four years back in the States, at first we didn’t have a phone, so again we wrote letters. We got a phone at some point, perhaps nine months after we got there, but, with international calls being very expensive no matter which side of the ocean they originated on, we still wrote letters to the same people. The recipients of those letters, our parents at least, kept them, and later gave them back to us (or we found them in their possession upon their deaths).
The Saudi letters will be an even bigger challenge. For now they can stay in their bin, awaiting my attention at some future date (measured in years, not months).
Now we have those letters. When we moved to this house in 2002, with some space to lay things out and organize papers, I began to “gather” these letters into boxes and bins. They all went into a plastic bin at first. I started transcribing a few of the letters from the Saudi years, but put it aside and have no idea where that computer file is. Perhaps I’ll find it. But no matter because I didn’t have more than ten of them transcribed.
Two months ago, when I began going through my mother-in-law’s papers, looking to downsize/declutter after her death, I found a plastic sack with some letters we had sent her. These were a surprise. That caused me to find the bin and put them in it. Then I thought, perhaps I should separate the Saudi years letters from the Kuwait years letters. So I did that. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be neat to get back to transcribing these? Since I didn’t know where my Saudi years computer file was, I decided to do the Kuwait years.
So on July 19, 2020, at 11:07 a.m., I created a computer file and transcribed a letter. Before that, of course, I had pulled them out of the bin and collated them by date. I’ve read enough letter collections by now that I knew pretty much what to do. The next day I transcribed another, and the next day another. This went on for a while. Occasionally I might do two letters a day, or even three, if they were short (as many of mine were to my dad).
Then, somewhere around mid-August, finding myself enjoying the transcription, I decided to just make that my work for a while. I began typing for all my time in The Dungeon that wasn’t taken up by stock trading or book marketing or promotion. I spent several hours a day transcribing. As I did, I saw holes in the letters for some month and people, especially to my wife’s dad. I know we wrote more to him than the number I found. I went hunting in the house. He tended to discard the envelopes and put letters into notebooks. I found them in a box, and found another ten or so letters we’d written to him. I think many to him are still missing, and perhaps with a little more digging I’ll find more.
Most of the letters I found around the house are ones we sent back to the States. I did, however, find a few letters we received. Since we returned to the USA for vacation right before Iraq invaded, we were able to go back only after the Gulf War. Our villa was a mess, we had many things to ship back more important (so I thought at the time) than letters, so we must have trashed most of the incoming letters. I don’t remember any of that, but the lack of having them makes me think that’s what happened. The incoming letters that I did find I also transcribed.
This box has other letters and miscellanies, not necessarily from overseas years. Yet, I need to go through it. Maybe I’ll find the missing Kuwait years letters in it.
Tuesday morning I typed the last two, incoming letters just after the Iraqi invasion from my father-in-law. The record is now as complete as I can make it. It’s 129 letters and postcards, 145 typed pages, just under 84,300 words—then length of a medium-sized novel. I have some editing out to do, and I think the final word count will be around 82,000. To this I will add commentary, footnotes, historical perspective. We have numerous photos with which to illustrate this, probably covering all the events mentioned. For the most part the photos are all in one place in the storeroom in a clearly marked box.
So what’s next? At some point I hope to add the commentary and perspective, and to illustrate this with photos. I hope to turn it into a book (‘t’will be around 300 pages, I think), not for publication, but to print off a few nicely-bound copies via my Amazon KDP account, and present them to our children and grandchildren. I wouldn’t offer it for sale. Who would want to buy it? Very few people are like me and love letters. And my lack of notoriety works even more against it ever being in demand. No, I’ll have the copies printed, pull it back to draft status, and leave it there should I ever need a few more copies.
As for the letters from the Saudi years, they will have to wait. I really need to get back to my regular writing and publishing schedule.
