Category Archives: letters

family, home improvements, letters, miscellaneous, reading, technology woes, The Forest Throne

Random Thoughts Part “n”

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Three collections of letters moved from to-do to done—or maybe not.

Having recently given up reading two books (which I will report on later), I have only random thoughts on my mind upon which to build this post. Here goes.

  • We are having a workman come today to make repairs to the screens on our screened-in patio. One screen panel is completely loose, two others appear to be at the point of coming loose, two have slight tears in then, one needs some caulking, one door has a closer that needs replacing, and the other door is sagging, leaving a gap. A few years back I would have attempted these repairs myself, but no longer. This workman will also be converting our tub-shower into a walk-in shower. We aren’t quite ready to do that yet, but might be in a day or two.
  • I may finally replace my 10-year-old laptop with a new one. I’ve been putting this off for as long as possible. Our oldest grandson needs a powerful one for his first term of college, and I’m hoping we can get a better price on a two-computer order. I may scoot up to Best Buy today and see what this will set me back.
  • I spent a good part of last week getting caught up on my checkbook and the family budget. Yes, I still balance my checkbook and keep a budget. I have a little more to do on these, which I think I can finish today. At that point I’ll be ready to…
  • start some new writing. It will almost certainly be Vol 3 of The Forest Throne series. Though possibly I’ll work on another piece first before I get into that. New creative writing will feel good after a long time working on editing collections of letters.
  • Also hoping for some good reading time this week. I began a new book yesterday, and it looks like it will be a good read.
  • This morning I spent a fair amount of time on computer file organization, making good progress. Ready to scan some photos and save them for posterity.
  • Other than that, the main thing I have to do is deal with an IRS letter that says I did my taxes incorrectly and they owe me money. That should be top of my list but I’m having trouble dealing with it.

In reading, I’m working on about three things. One of these is the Carlyle Letters Online. I found a good quote in a letter Thomas wrote to his wife, Jane:

…I really wish you could find an eligible house somewhere out under the quiet sky,…

8 April 1846, TC to JWC, par 3A.

Thomas was in the last week or two of shepherding the 2nd edition of his book on Oliver Cromwell through the editing and printing process. And he was sick of it. He needed a break and wanted his wife to find them a house away from London, “somewhere out under the quiet sky.” As the rest of the letter makes plain, it could be for the summer or for good. Carlyle was finally making money and probably no longer needed to be in London to be near the publishers.

I can so relate to this. I just finished editing and publishing the third collection of letters in a row. It’s taken me over a year, actually the better part of two or three years. Copies of the last two arrived today. I immediately thumbed through the two books, looking for layout errors, then read the Introduction of each. What did I find. An error in each book! In the first couple of pages. In one book I used the word “prosperity” when I mean “posterity”. In the other I have “thin” where I meant to type “think”. Am I really that back of a writer/editor?

But I’m so sick of these books, I don’t know if I have the mental strength or stamina to make the changes, let alone read the entire books looking for other needed corrections. I really want to move on to something else. I could see myself in the house somewhere under a quiet sky, reading and writing, a little bit of editing and publishing.

But I don’t really expect that to happen. There are still photographs and papers to sort through, pictures to hang. Drivers licenses to get and cars to see to maintenance on.

So onward and perhaps upward.

 

 

expatriate life, family, home improvements, letters, self-publishing

Some Projects Completed

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Transcribed in 2020-2022 and published in 2022, this was my first collection of letters to publish. Now it’s my fourth to be revised and finally completed.

Back on April 3 this year, I posted about what things I wanted to accomplish over the next months, or more likely a year.  A few times since then I’ve reported about progress toward the items I mentioned in that post. Such as getting my income taxes done and in on time.

The list was ambitious. It included not only things I was working on at the time, but also writing projects for once I completed other things. As I look back at that post and list, it’s hard to see myself ever getting all those things done. But it’s time to look back and see how I’ve done in the last few months.

The thing that prompted this was completing, yesterday afternoon, a significant revision to the book of letters from our years living in Kuwait. This included: adding recently found letters; adding in Lynda’s diary from the time she was working in Kuwait as a Red Cross nurse after the Gulf War; and, at the suggestion of our children, adding a bunch more photos to it. All of that took a lot of time, especially with interruptions. But Wednesday I added the last of the photos and began the re-pagination check, yesterday I completed the check. I found I had four blank pages where they weren’t supposed to be, so went scrambling and added more.

I adjusted the cover and uploaded everything. In checking the book online, I discovered some formatting was still off. I spent the better part of two to three hours fine-tuning the formatting and pagination. Finally it was done around lunch time. Amazon’s bot review declared all good, so I ordered my author copy. ‘Twill be here in about ten days.

So what’s next? That April 3 post included grandiose plans of new books to be written. Maybe I will shift to those. But first, I need to find locations on closet and garage shelfs for the things I got out to work on the three books of letters. And I need desperately to catch up on the family budget to see where we stand financially. I’m sure we’re in good shape, but I need to know. And I need to get back to the never-ending job of unpacking and organizing following our move.

I declare the next few days, or maybe a week, as maintenance time. Stowing, budgeting, unpacking, minor household improvements. These shall fill my time until I get to a stopping point and feel released to do some writing. This includes some organization of computer files, which I discovered in finalizing the Kuwait letters book are woefully discombobulated. Hopefully I’ll also be able to up my reading.

book reviews, History, letters, Politics

Book Review: All The Best

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A good read; 5-stars; wish I could keep it.

Back in the dark ages, must have been 1999 to 2000, I saw an episode of Larry King Live where George H W Bush promoted his book, All The Best: My Life in Letters and Other Writings. This was more or less Bush’s post-presidential memoir. At least I think it’s in place of a true memoir. I didn’t research that question.

Regular readers of this blog will know I love reading collections of letters. And I always liked the first president Bush. I voted for him in the Kansas presidential primary in 1980. I was out of the country during his 1988 presidential run and can’t remember if I got an absentee ballot in. I know I voted for him in 1992. He made a good presentation of his book in that 1999 or 2000 interview, and I made a mental note to pick up a copy. Way led on to way, and it was several years later when I found it for sale used and picked it up.

Way continued to lead on to way, and it was only a little over a month ago when I finally pulled it off the shelf and read it. It is a collection of letters (Pres. Bush’s), not of correspondence (incoming and outgoing). And it’s not comprehensive. It’s a selection, made probably Bush himself and an editor. The collection begins just before his enlistment in the Navy during World War 2, continues through his business years in the oil field, his jump into politics—running for Congress and both winning some and losing some, then as Republican party chairman, US rep to the United Nations, CIA director, US ambassador to China, then to vice-presidential and presidential years. Plus, a chapter or letters after he lost the presidency in 1992 to the book’s publishing in 1999.

The letters have been selected, of course, to put Bush in a good light. But it appears to be an excellent selection. They show a lot of humor, such as an award given to cabinet members who dozed off in cabinet meetings. There were letters to his parents and children. I found this great excerpt in a 1974 letter to his sons.

Don’t confuse being ‘soft’ with seeing the other guy’s point of view. …[U]nderstand too that power accompanied by arrogance is very dangerous. It’s particularly dangerous when men with no real experience have it—for they can abuse our great institutions.

Great sentiments from a nice guy. Yes, Bush was an understanding man who went about his jobs with quiet efficiency. Bush gained a reputation in the press of being a wimp—a weakling in foreign affairs and unconcerned with domestic affairs. That reputation is blown to smithereens in these letters. Bush continued Reagan initiatives that resulted in the Iron Curtain coming down, the end of the Cold War, and the break-up of the Soviet Union. He put together a coalition of nations that drove Iraq out of Kuwait—something especially close to me. Those are not the actions of a wimp. The contemporary press got it wrong; history is getting it right.

At 634 pages and ten to fifteen pages a day, it took me a while to get through it. But I’m glad I did. It was well worth reading, and I give it a strong 5-stars. But, alas, it’s not a keeper since you can’t keep everything. I’d put it in the donation pile, except I dropped the book on the patio one day and it split at the spine. So into recycling it will go. If you have an interest in history, or if you have a thing for letters, it’s well worth seeking out and reading.

books, family, letters, memories, self-publishing

The World War 2 Letters of Wayne Cheney

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The Pacific was Wayne’s war theatre.

Last week, actually around June 13, I finished my latest book project. It is The World War 2 Letters of Wayne B. Cheney. He was Lynda’s dad—my father-in-law, of sorts. He and Lynda’s mom divorced long before I came into the family.

Like many soldiers, Wayne wrote letters home, and received many in return, both from family members, townsfolks, and other armed forces personnel. He wasn’t able to keep most of the incoming letters, given how his base kept changing in the South Pacific. But his parents kept most of the ones he wrote home. When Wayne died in 1996, we brought those letters to our house. There they sat in a green plastic bin, moved from Bentonville to Bella Vista in 2002.

It was about this time last year that I decided the time had come to do something with them. I decided to transcribe them, put them into book form for easier reading by family members, then donate the letters themselves to some worthy institution.

From a Kansas town to an island=hopping war. See the world from the nose of a B-24.

Wayne enlisted in the fall of 1942 at age 18. He was hoping to get on the ground crew in the Army Air Forces, but instead found himself in school to become an air gunner. He was assigned at nose gunner in B-24 Liberators and saw action in the South Pacific. He was either based on or participated in bombing missions over some of the famous islands in the war history, such as Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Truk, Tarawa. His time there was over when the war had moved on to Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

In addition to the letters, Wayne wrote a war diary. He transcribed parts of this over the years, but only the parts dealing with actual combat. He mixed that with later explanations of what his modern impressions were about what was going on in 1942-1945. I did a full transcription of the diary, interspersing the entries with the letters.

Actually, the letters are not exciting stuff. Subject to forward base censorship (and occasionally running afoul of the censors), he couldn’t write a lot about what he was doing in the war effort. So there was lots about doing laundry, rigging something in his barracks, who he received letters from, talk about what must be happening on Kansas farms.

This book is not a commercial project, and I doubt anyone except immediate family members will be interested. Maybe someday a great-grandkid will ask about what their ancestor did in that war they covered in history class and someone will pull a copy of the book off the shelf. But should anyone else be interested in this small piece of WW2 history, it’s available on Amazon.

Fair warning: I have not yet received my proof copy, so I haven’t been able to go through an actual book to make sure the photos and print came out okay. That’s because I had the proof copy sent to the wrong address. Still waiting for it to be forwarded.

 

letters, miscellaneous, reading, The Forest Throne, Writing

Stardate 2026.06.08, Miscellaneous

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  • On Friday, I finally found a box of photos I’d been looking for in our disorganized new home. “It was poorly labeled” will be my excuse. Of course, I’m the one who labeled it. I sorted through the photos and, on Saturday and Sunday, began scanning them to put them in the right format for adding to the WW2 letters book, learning more about formatting photos in G.I.M.P. in the process. It now looks like I might be able to finish the book, complete the formatting, and publish it within the week.
  • Not related to writing, other photos finding/sorting/evaluating is also in progress, with some progress, though also with some dismay at finding many more photos than I realized we had. The task I thought was merely humongous is actually gigantic.
  • I’m sticking to my reading and making my reading goal almost every day.
  • Today, in writing a letter to a friend, I made the first tangible documentation of an idea for another book. I know, I don’t need another book in the queue, but nor do I need this idea consuming so much brainpower with no outlet. Perhaps now I can direct more energy to projects already in progress.
  • After three or four weeks of undisciplined eating and failure to exercise, I’ve at least partially righted those wrongs and my weight is dropping a little. Gotta keep it up. Also seeing progress on blood sugar daily readings.
  • Perhaps related, perhaps not, my sleep seems to be better regulated.
  • The wall I hit, at mentioned in my last blog post, hasn’t totally come down, but it has enough chinks in it to see to the other side.

Bulleted items aside, I start off this week in a significantly better mood than last.

family, letters, miscellaneous

Hitting the Wall

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That’s what happened to me yesterday. I hit the wall. By 9 a.m., I felt like I couldn’t do another thing. Yet, I had done very little except for Monday morning stock market work. I couldn’t work family finances, at which I’m falling desperately behind, couldn’t work on my three letter projects, couldn’t work on post-move organization. I did manage to get my wife to her cardiology test appointment. I also managed to get a long message chain done with a newly found cousin on Lynda’s side.

Today has been somewhat better. But here is it not quite 4 in the afternoon and I’m out of steam. I guess I’ll try to read for a while.

expatriate life, History, letters, memories, self-publishing, Writing

A Project Never Seems Done

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In the full cover, the photo and text is not out of center. This Amazon photo of the cover is, though.

About a month ago, I wrote about the projects I had on my to-do list and what I might tackle next, what would come after that. I have no shortage of projects in some stage of thinking through.

So after thinking through my projects list, and after having finished my income taxes, I spent a little time at paperwork reduction, then jumped into my list. The first item that seemed best to me was revisions to my book The Saudi Years in Letters. This promised to be the shortest of my projects, and it truly did go quickly.

First, I loaded the recently found letters into the book and formatted them. That added around 16 pages to the document. Next, I proofread the book using Word’s text-to-speech read-back feature. I was able to go through the book in three or four days. I probably could have done it all in a day and a half except for the concentration fatigue. Proofreading caused me to flag four letters to check against the originals. That took only an hour to do.

That brought me up to formatting the overall book. I had to do that page by page, making sure to have text and photos in right relation to each other, eliminating excessive white space and adding white space where needed. This took a day of work and eliminated about five pages from the file. I uploaded the new text file to Amazon without re-doing the cover. Alas, the extra pages from the extra letters were a few too many for the existing cover to work, so I had to re-do the cover. Fortunately , I was able to re-size the cover and upload the book to Amazon in about an hour.

So the project is finished, right? Not quite. As I went through the on-line layout checking of the book, I saw that it would be possible to add six to eight photos without having to reformat anything. Should I do it? That would mean finding the right boxes in storage closets (not impossible), going through the photos, making selections, scanning and formatting. A day or two of work, most likely.

I decided not to do that right now. If I let the book go out to my kids and grandkids, the intended audience, with a little extra white space, I’d say no big deal. I’ll take a few weeks to work on something else, then maybe come back to this.

On to another project.

book reviews, letters

Book Review: The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh

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This was the paperback version I read, 10 to 15 pages most days.

As I’ve said before on this blog, I enjoy reading letters. I bought a number of books of letter collections, used whenever I find them. Some of these are keepers, already read or waiting to be. Others are “nice to have to read once things” that will go in the donation box once read. The only thing keeping me from reading books in either category is time.

I recently decided to take time to read The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, which I bought a number of years ago at a used bookstore. I’m not an artist, don’t care a whole lot about art, but I do care about letters and knew Van Gogh was famous (or perhaps infamous), so figured his letters would be interesting to read. Thus, after finishing another book, I scanned the bookshelves in my new office and this one jumped out at me. Perfect, I thought. An interesting read then a slight reduction in my library.

Van Gogh’s famous self-portrait.

And that’s the way it turned out to be. First, I learned that all the letters in my paperback copy—340 pages set in 10 pt font, so a bit hard to read—were to his brother Theo, and it was an edited collection, not comprehensive. An editor selected the ones he thought best. There were a lot of them, representative of the full range of Van Gogh’s adult life. Normally, I prefer to read correspondence, the back and forth between two letter writers. But I’ll take letters, all outgoing, and find good reading in them.

That’s what these letters were. They mostly dealt with Van Gogh’s artist career. Theo was also involved in art, but as a dealer for an art brokerage house. Van Gogh mentioned a large number of contemporary artists and discussed their techniques and results. He did a lot of comparing himself to them. Sometimes he mentioned various masters of the past.

Much of his discussion had to do with what paintings or drawings he was working on at the moment. Since I don’t know a lot about his paintings, I’m sure some he discussed are famous. A student of Van Gogh as an artist would no doubt enjoy hearing what he thought of his own work at he produced it. He wrote about his techniques, problems he had procuring models, about finding lodging and space for a studio, about trying to get colors and perspective right. Fascinating stuff to this duffer on art.

Occasionally, Van Gogh spoke about family. He was thankful for Theo’s financial support, which was the only way he could do his art. Vincent sometimes mentioned other family members (parents, siblings, uncles, aunts), but less so than I would have expected in letters between brothers—unless the editor decided not to include mainly family letters.

About the demons that troubled Van Gogh his last couple of years, demons that led him to commit suicide at age 37, the letters say relatively little. The same about the famous incident with his ear. Included was a memoir of Vincent’s life written by Theo’s wife.

If you are into art, or a fan or student of Van Gogh, you likely would enjoy it. I did. But, even though I feel good rating it 3.5-stars, it’s not a keeper. To the donation box it goes, according to plan.

 

America, Bible study, books, Documenting America, family, letters, self-publishing

What’s Next?

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This will certainly be task one, making needed additions and corrections.

As I reported in my last post, my 8-volume Bible study is done. I suppose nothing is ever done for the self-published writer, because there’s always things to do (improve covers, check for formatting errors, fix the dreaded typos once found). But I can lay all that aside for a while and move on to more pressing items.

I hope I get back to this series fairly soon.

But what’s next? I’ve been thinking that through for some time and have been developing a mental to-do list. Monday evening I started writing the items down. Let me list them here. It’s a combination of revising existing works, completing long-planned works, and trying to figure out if anything that’s been keeping my brain from resting is worth pursuing. I’ll give the list as bullet points.

  • Do my income taxes. The deadline approacheth. I started on this yesterday. Looks like I owe the IRS.
  • Make additions and corrections to the book of letters from our years in Saudi Arabia. I added the recently found letters on Tuesday and re-formatted the chapter. I need to check the formatting of the entire book, then re-publish.
  • Make additions and corrections to the book of letters from our years in Kuwait. That will include adding a lot more photos.
  • Put together the book of my father-in-law’s service in WW2. This includes syncing up his war letters with his war journal, and finding enough photos to add a little spice. I started on this on Wednesday, loading the first 20-odd letters into a file. On Thursday I proofread them and made corrections. I can see that I’m going to have to do this differently.
  • Write/publish book three in The Forest Throne series, tentatively titled You Can’t Change The Past.
  • Write/publish book four in The Forest Throne series, tentatively titled Lost In Time.
  • Decide if I want to do any more books in the Documenting America series. Ideas for more books have been refusing to leave me alone, but they take a lot of research and writing.
  • Decide if I want to write a book with the tentative title Nature: The Artwork of God. That’s another thing that’s taking up brain space.
  • Get a start on a couple of essays I’d like to write and publish.

That’s enough for both short-range and medium-range planning. I’ll have to see how it goes.

 

 

family, letters

One Special Project Completed

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The box of Wayne’s letters written during World War 2.

My sleeping rhythms have been off lately. If I wake up at or near 3 a.m., I can’t get back to sleep. I’m restless lying in bed. After a half hour of lying there awake, I generally get up and try to sleep sitting in my easy chair. That will work maybe one day out of three. Sometimes I read for an hour then am tired enough to sleep for an hour. Other times I just recline, maybe dozing a little but mostly trying to still my racing mind.

Monday-Tuesday night and Tuesday-Wednesday night was different. Oh, the waking up at an importune time for getting back to sleep happened. But after an hour or so passed, putting me in the 4 o’clock a.m. hour, I decided why the heck am I trying. I got up, got dressed, took my computer to The Dungeon and decided to begin my day. I worked on the letters, and in those two days was able to finish the transcribing work. I also was able to go back and correct one letter I realized I hadn’t completed.

The rest of the work consists of putting the letters into one document file, formatting it, sorting through photos of that era and adding them to the file, then computing publishing tasks. Proofreading will be included at some point.

Unfortunately, all that will have to wait until our move from Arkansas to Texas, plus finding the energy to set up the new house. When I get the book done—perhaps I should say IF I ever get it done—we’ll have to see.