Category Archives: The Forest Throne

Bible study, goals, Life Group lessons, The Forest Throne, Writing

Monthly Progress and Goals

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The sequel is coming, folks. Hang in there.

In the category of “what was I thinking–I wasn’t thinking, include my post on last Friday. That was the day closest to the first of the month, the day I should have been recording my writing progress for January and goals for February. Instead, I did the post that came to mind first. Ah, well.

Here’s how I did in January relative to the goals I set.

  • Edit The Key To Time Travel, at least once and hopefully twice. I’m happy to say I did three editorial reads of TKTTT, and am pleased with how it turned out. One of those reads was aloud with my wife.
  • Finish one pass through A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 4. If time allows (which it should), make a true editorial reading of it. Also, write whatever introduction is needed, and whatever ending makes sense. And I did this too. That is, I did a devotional reading of it, one section each day. The editor in my couldn’t keep from correcting typos, clarifying the text, making the occasional change. At least this allowed me to know the two places I need to give most attention to as I do my edits in February.
  • Blog twice a week, Mondays and Fridays. I don’t know if I can claim this as done or not. Twice I had only what I call a “dummy” post, just a few words to let my readers know I was alive and kicking, but didn’t have time to write something beneficial.
  • Attend four writers meetings this month. The one I sometimes make, sometimes miss, is a lunch brainstorming session, which I plan to go to.  I was able to attend only two. The two others came during my wife’s hospitalization and I wasn’t able to attend.
  • Work on at least one other part of A Walk Through Holy Week, probably Part 3, which is already well along. No, I did not get this done.
  • Plan out the next part of A Walk Through Holy Week. I will be teaching that in February through April, and last year I found it was easier to write the current part than one from a previous year. Yes, this I did get done. I have a plan for the 10-lesson series and have discussed it with my co-teacher. It begins February 26. Still more prep work to do, however.

So now, we come to February, already six days into it. Here are my goals.

  • Blog twice a week, on Monday and Friday. I believe this is do-able, even with certain distractions planned into the month.
  • I won’t be attending writers meetings this month. The first one, already passed, was snowed out. The three others come while I’ll be out of town.
  • Edit and complete A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 6. This was Part 4 until I restructured the series last month through some serious planning. That wasn’t one of last month’s goals, but I did it. I begin that editing today. Part of this goal is to, at the end of February, have a publication-ready book.
  • Begin work writing AWTHW Part 7, simultaneously to when I teach it. That worked well last year on part 6 (was part 4 before restructuring).
  • Get TKTTT to beta readers and receive their feedback back. I began this process last Friday. Hoping two of my grandchildren will read it this week and next. And I have one other family to check with.
  • Work with the cover designer of TKTTT.

That seems like enough. I’ll check back in on March 3, report how I did, and post some goals for March.

Bible study, Documenting America, letters, The Forest Throne, Writing

2023 Goals

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A few days ago, I gave some January goals. I did that before I had given a lot of thought to 2023 as a whole. I’ve since been able to do that, and have come up with some goals for the year. Here they are.

  • Edit and publish The Key To Time Travel
  • Determine the structure of the overall A Walk Through Holy Week Bible study series, and whether it will be six parts or seven. It’s being taught in six parts over six Lent/Easter seasons, but I’m thinking it’s better as seven parts in books.
  • Finish/edit Part 4 (what may become Part 5) of AWTHW
  • Finish/edit Part 3 (what may become Part 4) of AWTHW
  • Write Part 5 (what may become Part 6) of AWTHW, simultaneously with teaching it.
  • Start Part 1 of AWTHW, after determining the overall structure, of course.
  • Depending on how work on this goes, publish some or all of the completed parts of the study.
  • Start writing the next book in the Documenting America series. It will cover the years 1761 to 1775 and is tentatively titled Run-up To Revolution.
  • One other item, which is non-commercial but which will be a book, is to start transcribing the letters from our years in Saudi Arabia (1981-1983). I don’t think this is something that I can finish in one year, given that it will be fill-in work when I have nothing else to go, but I’d like to at least start it. I’ll wait to start it, however, until I get a few more disaccumulation items done.

Since these are goals covering a full year, and since way leads on to way along this path through the woods, I reserve the right to change these as the months go by. Possibly there will be updates. If not, look for a post in late December 2023 as to how I did in 2023 relative to these goals.

Bible study, books, The Forest Throne, Writing

2022 Recap

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This was one of my two new publications in 2022.

In terms of my writing career, what can I say about 2022? It was productive, but not overly so. That seems to be the best I can say.

As 2022 started, I finished the first draft of There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel, and was ready for beta readers and to figure out what to do about a cover. Also finished, and not yet published, was our church’s Centennial book. I had finished it—all I could see to do on it—in October, and was waiting on proofreading and editing. So two books were essentially ready to go to publication.

While waiting for those to projects to grind through to publication, I began writing a Bible study. Our Sunday school class has been studying Holy Week, during the run-up to Easter. It is a multi-year effort. In a few weeks we will start our fifth part of this, the Roman trail. I had no intentions of developing this into a published Bible study, but in early 2022 said, “Why not?”

I began with what we studied in 2021, the Last Supper. That was our third year. I made some progress on it, then came the time to teach the fourth year, Gethsemane and arrest of Jesus and the night trials. I found writing it as I was teaching it much easier than trying to write what I had taught in prior years.

I count sales of these in the year’s total, even though it wasn’t a royalty producing project.

I worked on the current year and the previous year simultaneously. By the time the end of April rolled around, I had the current year’s mostly done, the previous year’s about 40 percent done, and a plan for the entire series. Although it is a six-year study, I came to see it should have been a seven-year study and that the published books should be divided into smallish seven volumes.

That’s when other things got in the way of writing. That included the three special projects, as well as a number of things around the house and health concerns. Writing lagged behind. Publication went forward, however. The Centennial book was published in April and seemed to be well accepted. TNSTATT was published in June. On-line sales are nonexistent, but in person sales have happened, with much effort and pushing on my part.

Gary is gone, but the letters between us live on.

In July I began work on the next book in The Forest Throne series, titled The Key To Time Travel. After delays of putting a major effort into it, I knuckled down in December and finished it. It is now waiting on beta readers, as well as for me to edit it. Early chapters have passed muster with my critique group.

The Kuwait Letters book is done. This is the final cover—before the typo was fixed. Now done, distributed, and un-published for now.

Two other publications in 2022 were letters collections. One of these was the letters with my good friend, Gray Boden, as a tribute to him after his passing in 2020. I suspect this book will soon be un-published, as it actually includes items for which I don’t have permission of the writer (i.e. copyright holder) to publish. The other was the collection of letters from our Kuwait years. Copies of his have been obtained by all family members that want them and has been unpublished. These were not really commercial ventures, but took time away from what could have been time on writing and marketing books.

I took part in three author events near the end of the year, and spoke three times to the letter writers society I’m a part of. I wasn’t aware of any other events I could have participated in. I’m hoping 2023 will see more of them.

I wound up selling 279 books, my highest year ever. Without the Centennial book (which I count as sales for me even though it was a non-commercial venture), I would have been a little behind 2021 sales.

So I enter 2023 with a completed, unpublished project, two works-in-progress and another soon to start. Here’s hoping and praying that 2023 will be more productive than 2022 was.

Bible study, goals, The Forest Throne, Writing

December Progress, January Goals

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It’s a quiet morning at Blackberry Oaks. Ten people in the house and, at 7:19 a.m., I’m the only one up—unless some are up and quiet in the basement. It has been a good post-Christmas celebration, one that will continue for a few more days.

So I’m going to give a somewhat quick progress and goals post. I may come back with a follow-up post later, when I’ve had more time to think about it. First, how did I do relative to my December goals?

  • Finish The Key To Time Travel. Yes, I managed to do this. Added the last words on Dec. 16. About time to edit it.
  • Blog twice a week, Monday and Friday. Yes, did this, with real posts, not just fillers.
  • Attend three writers’ meetings. I may even slip in a fourth. Just three this month. I decided to to forego the fourth.
  • Read at least some of the Bible study I’ve set aside. I’m going to read it for my own morning devotions. Yes, I’ve been doing this. I’m now up to the fifth chapter, out of seven. Each chapter is divided into seven parts, providing a daily reading for those who want to do it that way. That’s how I’m reading it right now. It has been a blessing to me as I read. Of course, the writer/editor in me can’t help but fix typos as I’m reading for devotions. Occupational hazard, I’m afraid.

Now, to make a few modest goals for January, 2023.

  • Edit The Key To Time Travel, at least once and hopefully twice.
  • Finish one pass through A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 4. If time allows (which it should), make a true editorial reading of it. Also, write whatever introduction is needed, and whatever ending makes sense.
  • Blog twice a week, Mondays and Fridays.
  • Attend four writers meetings this month. The one I sometimes make, sometimes miss, is a lunch brainstorming session, which I plan to go to.
  • Work on at least one other part of A Walk Through Holy Week, probably Part 3, which is already well along.
  • Plan out the next part of A Walk Through Holy Week. I will be teaching that in February through April, and last year I found it was easier to write the current part than one from a previous year.

That’s plenty. I’ll review these over the next week, after things calm down here, and see if this makes sense.

fiction, The Forest Throne, Writing

The Key To Time Travel

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I don’t have a cover for the new book yet. Before long I’ll get that process started.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was writing fast and furiously this month on The Key To Time Travel. I’ve been working on this since around July 10th, when grandson Ezra and I put the first words on the computer. I suggested a way to begin it, and he gave me some ideas of what to put in the prologue. In a few days I managed to complete the Prologue, Chapter 1, and some of Chapter 2. Ezra and granddaughter Elise read and approved it at that point.

Due to the several special projects I had over the summer, I made little progress on the book. But I kept thinking about the plot and how I would get Eddie into trouble with the forest throne, a.k.a. a time portal. I worked on it some in October and got it up to around five or six thousand words. Again, there it sat. Again, I pondered the plot even as I was busy with other things.

As I reported recently, I got into a good production rhythm after Thanksgiving, and wrote and wrote. The words flew from my mind to the keyboard and screen. December 19 came, and I wrote “The End”—figuratively, that is.  Soon I will start the editing process, as well as look for beta readers.

So what’s the story about? Somehow I need to describe the plot without giving the story away. It’s about Eddie Wagner’s experience with the forest throne. As the second of four children, he is anxious to ‘one-up’ on his brother. He knows enough about the throne from older brother Ethan to know what it does and how to work it. He needs the blue and orange pegs. He knows which one does what, and that the ends are marked designating ‘past’ and ‘future’.

But did Grandpa destroy the pegs? Eddie gets to spend an extra week at his grandparents’ Ozarks home after the rest of the family goes home. He has a long conversation with Grandpa and learns things that Ethan didn’t reveal. Grandpa also said that he couldn’t destroy the pegs, and that he didn’t yet want to throw them away.

Eddie makes up his mind to search his grandparents’ big house and find the pegs, then go to the throne and send himself into the future. He will stay there just long enough to get something to prove he was in the future, then he would go back to his time and show Ethan how he himself had the greater adventure.

As you can imagine, it won’t work out the way Eddie wants it to. He takes the pegs, one sawed in half by his grandfather, then sneaks down into the hollow to the throne while his grandparents are busy. He uses the pegs the way they are meant to be used, and…

…well, it just didn’t work out the way he expected. If I say anymore, it will give the plot away. You’ll just have to wait till the book is published, buy a copy, and read it.

The Forest Throne, Writing

A Productive Writing Season

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The sequel is coming, folks. Hang in there.

Trips and holidays. This is why typically I don’t get much writing done in November and December. Thanksgiving is usually a gathering at our house. That kills November and is one reason why I’ve never participated in NaNoWriMo—the National Novel Writing Month. Then December has always been crowded with special activities and sometimes a trip. So significant writing work is not possible near the end of the year, and I need to do really well in September-October if I want to make any writing goals happen in a given calendar year.

This year, since September and October were filled with special projects, I figured my writing production would be down. If so, it was for a good cause. The special projects dealt with disaccumulation in anticipation of future downsizing. I made progress toward that goal, and so feel good about the time spent.

We went to western Kansas for Thanksgiving. Returning home, finding the special projects mostly done (a few stray papers that defied decision-making still adorn my worktable in The Dungeon. But as we drove home after TG, I made up my mind that I was going to concentrate on my work-in-progress, the second book in The Forest Throne series.

Book 2 is titled The Key To Time Travel. It features the second son of the family, Eddie, who, in a bit of sibling rivalry, decided to use the time portal to travel in time. It doesn’t turn out to be the easy future-and-back followed by past-and-back he was expecting.

I began writing this in July. July 11 to be precise, though I’d been working plot lines out in my head long before that and had a few typed notes on what I wanted to accomplish. I did it when my #2 grandchild, Ezra, was here. In a couple of days, I had a prolog and the first chapter written, around 2,100 words. Ezra and Elise read it and gave me some thoughts., which I worked in.

Alas, that’s about when the special projects started, and the book sat. I pulled it up on the computer now and then, reading what I’d written and making a few edits. My writing diary shows me spending a little time in it on Sept 6 and 12, ending that day around 3,650 words. Since I want the book to be between 35,000 and 40,000 words, that meant I was a tenth of the way through.

We made the trip to West Texas in early October, and I used the time away from home to write on it every day. By Oct. 6, I was up to over 9,000 words. We came home, and there it sat, my time filled with household things. Oh, I opened the file from time to time and edited and added. By Oct 24 I was at 10,400 words, and somewhat pleased with where I was but lamenting that I had never been able to spend a lot of time on it.

Then we got home from our Thanksgiving trip, and I decided to make this my main project. Those minor things on wrapping up the special projects could wait. Filing paperwork could wait. Any end-of-the-year yardwork could wait. On November 28 I sat and worked on it. I had to re-read the last couple of chapters to see where I left off, and then I wrote. Only 500 words added that day.

On the 29th I started to get on a roll, adding almost 1,250 words, then 1,600 on Nov 30th. It kept going. The plot was so well established in my mind that I was able to write and not take a lot of time to ponder what I wanted to do. The additions came, as did a little editing on just-completed chapters. As I wrote, I found it easier to write the next day. Where I hadn’t thought fully through a plot line, a way to make it work came to me with barely a stop.

Fast forward to yesterday. At the end of my writing time, I closed the file with just over 27,000 words written. If my expectations for the length of the complete novel are correct, that means I’m only 9,000 words away from completion, and I should have it done in a week.

That’s the first draft, of course. Editing will take some time, as will running it by beta readers. But I can’t tell you how good this feels, to be back writing, to have good production, and to see a project nearing completion. I need to do that, because four or five other books are in the queue, shouting at me to hurry up and get to them.

Bible study, goals, The Forest Throne

November Progress, December Goals

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Regular readers will recall that I did not post goals for November. Right around the first I was much preoccupied with life, and writing a progress and goals report was beyond my capabilities. But it’s now a new month. I’m writing this on Dec. 1st to post on the 2nd, and I’ll do my end of the month normal post.

First, the goals, for which you have to go way back to October to see.

  • Complete some significant work on The Key To Time Travel. I will have four days (starting today) where I will be somewhat cloistered, and hope to write 4,000 words those days. For the month I’ll double that and set a goal of 8,000 words. With a little discipline, that is quite do-able. Alas, I did almost nothing the last two months, not even on those “cloistered days.” I did some editing based on critique group comments, but almost no new writing.
  • Finish the Bible study A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 5. I should get a report on viability soon. Indeed, a preliminary report on that indicates it is good. Note that, if I’m not mistaken, this is a renumbering of the Bible study, splitting part 1 into two and renumbering those after it. I did nothing on this. I finally heard back from a beta reader, and he proclaimed it good.
  • Attend three writers meetings, all in person. Actually, I may fit in a fourth meeting. I’m also considering joining in on an on-line group. I attended my regular meetings in October and November. There were a couple of more I could have gone to, but was satisfied with the ones I did attend. I also had two author events in November, which took up time.

What about goals for December?

  • Finish The Key To Time Travel. I know, I know. I can hear my regular readers laughing, after all the failures to achieve even modest goal for this book. But my special projects are done; only a few straggler items remain to be put in place. So I should be able to spend a lot of time on it. Monday to Thursday this week, I wrote over 5,000 words on it. I’m on a roll. I have most of the plot items reasonably well worked out. I hope to finish this and give it to my grandchildren to read before the end of the month.
  • Blog twice a week, Monday and Friday.
  • Attend three writers’ meetings. I may even slip in a fourth.
  • Read at least some of the Bible study I’ve set aside. I’m going to read it for my own morning devotions. Since it’s been around six months since I’ve even looked at it, I’ll be coming at it kind of cold, so it might be a good test of how well the Bible study reads for its daily reading feature.

That’s it. See you all on January 2 with a report.

family, reading, The Forest Throne, travel

A Pleasant Weekend Behind, Crunch Time Ahead

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On Wednesday, we drove to Meade, Kansas, my wife’s home town, to spend a long Thanksgiving weekend with my wife’s cousin and her husband. We had our Thanksgiving dinner on Friday, to accommodate the schedule of another cousin.

Thursday we went through a box of old family photos that we brought from Bella Vista to Meade. How we came to possess this box is a complicated story, not to be recounted here. We sorted the photos by family group and era, and were able to identify almost everyone in them. A few were mysteries, but after the sorting we figured them out. One was a puzzle, a photo of Lynda’s grandmother as a young girl, sitting on a man’s lap. The man’s name was written on the mounting cardboard, but no one in the family knew who he was. I did some quick internet research and discovered he was a neighbor at the old homestead in Finney County. A mystery solved.

I got in a fair amount of walking around town. Most of the streets are wide, there’s not much traffic, and, since the sidewalks are mostly in rough shape or non-existent, it was quite safe to walk on the streets. Still, even with the exercise, I came back almost two pounds heavier than I was when I left. So the crunch time for weight loss begins today. Despite that, my blood sugar readings were mostly good.

We had lots of good conversations, watched some good music performances on TV, though a little too bluegrass for my tastes, ate good food, had a good Sunday school class and church service yesterday. Our son called us from his vacation in Spain a couple of times. I wrote two letters, one to a pen pal by e-mail, and one to a grandson on paper.

I got done a lot of reading, mostly in the biography of David Livingtone. I’m still less than halfway through this 633 page tome. I started on another book, Great Voices of the Reformation, which is close to 600 pages. Trish and Dave gave me two C.S. Lewis books I didn’t have—compilations of essays and stories, though I did have some or the individual items compiled. So I may have come back more encumbered than I went.

Thus, we come to the crunch time, mainly writing. I’m going to try to finish The Key To Time Travel before the grandkids arrive after Christmas. 1000 words a day and I’ll accomplish that, with time to go through it once editing.

The crunch time is here for clean-up. The special projects I’ve talked about in a couple of blog posts now need to be wrapped up and the “residue” put back on shelves. Piles of books need to be returned to shelves. A few Christmas decorations need to replace the few fall decorations. And then we’ll be ready for the family celebration between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Now, I must leave you and see what trouble I got Eddie Wagner into in the future, and how I’m going to get him out. Oops, guess I just gave away some of the plot.

 

expatriate life, family, letters, Stars and Stripes, The Forest Throne, travel

More On Those Three Special Projects

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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.

home improvements, letters, The Forest Throne, Writing

A Project Complete

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The brush pile back in the spring.

Dateline: Saturday, 22 Oct 2022

It was earlier this year, in the spring, that my wife asked me to do something that I wasn’t excited about. On our wood lot, adjacent to our house lot on the uphill side, was a large brush pile. For years I took deadfall from the trees in our front yard and built that brush pile. We didn’t own the lot at the time, but the owner was nowhere to be found, and rather than haul the stuff way downhill behind our lot, I put them “next door.” By this spring, the pile was about 7 feet high.

For years it was nicely hidden from the street by the many saplings and weeds in the space between the street and the big trees line. Back in early 2020, the power company cleared out all the saplings so as to keep them from growing up to the powerline. They also took out a few of the bigger trees. Since then, I’ve worked on that area to keep it in grass but let the blackberry bushes grow up. As a result, the brush pile became quite visible from the street. Lynda asked me to move it way down the hill.

Being a dutiful husband, I resisted. Then I said okay, I’ll do it. I think it was April or May that I began. That was about the beginning of “snake season,” and I was sure that they would be living in the pile. So I started very carefully. Working from the downhill side, standing as far away from the pile as I could, I used a strong garden rake to pull the top branches off the pile. Once I got them to the ground, I threw them down the hill, saving my legs.

Taken from close to the same place as the previous photo, the brush pile is gone! It’s beginning to look like the wooded park I want it to be.

The first day, I spent maybe half an hour on that. I figured I had to take the pile down a little at a time. Week by week, I raked branches off the top and threw them down the hill. Slowly, I could see the pile height reducing. Slowly, if the snakes were in it, they must have moved because I never saw even a one. This summer, when the oldest grandson and his friend were here, I hired them to move the thrown branches to the downhill brush pile.

I’ll fast forward. Around three weeks ago, the brush pile was gone. All that remained was several little piles of smaller sticks. I raked these up into small piles. This week, I spent time almost every day taking wheelbarrow loads down the hill to the lower brush pile. This morning, I took the last three loads away. I had already raked and smoothed the area of the brush pile. This is near enough to the tree line that I hope some volunteer grass will sprout next year.

And why, you ask, am I telling you this? A few weeks back, I posted about special projects I was working on. Those were three things in the house—paperwork stuff—that were cutting into my writing time and sapping my energy. I forgot about this big project mainly because it was outdoor work. But it was also taking time and energy. Now it’s done. Also, my work on the Stars and Stripes is very, very close to being done. They are inventoried and boxed. All that is left is to take them by the UPS store, get their guidance on whether the packaging is suitable for transporting with them. Then, I’ll add padding to the boxes, seal and label them, and ship them. That will then be only two special project left.

I’m making good progress on digitizing my old letters. My wife and I are also making good progress on proofreading the Kuwait Letters book. I believe we have only five or six reading sessions left. I’ve been making corrections as we go, including moving a couple of un-dated letters that we decided I had in the wrong place. We are down to 45 pages in the original book, maybe 60 pages including items I found after I had the proof copy printed.

I feel so good about these projects, that this week I plan to back off the letter digitizing some and resume work on my latest novel. Just today, I wrote a letter to grandson Ezra, detailing more of the plot to him so that he can be thinking about it and help me if he can think of anything else.

This all feels good. I’m going to go now and finish that letter, or maybe read some and save that for tomorrow. Life awaits. I will awaken the dawn.