Because nothing was scanned in any kind of order, today I was kind of bouncing back and forth between the early years of the war (“Why do I have to do all the boring butt stuff?”) and the later years (“Good thing that shrapnel wasn’t inside the aorta!”).
This is early:
We played softball Saturday p.m. P. has been running the show out there. In warning them how good we are he said, “The officers of the 5th are beating their privates regularly.” That will be wit in the annals of the 5th.
I was planning to work on Trials, but I didn’t get much sleep last night, so instead I typed up World War II letters. In the early years of the war, my grandfather was stationed in Northern Ireland, and things were slow enough that he could go fishing in the country on the weekends, usually getting to good, isolated fishing holes by taking a bicycle on the train. Since he didn’t know the area, he often got a bit lost, or as in this case, he ran afoul of country notions of hospitality.
Having allowed a decent time to get back for the last train and being a little cold & very thirsty as all I had had to drink was a bottle of beer at noon, I accepted Mrs. M’s kind offer of a cup of tea. But damn it all they cooked eggs & biscuits and set up a big Sunday night supper—all on an open peat grate. They had lots of bread and big plates of home made butter & some home made cheese. Gee the butter was good. They kept pressing me and time wore on. By the time I got away I had 45 minutes to make 11 ½ miles and the awful thought that it was the last train home and it was either a hell of a sprint or some 80 miles to pedal home by 7:00 a.m. A hell of a sprint it was. I passed horses, boys on bicycles with gearshifts & handlebars down, and even an occasional small car. Fortunately the train was 4 minutes late & I had a 2 minute wait.
Edited the first seven chapters of the printout of Trials—caught a lot of little things, but overall I was happy with the pacing and general feel of the book.
The chapters start out fairly long, and then get shorter and shorter as the book progresses, so I’ll have to look at that and decide whether that’s something I want to keep or not.
Wear
a
fucking
mask.
Typed up more letters—here’s his account of the day he & a group of fellow officers were told that they had been promoted. To celebrate, they went on an epic bender, which began thusly (and continued on):
J. & I each broke out a bottle and with the assistance of surprisingly few friends started relaxing—we finally made up a party & went to town for a few cocktails & lunch.
J., B. & I went to see “Mrs. Miniver.” I would say it was the best picture I’ve ever seen—if you get a chance have a couple, get a supply of handkerchiefs & see it.
All the way home on the train the little men with hammers were very busy & bothered a good deal….
Typed up a bunch more letters today. I’m going to include a quote from one, because it’s funny. So, this was in Great Britain during World War II, and my grandfather was a surgeon (my grandmother had been a nurse). The Princess Royal at the time was Mary, the aunt of the current Queen Elizabeth (I’m going to censor the other names, just to respect people’s privacy).
[Two] weeks ago the Princess Royal was here & went through the hospital. . . . She was apparently a very pleasant person though probably terribly fed up with having to visit 2-3 hospitals a day. She almost inspected my ward—I don’t know what I would have told her about the patients for mine all have pilonidal sinuses or hemorrhoids—or had them. When word came down to stand by for inspection my corpsman rushed about opening all the doors—kitchen, utility room, linen closet, coal closet, and latrines. He was ready—
. . .
Z. does not like mice & they are begging to come in & keep him awake by eating his Tootsie Rolls, etc. He tore his room all about trying to get them stopped and got someone to dump cement down in the corner where they came in.
That night C. wadded up a big piece of newspaper & tied a string around it & stuffed it behind the wardrobe. By pulling the string under the door—it made a noise just like a mouse. He kept Z. up till nearly 2 a.m. hunting for the mouse.
Typed in a few more letters today—hit one of the love letters. It’s a bit funny to me because my parents were very much not romantic people, but my grandfather could knock out a My Darling Dearest I Love You More Each Day like nobody’s business! I was joking with some friends that it was a bit like a less-gothic Gomez and Morticia Addams.
But with the occasional “Why the hell haven’t you written!?!” cable for variety.
I’m waiting to go over Trials again, so I worked on my grandfather’s letters from World War II. I basically have a billion scans—I tried to make sure that scans of pages & envelopes from the same letter all stayed together, but we’re talking about (checks) fucking 780 scans! Jesus wept! That’s not counting the photographs—OK, out of morbid curiosity I looked, and those are 740 scans. This, for the record, is only a portion of the massive boxes of photos I had to scan, because God forbid anyone in my family ever just throw shit away. You’re starting to understand why I didn’t get much work done on Trials earlier in the year, right?
Anyway, I haven’t read all the letters, and scans aren’t really something you can make into a book (I guess I could just toss them into an e-book, but that’s not going to be terribly accessible to readers), so I’m basically typing them up and organizing them at the same time. I think that’s a reasonable system—I want this to be edited into something entertaining to the average reader, not just be Here Is Every Word My Grandfather Ever Put To Paper Because We Are Just THAT Impressive A Family. I still obviously have a lot to go, but even just on the first day I came across two letters that I definitely want in—his kids were little, so he tended to write one version of events for them and then another, very different version for my grandmother….
So I went back and cleaned up the earlier things—this edit is officially over! And I think things are far enough along that I’m going to print out a hard copy for the next edit. I’ll probably take that up in a week or so. Whoo!
Finished this editing pass! Whoo!
I really do like the way this book winds up—I thought this would be hard to edit because this section hasn’t had a lot of editing done to it, and yes, there was some basic fixing that had to happen, but it just flows very nicely.
There’s some things in earlier chapters I want to go back and fix—kind of a timeline issue—but overall I feel like the book is really coming along. Of course, it’s kind of a busy time, so not a bad time to take a little break before I go at it again.
One of the non-book things that has been going on has been clearing out the belongings of a family hoarder, and among those are letters from (and some to) my grandfather during World War II. They’re actually pretty interesting—we donated the originals to the National World War II Museum, but I did keep scans, so I’m thinking of chunking out a quick e-book of letters.
Edited Chapters 29-32! Whoo!
Yes, lockdown most likely is, but so is that Smashwords sale, meaning that Trust and The Weirld will be free there until May 31! Whoo!
Yeah, there have been a lot of distractions lately, but today I was able to get down and focus, and I edited chapters 24-28. I feel like I really improved some inconsistencies in the emotional arc there.
I’m also motivated to get going on Trials because I did a Facebook ad for Trang (it’s free, people are bored, and Facebook is getting a lot of traffic but not a lot of ads, so the click-through costs are low), so now I’m getting more readers, which means MORE GUILT.
(If you’re here because of that ad, you can get my other books for free on Smashwords! Do it! Before the 20th!)
Like most people, I’ve been finding it hard to focus lately, but today I decided to give editing a shot, and it went pretty well! I went over chapters 20-23, and I think it went OK—they’ve definitely benefitted from the earlier editing passes.
Smashwords is having a Help Everyone Cope with Covid sale, so I enrolled my books. Totes free until April 20!
Stay healthy & socially distant!
Yeah, Holiday Madness went into Tax Season, plus I decided to bite the bullet and go through the storage units (multigenerational hoarding!). So I’m a bit swamped, but I’m hoping that in March things will settle down and I can focus on editing again.