Finished the edits! Whoo! I’ll input them tomorrow.
I did do some beefing up of certain parts of the ending, but I think I won’t do another pass before I let the beta readers at it—I don’t think it’s anything massive, and probably I should let more time pass before I do more tweaking.
Edited more today—I’d say I’m probably three-quarters of the way through, so that’s cool!
I took more time off of Trials then I had planned because we’ve been having a heat wave PLUS really high grass pollen, which combined meant that I wasn’t sleeping well at all. I got a shot and the temperature fell below 80 at night, so I slept a whole bunch and today edited about a third of the manuscript. Yay!
My dear good night I love you and find I love you more and more. I am safe & well and don’t mind living in a field a bit.
Bonus quote!
Went shooting today with D. We walked around the fields near the hospital & put up 4 bunches of partridges but couldn’t hit them. I also missed a hare & one pigeon. Did get one hare. While we were waiting for the farmer to come out a little cocker pup I had brought along whipped in & drank out of the milk bucket…. [The] dog is a great dog on pails but no damned good as a hunting dog.
My grandfather’s letters to the kids were usually really short, because the kids were very young. But as the war wore on and the kids started to write him, he wrote some longer letters that were more descriptive of his life.
Right now there are lots & lots of bees and wasps. There were so many crawling in & out of a hole in the Manor House that one of the officers smoked them out. He took out a brick or two & there were 10 pounds of wild honey—we at it and it was good.
The peat bogs are seen all over the northern part and are high on the mountains surprisingly enough. The peat is cut in the winter & stacked to dry & burned the next winter. It smells a house up much as grandpa used to when he voided down the hot air register.
Doctors…view the world a little differently.
I am so glad the Easter flowers etc. arrived. I thought that if the children had small plants to put into the ground and to consider their own they might learn about the birds & the bees that way.
I am DONE inputting the changes!! Whoo! (Oh my aching back!) Went from 41 chapters to 31 chapters, by the way—didn’t really lose much length, just combined too-short chapters.
So I’ll give it a week and another read, and then off to the beta readers!
I inputted changes through what is now Chapter 18 and used to be Chapter 20. It’s taking a while, but hopefully I’ll be done tomorrow. I also lined up a couple of beta readers, so yay.
Back onto Trials—I finished this editing pass and input changes for the first five chapters! Whoo!
So, obviously I’ve been a bit focused on my grandfather’s World War II letters, and I realized today that I’ve typed up maybe 40% of the letter pages I have. (Whether to include photos or not will be another issue, and will probably depend on how easy Amazon has made that process—doing photos for The Weirld was kind of a pain.)
Anyway, at this point I think it’s clear that I do have a book here, and I will probably not excise huge portions of the letters. I was a little worried because my grandfather did tend to natter on about needing a wrench to fix his watch and some film, please, but assuming the remaining 60% of pages are like the initial 40%, the letters are actually pretty interesting. I didn’t realize this, but he was pretty close to some of the men who were leading the mad scramble to have medical men & supplies where you needed them when you needed them, which was no small task during World War II. (One surgical facility he was at went from 80 patients to 500 within a couple of weeks.) Even when he wasn’t in a leadership role, he was a close observer, and decisions to, say, not allow patients to stay in the hospital more than a few days before sending them on to a convalescent facility had a big impact on him.
So, I think this project is worth moving ahead on, and it’s nice to have clarity there. But I’m going to put my focus back on Trials for a bit, since I’m pretty close to it being ready for a beta read, and it would be nice to send it out. I’m a little concerned that I’ll be in production for both books one right after the other, but I’m not planning on doing a paper book of my grandfather’s letters, so it shouldn’t be too bad. (Famous last words….)
Mo S. has just opened a can of kippered herring and a can of coffee and with some snitched bread and a little butter has served a snack to 11 of us in his room—10 x 12 + furniture. Mo is wearing very well—every ½ inch a soldier—and my spirits are much better now….
Since my grandmother herself had been a nurse, my grandfather freely wrote about stuff like….
V.D. of course makes up a fair proportion of our work. We are very fortunate in have a Capt. H. (1st Lieut till a week ago) who is really interested in gonorrhea & lues [an archaic term for syphilis]. Lues now gets a 20 day crack of intensive therapy then a once a week for a spell and seem to be brought really under control—a great contribution I feel. Gonorrhea now gets treated in the units with the men on duty with sulfadiazine and if they don’t clear up they are hospitalized. Here they get a second course, then switch to sulfathiazole. If they still don’t clear up they are given fever therapy—wrapped up in blankets & rubber sheet & put under a light cradle. This brings the temp up to 105 in about 2 hours, then the lights are shut off and they are kept wrapped up for about 6-8 hours. This really cooks up the bugs & they mostly clear up in 24 hours.
He enjoyed the occasional visual aid.
As this Rx is rather rigorous & some people are temperamentally unsuited for it, a certain few can’t take fever therapy. These are given penicillin. This is given intramuscularly at the rate of 10,000 Oxford units every 1 hr for 10 hours. At the end of 5-6 hours the smears are negative and at the end of the Rx the discharge has stopped. Isn’t that something. We’ve been very fortunate in being able to have a certain amount of the stuff to work with. It is scarce and we feel very good about being able to put it on.
From letter written by a friend, also in service, to my grandfather:
Thanks for your nice letter, but I’m sorry you’re so stretched that there’s no little chance of our getting together for an evening. If I had any excuse to go to North Ireland I’d take it, but I can’t think of any at the moment. It’s nice to hear of your children, hens, and dogs. I can’t return much along that line—at least as to hens & dogs, because we have no hens and no one tells me anything about Janke….
The war is getting very hard here. Our monthly liquor ration is to be cut out entirely, I hear, and there’ll only be a quart of scotch in the bar each night. How much more can we bear?
Children & hens
Appropriate given how many people seem to be spending Memorial Day weekend….
Now that people have stoves in their tents and the wood is wet we do have a little trouble with people using lighter fluid to start their fires with. People just seem to have to learn the hard way that lighter fluid is very volatile.
Editing up to what used to be chapter 27 but is now just a part of some much-earlier chapter—definitely the shorter-chapter-later-in-the-book thing is not going to survive this pass.
My dear by the time you have this letter you may well have seen L. & possibly W. Q. may show up shorty. I visited Q. on Saturday. You can imagine my surprise when he met me on the train & said “I know you won’t believe me but I’m leaving for home at 4.” Well gee he was as twittering as a June bride. Could scarcely believe it himself. We stopped in town and bought 2 necklaces—amber—for the girls and a cannon for his boy. I bet [Q.’s wife] is mad when he teaches him to fire the thing off and goes away & leaves her with it.
Read over Trials up until what used to be chapter 18 but is now chapter 17. I cut a hunk that seems like too much of a diversion, but other than that the edits are pretty minor, which is great.
From a letter written to my grandfather by a fellow medical officer. If you’ve ever wondered if doctors gossip about their patients….
Was amused in your whoremaster friend. The situation must have been rough down there. One of my patients (an officer) says that it was so bad that he once sent a squad forward to take a machine gun nest and in half an hour they were back asking for prophylactics. He gave a pro to each one of them and sent them ahead again—in the second attempt they took the machine gun!