Quote of the day

From a letter to the children.

The other day Lt. Colbaine Conflict—a very dirty raggedy lop-eared Irish terrier—had this nice little pair of pants. I took them away from him and washed them out. Now I can’t find whose pants they are and I’m sending them along to you….

The pants are pretty hard to button and so they must be English.

This, of course, leads to a researcher’s quandary—was this Irish terrier Lt. Colbaine Conflict, or Lt. Col. Baine Conflict? I’m assuming it’s the former, but given my grandfather’s loose attitude toward capitalization, I feel obligated to point out that it very well could be the latter.

Quote of the day

My grandfather discussing a photograph of my mother, who was about 4 years old at the time.

G. has a tremendous tummy, with her britches about down & her tummy out. The pictures will be worth a good deal in blackmail in about 12-15 years.

Spitballin' here

As I’m getting closer to the end of the letters, I think what I’m going to do with the World War II stuff is to have the book have no art other than the cover (easier from a production standpoint) and then have bonus content on this Web site (instead of sample chapters) that will include stuff like my grandfather’s gazillion photographs, his cute little drawings, and the art side of the postcards.

I think that wouldn’t be too horribly time consuming, and that way people will have some access without having to go to the Museum of World War II and getting into the archives. My grandfather was pretty good about identifying the people in his photographs, and sometimes included where and when, so I think it might be useful to family and historians to have the photos in particular be more accessible. I am going to have to rope off the more-graphic surgery photos in some fashion, but that should be easy enough.

I have a cover mock-up that my sister doesn’t entirely like but (as she said) it’s my book (honestly, I think she’ll like it more, or at least understand it more, once she reads the letters). And I have a title that we both like. Once the letters are all typed up, I plan to give copies of them to various family members and tell the side that doesn’t know that I’m planning to make a book out of this, so you know—totally looking forward to splitting the family and being disowned. “Everyone mentioned is dead, so they can’t sue” while legally accurate is, I suspect, an argument that will work less well with relatives….

Quote of the day

So this is in the middle of a letter where my grandfather is explaining that he got orders to go to a different hospital the next morning. Both he & his CO thought that was impossible, so they bought him another day and shipped his things after him. He went to London, got a 20-minute INTENSE briefing, and then was sent off to a hospital with some 1,100 patients, most of whom needed complicated surgery. While in London waiting for a train….

While killing time I visited Madam Tussaud’s wax works & enjoyed it very much. I suspect that you have seen it as it would certainly appeal to you. The figures are lifelike to say the least. When one of them suddenly turns out to be a guard instead of a wax figure it makes you start.

Quote of the day

From a letter to the kids.

I picked some fuchsia seed to dry and send home for you to plant. They are a pretty red flower on a bush—but a mouse came into my room and you know sompin—he ate up all the fuchsia seeds. I have set a trap for him but he eats the bait off. He has eaten cheese, a peanut and a piece of chocolate candy without even springing the trap. And I tied them on too with a piece of thread. At night he rattles the papers in my box but when I turn on the light he stops. I think I shall never catch him.

Quote of the day

Ah, the woes of wartime cooking—if I’m remembering who Mrs C is correctly, she was someone my grandfather met while stationed elsewhere in Great Britain.

Mrs C sent me some shortbread and a fruit cake. She didn’t have any fruit for the fruit cake and it seems a little heavy to undertake. I think I’ll put it on the bar….

My wooly slippers got pretty dirty and I had them autoclaved. They came out pretty small—about bit enough for Alice and very hard. Lucky I have the old canoe shoes isn’t it.

Quote of the day

Both grandparents worked at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (PBBH), which is now Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Today I have had a wonderful day. Visited the 49th Station Hospital where K. is chief of surgical service. Did you know him at the PBBH? He has a grand service at a hospital that is serving Air Bases as ours is & I got a lot out of being able to spend the morning with him. He even had steak for lunch. It reminded me a good deal of the PBBH steaks we both know but was very good for a change….

One of the officers here…wrote his wife asking for some elastic for ladies bloomers. It came today by air mail without letter or comment.

Progress report

I input the changes to Trials (wow, that took all day) and sent them out to the beta readers. Whoo!

It’s shorter than the first two books: 84,500 words instead of the ~110,000 of the other books. I think that’s OK (although I guess my beta readers will tell me if it’s not)—there’s less world building, and the story itself is a little more narrowly focused.

Progress report

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.

Progress report

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!

Quote of the day

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.

Quote of the day

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.

Quote of the day

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.

Quote of the day

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.

Progress report

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!