As you may remember from previous posts, when I discovered my elder brother of choice Thomas, did not have a Literary Executrix, I volunteered. Obviously, I must have been on special assignment when we covered volunteering in Basic Training!
The first thing I did was work on his memoir, which he finished just before he died. That took a while (hard to see the computer screen if one is blinded by tears), but I eventually got there. Bless his heart he did a lot of copy and paste, instead of cut and paste. But I finally got the duplicates eliminated, and the tenses corrected, and sent it off to a friend to look over—and she will be publishing it in 2027!
The second thing I did was go through his many thumb drives and print out every written thing I could find. Best guestimate was 500 pages plus or minus. That’s a lot of stuff to go through. And as my friend said, why didn’t I just use a spread sheet to put the titles and dates in and use that? She even volunteered to make me the spread sheet! Well, if Thomas had been that consistent or organized, it might have worked but I found he had worked on poems and changed the title, but not the poem that much. Or he had written different poems, but used the same name. He used thumb drives and I found copies on multiple drives.
The third thing was to collect all the pages, and go on a week-long retreat to Port Hadlock, WA with friend Dixie of the spread sheet suggestion. There, I got all the poems in alphabetical order, found lots of pages that weren’t poems or were incomplete, and eliminated them, then went through each section and pulled out what looked to be the final copy, the complete copy, and then (why do I have an ear worm of Along Came Jones??) I divided them into categories. And then the week was up.
After coming home, I began going through them again, quickly, skimming, and divided the poetry into three books, and the stories into one. Took the hard copies I’d printed out, to Office Depot and had them scanned to thumb drives, one for each book, came home and got book one, Blanchard Mountain Woman, moved to a .docx file, edited, ordered, and saved in three places. One-hundred-thirty pages of poetry! And, of course, found a couple more duplicates with different titles, same words, different format. sigh.
Now, to find a poetry editor I can afford to go through the poems while I write the Frontis Matter, and the Back Matter (Backis Matter??), with the Table of Contents being the last in case we change the order. I plan on self-publishing these books, and hopefully deliver them to one of Thomas’s sons to take over, sell and manage the royalties which should be divided equally between the brothers.
One of these days, I hope to get back to my writing, and collections, and maybe get another book of my poems out. Doesn’t that sound like fun? Yes, I can tell, you are almost as excited as I am /snort/ In the meantime, I hope my files are a bit easier on my Literary Executrix, which I already have, and she has agreed to.
Mama Turtle
We have a mama turtle in our little pond. Perhaps we have a papa turtle, too, or he might be in the large pond next door. Every so often I see a baby turtle, but the heron gets them now and then, as well as the osprey, when they’re small. And since the landscrapers cut down our live trees by the pond, but left the dead ones, I’ve seen fewer turtles and frogs as they no longer have the protection of the trees, or the shade. The other day I noticed something in the water that was moving against the wind, grabbed my phone, put it on the largest telephoto I could and grabbed this shot of turtle swimming. As soon as I got the shot s/he dove back underwater, but at least I know we have at least one turtle, still. Dan says he’s heard Jeremiah sing now and then, and plop into the water when he goes outside.
“I’m here today because I refused to be unhappy. I took a chance.”—Wanda Sykes
Remember, you are loved, you are appreciated,
and you have a marvelous week ahead.