Beyond Christmas 2021

I hope you all had a joyous Christmas and are headed toward a profitable and satisfying new year. I don’t mean necessarily financially profitable. Just profitable in your writing and your life on earth.

Having no family here, I spent as much time writing as I could. I finished messing around with X Marks the Spot. I could find nothing that I could do to improve it, except proofing it, which I have recruited a friend to do. I’ll start that final process this week and then look at the manuscript after she finds those things which spell and syntax checker let through, like “it’s” instead of “its”.

Now I’ve started the final process on my biography of the Curtis String Quartet, which is a very different proposition. It’s non-fiction and probably those who read it will want to know about them. So no more wild and crazy reverse chronological order, made up words, etc. I also have to get pictures into it.

I was trying to index it, which you can do in Word. But it kept coming back “no entries found” which was ridiculous because there’s a 250-pp monograph. I looked on U-Tube under “How to make an index.” I was supposed to highlight what I wanted indexed. ‘Duh.” I have to give it something to index. Somehow I guess I expected that the program would read my mind. Sometimes it seems to do that but that’s because it’s inferring what I’m thinking from what I’d doing.

Meanwhile the new telescope got launched. I forgot to watch it. I didn’t hear about any snafus. 334 things have to go right. If one of them does not, the mission is scrubbed. I’s going to be a million miles away. No repair missions like they did on the Hubble. They say they’re going to start getting images back in 6 months. I can’t wait.