All of us have heard this sage advice at some point in our lives. Possibly even more than once. Normally I would agree that it is probably a good rule of life, but today is a little different. I’m off work from the day job this week, and since my kitchen stove has been on life support for over a year, I decided it was time to replace it.
So here I sit, waiting for the store’s delivery driver to call and tell me he is half an hour away. The call has to be coming soon, because I was promised it would be here between 3:30 and 5:30 today. As I write this, it is now 4:31.
Anyway, to pass the time, I have been going through boxes of “stuff”. You know, the kind of things you don’t want to deal with at the moment so you throw them in a box, promising yourself you will deal with them “later”.
Today is “later”.
Up until a few minutes ago, most of what I found in these “later” boxes has been pretty unsurprising. Some were disappointing, such as the doctor’s office visit bills and prescription receipts from two and three years ago that I could have deducted from my taxes for those years, had the documentation not been hidden away.
The really surprising find however was magazines. Not just any magazines, these are magazines about (are you ready for this?) writing!
Three copies of Writer’s Digest: November 1999; February 2000; March 2000.
Four copies of Writer’s Journal: March/April 1998; September/October 1998; November/December 1998; July/August 2000.
One copy of Fiction Writer: May 1998.
And, last but not least, three copies of The Writer: March 1998; April 1998; May 1998.
The only issues that have mailing labels are the copies of Writer’s Digest, which I subscribed to for several years in the 1990’s. It seems likely that other issues are hidden away, probably in one or more of the boxes cluttering my writing room. The others titles I bought at Tower Records, which used to carry a nice, if small, selection of magazines for writers. I really miss Tower Records. I loved that store.
These 11 magazines, ultimately destined for the recycle bin, now sit on the table next to my living room chair. Before I recycle them I will skim through them, marking articles to be scanned into .PDF files before I ditch the hard copy.
Then I will, indeed, live in the past, as I go through those articles from more than 15 years ago. It will be interesting to see how many (or should I say, if any) of the techniques put forth in those articles are present in my writing now.
Hmm… Ten minutes to five and still no call. It figures they would show up at the worst possible time, when all of my neighbors will be coming home from work. They will be wanting to park their vehicles in their assigned parking spaces, but instead they will find a big delivery truck blocking the cul de sac.
::sigh::
That’s me: Making friends everywhere!
Thanks for reading this.
Al Evans
Wood Village, Oregon
PS: This article is an experiment of sorts. Rather than writing it on my Samsung laptop using Microsoft Word as the text editor and then uploading that to WordPress, I am writing this on my little Acer Chromebook directly into the WordPress text editor.
PPS: It’s now 5:00 and still no call.
PPS: It is now 7:12, and I just spent well over 20 minutes writing an add-on to this using the comment function, only to see it all vanish in a cloud of angry electrons when I hit the backspace key on the Chromebook. I mean the whole damn browser window closed, taking my hard work with it.
So there will be no more using the Chromebook for any serious writing. I should have known better because I have seen it do weird damn things before. Things like I would put the cursor in one section of text so I could revise it and as soon as I started to type the cursor would jump to another section of text, apparently all on its own.
I don’t know, maybe that is a WordPress quirk, because the only times I noticed it, I was working on JFASN online. But only when I was using the Chromebook. If you have any ideas, please let me know.
Thanks for reading this. Have a great evening.
-AE
Copyright (©) 2015 by Al Evans. All rights reserved.
jazz for a saturday night 