Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Do I Have To Read This AGAIN?!

Pohainake Parish is finally at the publishers, after proofing the galleys five times. The first proof had hundreds of mistakes (my fault, I sent in the wrong version instead of the last, corrected one.) The second  mistakes were mostly capitalization and punctuation errors. The third had only 25 such as eminent instead of imminent. The fourth had 10. The fifth had two and that was it! Five different people read the proof copies, and each time one of them found something the other had missed. Blinded by my brilliant prose, I overlooked almost all mistakes. My dear friend Pattie typed and retyped, patiently correcting each error, checking and double-checking (were instead of was? mic or mike?), never losing her cool or telling me to go fly a kite. Thanks also to Mary, Joan, Lee, Carli and Margaret for their time and editing skills.  I'm so sick of Pohainake Parish, I'll probably never read it again! 

Sunday, February 8, 2015

Good movie, good book


Saw a nice movie, Black and White, starring Kevin Cosner. No f-bombs, no explosions, no car chases, good plot, and entertaining.  Highly recommend it. 
My friend Cynthia recommends "One Vacant Chair" by Joe Coomer, a good read.

Saturday, February 7, 2015



Cuba on My Mind - Being a native of Cuba, I'm frequently asked my opinion on the new policy change toward the island. I think it’s great. An embargo that fails for 53 years needs a little tweaking, don't you agree? William and I visited Cuba three years ago when it was still taboo to get there, but we managed.
Loved the 1958 cars! 

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Not For Profit

Feb. 5 - Getting a book printed and ready for sale, is a much more ardurous enterprise than selling a house which I did for many years. Maybe it's because the house belongs to somebody else, and you're not emotionally involved with it (exccpt for the paycheck!) My latest book, Pohainake Parish, (which nobody can figure out to pronounce, and I don't really care, call it whatever makes you happy) was proofed by 4 sets of eyes (that's 8 altogether). What one person missed, another caught. Now it's at the publisher's who will print more proof copies (galleys, they call them, I can't figure out why) send them back, and we'll have to reread the whole thing one more time before the final printing. We'll have to sell 100,000 books to make one real estate commission. So truly, for amateurs like me writing is a work of love, not profit!