Book Sorting Can Be Painful
In which I pay the price for moving books around, don’t get to a convention, and read a friend’s latest work.
This week we reached the moving-in milestone of opening the last box of books!
Now we have the fun task of getting them all organized!
And we’ve made a start.
The bookcase in the living room stacked with novels read and to-be-read is now arranged alphabetically by author. The custom bookcase we had built in the hallway is groaning under the weight of Gill’s collection of Agatha Christie related volumes. In my office, I successfully organized my stack of DAWS ‘yellow spine’ science fiction novels.
But it seems all of that came at a price. After weeks of moving furniture around, shuffling boxes from place to place, and hefting various heavy loads, followed by lifting maybe one stack of books too many, my lower back cried foul.
On Wednesday morning it decided that it was time to remind me who was boss and go into the worst muscle spasm I’ve had in years. I guess it was my fault as throughout the moving saga I had neglected to keep up with the back exercises I’d been assigned by a physical therapist many years ago, and my somewhat daily post-work tai-chi routine had also been equally neglected.
So the latter half of this week has been spent laid up in bed while various muscle relaxants and painkillers do their job.
But at least it's allowed me to catch up on some reading, including my friend Chris Brown’s excellent “A Natural History of Empty Lots” (see below), and even find the time to get back to researching and writing up scripts for my equally neglected Beatles podcast.
Alan
Other Stuff
You have subscribed, haven’t you?
Each week when I sit down to put one of these newsletters together I’m always grateful to my subscribers. If you aren’t a member of that wonderful group of folks yet, then click the button below and join our growing community of readers and commentators to get these missives delivered directly to your email inbox every Friday.
Brabazon Bits
Copy editing on the book on the Bristol Brabazon is now complete, and I’ve also started to receive additional notes from various early readers.
Next up will be to work through the manuscript and consolidate those notes making any necessary updates, plus there are a few reference sources that still need to be followed up and finalized.
Word Slinging
Apologies to folks I had hoped to catch up with at Baltimore Comic Con last weekend, but a large fire downtown meant roads were closed and the Light Rail was suspended in the city center. The Light Rail's alternate bussing-you-there experience was so poorly organized and minimal (one bus for a full packed train load of passengers) that they recommended people walk the last mile or more into downtown!
When I heard two of the drivers talking and saying “They don’t know what to do, do they?” I decided to cut my losses and get the next train back home.
Hopefully, we will make it next year.
******
On a more positive note, this week also saw some sample chapters completed and sent to an editor who expressed interest in a proposed new non-fiction book project. - Fingers crossed they like them.
******
And tomorrow I’ll be speaking at the Maryland Writers Association get-together, sharing my presentation on "How Lightning McQueen Made Me a Better Writer (or 5 Things I Learned Writing the CARS Comic)".
Pages and Screens
Books Read in 2024 - “A Natural History of Empty Lots” by Christopher Brown
It’s not often you meet someone who makes you look at the world in a different way, but that is what Christopher Brown did over the years I’ve known him. Through his stories and in particular, his weekly Field Notes newsletter he opened my eyes to the natural world around me on my morning walks, originally in our cultivated Texas suburban sub-division, or now on the northern edge of a North Eastern industrial city surrounded by ancient woodlands.
In A Natural History of Empty Lots, he pulls together and builds on those stories in a combination of nature writing, history, observation, part memoir, and part manifesto to open his readers' eyes to find and appreciate the wonders to be found “at the edges where the pavement ends.”
It’s an entertaining, engaging, and thought-provoking read woven together by the author’s poetic and illustrative prose style.
You can subscribe to Chris’ excellent newsletter here.
Our online bookstore at Bookshop.org is fully up to date with the books read so far in 2024, so you can pick up copies of any that interest you, while also helping out local independent bookstores .
Weekly Web Round-Up
Batman On The Cover - The journey through Batman’s comics publishing history continues as we move into July 1969 with just one new story from DC Comics this month in Detective Comics #389 featuring yet another dynamic Neal Adams cover.
Where on the Web is Alan?
You can now find links to all the places you can find me online, websites, newsletters, social media, and more in a single LINKS page on my personal website.
As always, thanks for joining me this week. If you know someone else who might enjoy the contents of this week’s newsletter, or just my weekly ramblings in general - please feel free to share by clicking the button below.
See you next time
Alan J. Porter
The Can’t See The Forest (TM) newsletter is a production of Megrin Entertainment, a division of 4Js Group LLC