WC06032020

Todays challenge is: Things I wish I were better at.

1. The first sport I ever played as a team was baseball. Little League. I played first base and was a good fielder. I was the walk specialist as a batter. I could hit a dozen foul balls until I was finally walked. Hitting I was not very good at, but I usually got on base. Stats were crap.
2. No matter how hard I tried, I could never dunk a basketball. I couldn't even touch the rim.
3. I get by in the pool, but I've never been much of a swimmer. I won't try a lake. I have to be able to touch bottom.
4. I have a brown thumb. My father could plant something and it would grow and our yard was always lush and green with flowers and a garden of vegetables. Whatever I plant it survives, but doesn't thrive. My son has taken over the front yard. He sits out there and smokes. I told him he could water the flower bed, a little patch of grass and the rose bushes. He has the scrawny, puny, things, lucky to have five roses a summer covered with them.
5. I wish I was better at typing. The godsend for me was the computer and word processor. In college all my papers in English and history came back bloody. Fortunately I married a great typist. My final education classes before student teaching whenever I handed in my papers (back when all typing was corrected by little correcting sheets), the professor the first thing the professor said was, "Who's your typist?"
A good typist back then (1970's) could make a fortune typing up masters and doctoral theses. My brother paid a thousand dollars for his doctoral thesis. It was not optional.
6. I wish I was better at proof reading. The biggest complaint I have when someone reads my e-books is typos and misspelled words. When I retired and started writing I was churning out a lot of pages a day. My wife was the assistant editor of a newspaper (why she's a good typist and editor), but the last thing she wanted to do after getting home was edit my work. In the last ten years the spell check and grammar check on Word has gotten much better, and I can edit better, though for the life of me I don't know why it underlines contracted words like don't. Wife is now retired and I'm getting her to edit my books and with the beauty of e-books I can republish and clean up the mess that drives friends like Berthold Gambrel nuts.

Hot off the press. A newly edited and revised Optimus: Praetorian Guard and the sequel Stephanus.
Available at Amazon as e-book and now paperback.

Also the newly edited, revised and updated: Fan Plan Trilogy. Three complete novels in one a compilation.






The same goes for my others books now in an edited and revised version and in paperback.