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Family and Friends is my everyday journal. Captain's Log is where I pontificate on religion and politics.

Wednesday, June 03, 2020

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.




26 comments:

Lydia said...

It's so cool that your wife is editing your books now!

Have you ever had swimming lessons? I had a few as a small child, but I'd like to be better at swimming, too.

P M Prescott said...

Yes, Lydia, I had a class in college. I can do fine on my back strokes, side strokes, but the crawl is still awkward. Thanks for coming by.

Sydney Winward said...

I feel you with the basketball dunking. I'm tall for a woman, and yet I've never been able to jump very high.

Marianne Arkins said...

I'm an editor in another life, and wish I could STOP sometimes. Editing for living takes much of the joy out of reading because I can't shut it off...

Do you know, I played basketball all growing up and even coached my kid's high school team, and it never occurred to me to even TRY to dunk? Of course, women didn't really do that back in the day, so that's probably one reason.

Have a great day!

Tena Stetler said...

Nice list. I'm with you on the proof reading. I need an editor for my email. Sad but true! Thanks for sharrng. Heres mine. https://www.tenastetler.com/lsrs-wednesdays-blog-challenge-things-i-wish-i-were-better-at/

Wendi Zwaduk and Megan Slayer said...

Nice list. I was never good at typing. I was in college when it was fashionable to use computers and used to mess up the margins all the time. My English teacher finally just gave up and let me turn them in messed up. The next semester, I got a lot better.

P M Prescott said...

I played a pickup game,Sydney, against the Queen Bees, the JV team of the Flying Queens at Wayland, the track guys got waxed.

P M Prescott said...

Wayland Baptist College, had a great Women's basketball team. They were national champs, my sophomore year. B4 Title IX moved the talent to bigger universities.

P M Prescott said...

Thanks, Tena.

P M Prescott said...

Megan, margins were the least of my problems.

Mary Morgan said...

Enjoyed your post, Patrick! Did you know you can opt out of Word finding those 'contracted words'? And I'm raising my hand here, since I'll always require an editor.

P M Prescott said...

Thanks for the tip, Mary.

Gina Briganti said...

I also wish I was better with gardening, another one I wasn't thinking of when I wrote my post. I have three plants that are miraculously still alive. Maybe my thumb is turning green?

P M Prescott said...

Thanks for coming by, Gina.

Gina Briganti said...

🙂

P M Prescott said...

Hi, gina.

Michael Mock said...

I did not do well at team sports, so Basketball was never really a thing for me. I was lucky, though: I'm horrifyingly dysgraphic -- I couldn't read my own handwriting until sixth grade, it was that bad -- but the first home computers were just coming onto the scene as I hit middle school. I tell people I learned to type in sixth grade in self-defense, and it's basically true.

P M Prescott said...

Yes,Michael, computers are a true lifesaver.

Yogi♪♪♪ said...

I was never any good at sports. I only played one year of little league and hit only two fair balls all season. I got on base a lot though early in the year but that got less and less as the pitchers got better control as the season went on.
I loved basketball and although still a scrub I could shoot from outside pretty well.
I am a very slower runner but still at it and 65. Slower than ever but I place a lot in age group awards mainly because there are not that many people my age running.

Dixie Jackson said...

Sounds like y'all make a great writing/publishing team! :)

P M Prescott said...

Yogi, I was a guard,in bb , but only played in church league.

P M Prescott said...

Me and Amazon, plus a million other writers, Dixie.

Cathryn Hein said...

How handy to have your wife to do the editing and proof reading! I wish my other half could do mine. Editing is by far my biggest publishing expense. I hire the same ed that does my trad published books and she's not cheap. She's good though.

P M Prescott said...

Yes, Cathryn, I have been blessed.

Tanith Davenport said...

I used to be a decent swimmer - not fast, but long-distance. These days I can swim well enough not to drown and that's it.

P M Prescott said...

I enjoy the water and was doing water aerobics before the pandemic, Tanith. That's as much as I can do now.