Light posting to follow. I'm finding it necessary to focus on wrapping up a number of loose ends in my personal life - mostly unfinished pet projects and the like - so I will not attempt to post here on a daily basis until, probably, after mid-August. Morning Report will be going on leave.
In addition to those minor pet projects, there's one major project I want to devote some energy to - fiction writing. There's a space-based SF story I've been writing in serial form (meaning I have no idea where it's going) and I want to make some progress on this, and possibly finish it up. With that done, I should then be free to develop some ideas in a more serious way. And then ... ? Maybe try for print publication? Who knows?
Pacific Memories is finished. One project that I worked on sporadically for almost two years, I finally completed in a big burst of energy earlier this week. Pacific Memories is my father's unfinished memoir from World War II, which I've transcribed from his typewritten manuscript and posted on Blogger.
The manuscript was among my father's personal papers, which I retrieved from the basement of the family house at the time of my mother's death in 2003. I don't know when it was written.
I wish I could tell you that it's a tale of non-stop, thrilling combat action, but that's not what my Dad wrote. In fact, it appears he abandoned the project just before the real excitement started: the unwritten sixteenth chapter is titled "Marching Through New Georgia", but that's all he wrote, a title page with nothing after it. (Thanks, Dad! Grrrr.) Perhaps the fighting on New Georgia was so fierce that he trembled at the very thought of setting it down on paper? I'll never know.
But what he did write remains a detailed, down-to-earth, entertaining and witty account of the 37th Infantry Division's progress through the Pacific towards an ever-closer Japanese threat. Read it for the interest of a first-hand account of the Second World War, written by an intelligent and sensitive man who had quite a way with words.
Wilderness Vision. Another posthumous collection I've posted to the web is Wilderness Vision, a collection of my sister's poetry. (Stephanie died in 1992, at the age of 28.) If you haven't yet, pay a visit. She was extraordinarily gifted. The site represents nearly all of her extant poetry - over 50 poems - and includes pieces written when she was as young as 12. The poems are not arranged in any particular order. Some of these works earned her prizes in the Scholastic competitions from 1977 to 1981. I'm in possession of a box full of her manuscripts and letters, which I'm continuing to organize with an eye to producing a coherent narrative of her life and work - agan, maybe for print publication some day. But I don't plan any further updates to the website.
You can read her fiction at the site Iridescence. Some of the works are unfinished or fragmentary. Also, my father's creative writing is posted at Urban Renewal.
One more important site. This hasn't been my favorite site to work on, but I consider it one of the most important: The Iraqi Holocaust. I am no longer actively updating this, although I may add new material at a later date, perhaps in connection with the trial of Saddam Hussein. If you know somebody who believes that "the Iraq war war wrong", please consider sending them a link to The Iraqi Holocaust. Thanks.
Finally, one thing I've been feeling the need to do is to take some time off to just read and study about the Middle East - and about history and culture in general. Lately I've been feeling as if I'm just scratching the surface - there's so much going on, and I'm struggling to keep up with it, but I'd like to be able to write with a little more depth. I've got several books lined up on the shelf, plus I may set aside some time to read through the old Iraq the Model archives. Hopefully cutting back on quantity will allow me to improve the quality.
So, stay tuned. Posting will continue here, but at a more deliberate pace until I feel like I'm caught up on other stuff. Don't go away.
(Besides, where else could you read an epic-length post explaining why posting is going to be light?)
