Ah! Spring Glorious Summer...?!@#$! Plus Summer, Fall, Winter, and 2022

 It's May 24 and Ninety Degrees...So, how is this Spring?

Every May around this time, I think back to 2016 when I arrived, late at night with the keys to my newly bought house here in Columbus, with two little kittens, Ellie & May, to an empty house...the furniture wouldn't arrive for another week, and the only place I had to sit was on the toilets, the only place to sleep was on an air mattress, which I had to run out and purchase the night I arrived, despite how tired I was and craving a shower and sleep. But the girls had to be taken care of and their excited, curious, and a-bit-frightened meowing was oddly reassuring that I had arrived and these little girls were going to make everything all right. Even now I can't imagine how I would have made it without them.

So I fed them, piled up their blankets near my air mattress, made sure they knew where their poopy box was and where their water was—and of course where I was. Oh, they never lost me, because just as they were my protectors, I was theirs. In my 68 years, I had never been on quite the adventure I was on that May 2016. At least not all by myself. I kind of reinvented myself, my routine, my attitude toward learning new things, meeting new people, and being open to learning about, not judging, the people in this new place. People who have never been to Mississippi (like me) find it easier to assume that the stereotypes of Mississippi and its people are true and to go on from there. I didn't.

So in the five years I've been here, I've met dozens of people I'm now well acquainted with, others I recognize easily in public places, and I have been a member of the Writer's Guild of Columbus, MS since 2016. My desire to bring my editing expertise into my retired life has worked very well, here, and I have just finished a major, major work for artist Nancy Scott, who lives just down the street from me. 

This is the cover of the book and the title is Mixed Messages. It is a combination of paintings and the stories (usually in free style) that accompany each painting. The book will be available at Nancy's upcoming gallery showing at the Rosenweig Arts Center on the corner of Main and 5h Street downtown from July 2021 to August 2021. It is also available for purchase at this link: Nancy Scott's Mixed Messages The book is a full color 8.5x11 inch format consisting of over one hundred of Nancy's paintings, and the size of the book format allows for appreciably larger display of each painting that wouldn't be as satisfying in a smaller format. Yes, I edited the book, formatted it and worked closely with Nancy for several months to bring this work to fruition. 

And then things sped up and I got sidetracked with more work than you could shake a stick at and I find myself looking over this draft entry that was started 10 months ago and never finished.

2021 was just as difficult a year to live through in terms of CRAZY as was 2020.

Summer and Fall of 2021 I had numerous contracts to edit writer's work and that can be found at my writing web site: RLD Books. And the Catalog of work Two Brothers Press has produced.

 So I've kept my head down and worked on a brand new kind of thing (to me) bringing out editions of Classic literature from the books of famous writers whose copyrights have expired and their families have not renewed them. They're books in the public domain and are free for anyone to produce editions, just as university presses and publishing companies, and probably very smart people have produced thousands of editions of "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare." Doing my own edition of Public Domain books was never something I knew about until a few months ago, and I've now produced over thirty editions from the works of writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Zane Grey, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad. Here is the updated list.

This is the last book I've uploaded to Amazon, which will be appearing for sale in a few days.. It is one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's non-Sherlock Holmes books. Besides being the author of countless Sherlock Holmes mystery novels, Doyle considered his historical novels among his best work. Micah Clarke is about an old soldier who recounts his life from the mid 1660s to the early 1700s, and a participant in the historic Monmouth Rebellion of 1665, where the Puritan Protestants, led by Monmouth attempted to depose King James. It ended in defeat and slaughter for the Puritans.

Sir Nigel by Arthur Conan Doyle is available now at Amazon.

This book is available in  three formats: ebook, paperback, and hardback at amazon. Both this book and Micah Clarke take place in both the late 17th and early 18th century. These are essentially periods when great strides are being made throughout Europe and the new World, which is on the cusp of breaking free of colonial rule, although that won't come until later in the 18th Centrury. But Sir Conan Doyle is a master historical storyteller, basing his engrossing works on actual historical events that were watersheds for their time.