Category Archives: The Writing Life

Posts about writing for fun and profit.

Freebies

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On why a professional writer should consider writing for free.

It was a hotly debated topic back when I started writing professionally and frequented BBS message bases (the precursors to Internet mailing lists). Some people argued that a professional writer should never write for free. In fact, one person even bragged about how much free work he turned down regularly. (Of course, he never bragged about the paid work he got, either.) Other people — including me — argued that to break into a writing career, you have to write for free, at least in the beginning. How else would you get the clips you need to establish yourself as a writer?

Clips are the beginning writer’s Holy Grail. A clip is an article or a story you have written for a magazine or other published document that has been “clipped” out to show other publishers or editors you want to write for. It’s proof that you have been published. The more clips you have, the more experience you can prove. You can then use those clips to impress the people who can get you better assignments.

Of course, the quality of a clip is just as important as the overall quantity of clips. A clip from, for example, Vogue, is worth about 50 clips from small press beauty newsletters that no one has ever heard of. So the argument that you should be paid for all of your writing does have some merit, since Vogue is far more likely to pay for your work than the sporadically published Betty’s Beauty News (if such a thing exists).

Back when I started, I was breaking into a new career that I had absolutely no formal training for. Heck, I was a financial analyst and former auditor with a degree in accounting! What did I know about journalism? I knew enough, it seems.

I knew back then that I needed clips to get started. I knew that no one would pay an unknown to write for them. So I knew I had to write a few freebies. And I did.

My first published article was for The Audit Advisor, a 12-page monthly newsletter for auditors, back in 1987. It was an article about auditing construction project budgets. I received two copies for my efforts. No money. But I had my first clip.

I wrote a few other articles for publications I can’t remember. Junky little publications. One was a writers’ newsletter. When I received my sample copy, I was appalled that my work had appeared in such a rag. It had obviously been “printed” on a photocopier. One that needed maintenance.

I got my next big break in 1989, when the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) offered me $10K to write a 4-1/2 day course about using computers for auditing. I had taught a few times for them — also for free, with permission and salary from the company I worked for at the time — and knew what they were looking for. I was also quite informed about personal computers, which were very new at the time, and how they could be used to simplify work while performing a financial audit. I asked for leave of absence from work, but they wouldn’t give it to me. So I resigned my $45K/year job (a huge amount of money in those days) and took the biggest gamble in my life: to start a new career as a writer.

I finished the course in the alloted amount of time and even taught it a few times for the IIA. They paid me to write spinoff products for it. I can’t remember what they were, but I have copies in my office somewhere. But I was not really a writer yet. I hadn’t paid enough dues, I didn’t have enough clips for what I wanted to write about: computers.

So I got to work and found some more small publications to start writing for. For free. One of them was one I cooked up: Macintosh Tips & Tricks. It was a monthly newsletter that lasted a few years in a number of formats. People paid to get it mailed to them, so I guess you can say I was being paid for my writing. But not enough.

So I supplemented my income with a job as a per diem computer trainer. I worked for two different companies. One paid pretty well; the other paid very well. It kept the mortgage paid and food on the table.

Oddly enough, my next big break was as a ghostwriter for a John Dvorak book. Dvorak was very big in the computer world back in the early nineties and his name sold books. So the publisher, Osborne/McGraw-Hill, had hired him and Bernard J. David to write a book called Dvorak’s Inside Track to the Mac. Of course, they didn’t actually write the books. They hired ghostwriters to do it. They split the chapters and farmed them out to a handful of people who were probably a lot like me: struggling to get started as writers. I got the Fonts chapter and finished it quickly. Bernard liked it so much, he gave me three more chapters. I made a whopping $500 per chapter. My name doesn’t appear on the cover, but it is in the second paragraph of the acknowledgments. A very big deal in those days.

I neglected to mention how I managed to make this connection. This is an odd story, too. I’d written a book proposal about using Macs for Telecommunications. I was rejected by the four or five publishers I sent it to. (Ted Nace at Peachpit Press wrote a kind letter saying that there wasn’t a big enough market for the book. The truth is, I was ahead of the time back in those days. A year later, telecommunications really took off.) But one of those publishers sent my proposal to an agent. The agent wanted to represent me, but I was unproven. (Not enough clips.) So he referred me to Bernard who wasn’t terribly pleased (at first) about having to give me a chapter of the book. The really odd part about it is that the agent never contacted me again. To this day, I’ve never been represented by an agent.

After that book, Bernard wanted to work with me again. We wrote The Mac Shareware Emporium for Brady Books. It didn’t do very well, primarily because another book on the same topic was published two months sooner (for reasons I won’t get into here) and it was heavily promoted on AOL. (AOL was just starting to gain momentum at the time and shareware was hot.) But I did have the ultimate clip: my name on the cover of a book.

Fast forward to today. Since leaving my full-time job, I’ve written or co-authored about 60 books. (Many of those are revisions to existing, long-lived titles.) I’ve also written hundreds of articles for magazines, newsletters, and Web sites. My published books collection (including translations) fills three shelves on a bookshelf and my clips, which I don’t even bother collecting anymore, fill a file storage box. You can see a list of everything I’ve bothered to list on my Web site’s Books and Articles pages.

So you might assume that I no longer write for free. Not so. I’m obviously writing this for free. (No one is going to pay to read the things that go on in my head and in my life.) And until recently, I wrote how-to pieces for publication on the Web.

Why? Well, the way I see it, there are two goals to writing. One goal is to make money. That’s why I expect to be paid for writing books and most articles. I have to earn a living. But the other goal is to establish yourself as an authority and spread your name around so people will look for the other things you’ve written.

For example, suppose I write an article about Faxing with Mac OS X Panther. The article gets read by a bunch of people. Some of them may have read other articles I’ve written. They like my writing style, they feel I know what I’m talking about, they think they could benefit from reading some of my other work. Like my books. So they go to the bookstore or log into Amazon.com and buy a book. And I just earned a little bit more money on book royalties. While it doesn’t really pay to have one person do this, it would be nice to have a thousand people do this. And with Web publishing, this is possible.

If you were reading carefully, you may have noticed that I used the phrase “until recently” when mentioning that I wrote how-to pieces for publication on the Web. I still do write these how-to pieces, but I’ve found Web sites that are willing to pay for them. So instead of writing them for free, hoping that readers will buy books to compensate me for this work, I can now be paid for the article. And one of these Web publishers is kind enough to put links for buying my books where the article appears. So a reader can succumb to impulse buying and order the book right then and there.

Will I still write how-to pieces for free? Yes. But only when I can’t write the same pieces for paying markets. After all, I do have to make a living. And the clips box is full.

Do It Yourself Layout

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How and why I lay out my own books.

I do layout for most of my books. That means I submit finished pages to my editors. What they see on the page is what the book will look like when printed.

I write the book as I lay it out, in Adobe InDesign CS. InDesign is an incredibly powerful page layout program, but I use only a fraction of its features. I start with a template that has all the elements of page design. I use text boxes to position text in the appropriate place. I actually type the text right into the text box — I don’t use InDesign’s separate text editing window. I use styles for paragraphs and characters. I’ve even taken advantage of InDesign’s nested styles to automatically format text like numbers in numbered steps and bullets in bulleted lists. That saves a lot of time and ensures consistent formatting.

I create figures using screenshot software on my “test mule” computer. That’s the computer I run the software on while I write about it on my production computer. My Macintosh test mule is an eMac; my Windows test mule is a Dell Dimension PC. Both are networked to my production computer, a dual processor Macintosh G5. I pull the screenshots over to the G5, open them with Photoshop, and run an action on them to convert them to grayscale (or CMYK, depending on the book) and save them as uncompressed Macintosh-format TIFF files with 72 dpi resolution. Then I literally drag the image icons from a Finder window to the InDesign document. I downsize them to fit, which also enhances resolution, and drag them into position. Then I use InDesign’s library feature to insert a pre-formatted caption, which I fill in for each screen shot. This is probably the most time-consuming part of layout. No, that’s not true. Callouts — those little lines that run from labels to exact positions on a screen shot — take far more time to do. I have InDesign library elements for other items, too, like thumbtabs (for my Visual QuickStart Guides) and callout lines (for my Visual QuickPro Guides).

I write each book a chapter at a time. When a chapter is finished, I create a PDF format file of its pages that includes printers marks such as registration marks and cut marks. (Can’t remember the exact names of these things.) I then upload the PDF file to an FTP site where my copy editor and production editor can download them. There’s a workflow over at my publisher’s place that varies depending on the editors assigned. What I see at the end of the process is printed pages that have been marked up by both editors. I get them a few chapters at a time via UPS. I normally take care of the edits in the afternoon, after submitting a chapter for the day. (I try to do a chapter a day for revisions and a chapter every two days for new titles.)

I review the edits and make about 98% of the changes that are requested. Most changes are of a typographical nature — I have a habit of repeating words and leaving characters out of words — but some are of a layout nature — rewrapping text to prevent widows, moving a callout up two points to improve spacing, etc. And of course, there are always a few grammatical errors that need fixing. (I wasn’t an English major!) Any time I don’t make a requested change, I note the reason why on the marked up pages. I don’t ignore a change without good reason. Then I print the manuscript and send it back to the editor with the markups. If the production editor is a freelancer, I usually have to print up a second copy for him or her. It usually takes about 30 minutes to turn around edits for a chapter, so I can knock them off quickly. The final InDesign and TIFF files get FTPed to the production editor or, if he or she requests it, put on a CD. The production editor sometimes puts a few finishing touches on the final files.

When I finalize a chapter, I also create a finalized PDF and upload it to the FTP site for the indexer. Sometimes, if the book is on a tight deadline, the indexer will work on draft pages. This is usually pretty safe, especially for revisions, since pages rarely have significant changes from draft to final. When the indexer has indexed all chapters, she submits a Word or RTF file to me via e-mail. I then pour the index into an Index template and reformat it to fit the number of pages allotted. Sometimes that means making the font size really small — my last book had 7.2/8.2 font for index entries. Other times, that means making font size and leading normal but increasing the spacing between paragraphs or above headings. The book’s total page count has to be evenly divisible by 8, and it’s my job to make sure I submit exactly the right number of pages. Fortunately, Peachpit is not normally page count driven. A book can be as long or as short as it needs to be — as long as the total number of pages is divisible by 8. That’s great for me, because I can write just what I need to.

Generally speaking, it takes about a week from the time I finish all chapters in my first draft to the time the final files and index are ready to send to the printer. It then takes about three weeks from the time the files get to the printer to the time I see a printed copy of the book. Add another week for copies to get to stores and you have a 4-week turnaround from finished manuscript to book available in stores. Obviously, this is the greatest benefit of doing my own layout. Let’s face it, computer how-to books are extremely time sensitive. To get a book out quickly, you have to prepare it quickly. I have a knack for doing my job quickly and since I don’t have to depend on someone else at the publisher to do time-consuming layout, each book can be turned around very quickly.

There are other benefits to doing my own layout. It’s great for me because I have a lot more control over my work and can write in a way that takes advantage of the book’s layout. I also get a bit higher royalty rate to compensate me for my additional work and the cost of labor I’ve saved my publisher. It’s great for my editors because they can see the “final” product as they are editing. So if the layout isn’t quite right — for example, a figure would be better on one page than another or could be improved with a callout — they can tell me and I can fix it as part of the editing process. Otherwise, the book would have to go through multiple editing processes, each of them handled by someone different who may or may not care about the quality of the book. I’m the author of my books and I care about all of them, so I do my absolute best to make sure they’re something I’d be proud to have my name on.

Peachpit, to my knowledge, is the only publisher that allows authors to handle what they call “packaging.” And they won’t let all authors do it. You have to prove that you have the ability to handle layout to their standards. I’ve been doing layout for my own books since 1996 and have produced over 40 titles for them, so I’m proven.

Other publishers don’t work this way at all. In fact, they are completely opposed to the suggestion that an author layout out the book. The reason: they are worried about losing control over the book’s contents. They don’t seem to understand that they do get final possession of the manuscript’s files and can make any changes they like before sending the manuscript to the printer.

One of my other publishers, in fact, has an extremely complex production process. First the author writes the manuscript using a Word template that has macros built in for formatting. Some of the macros work, others don’t. The author is required to insert special codes in the manuscript to signal certain types of styles. Meanwhile, the author creates screenshots, which are supposed to be submitted as full screen images. The author is supposed to print each one and mark where the image should be cropped. (I refuse to do that because it wastes time and paper and relies on a production person to get the cropping right. I send cropped images and I don’t even bother printing them anymore. Nobody complains. Frankly, I think they’re relieved that I’ve spared them this extra work.) From the author, the Word file and images go to a copy editor and a technical editor. The copy editor uses Word’s change tracking feature to mark up the manuscript and insert all the codes the author has either neglected to insert or inserted wrong. The Word file then goes back to the author for review. The author further messes up the file by using the change tracking feature to accept or reject changes. The author also gets comments from the technical editor and changes the Word file to make necessary corrections. A production editor gets it next and incorporates the copy editor and author changes to finalize the file. Then it goes into production, where it’s converted into a Ventura Publishing file (I kid you not) with the images inserted. The images are usually in-line images, meaning that text doesn’t wrap around them. It also means that the images might not appear where the author thinks they should. (But that doesn’t seem to matter much.) The author gets “proofs” of these pages, in print, and is required to mark them up and send them back to the publisher. About 10% of the author’s suggestions are incorporated into the final pages. To be fair, any change that corrects an error goes in but any change that tweaks the layout is basically ignored. The book eventually makes it to the printer where it is printed and sent out. Time elapsed from completion of first draft to printed copies: 8 to 12 weeks.

Is the quality of a book better when a professional publishing staff takes it from manuscript draft to printed book than when an author takes it most of the way? I don’t think so. But I also think that quality isn’t the most important aspect of book production to some publishers. But that’s a topic for another blog entry.

Books of 2004

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I bring readers up to date with the titles I churned out over the past year.

I realized, in writing my last blog entry, that the last book I’d mentioned finishing on these pages was my Mac OS X 10.3 Panther: Visual QuickStart Guide last October. Don’t think for a minute that I’ve been idle since then.

It’s been just over a year and, believe it or not, I had to consult a list of the titles I’d put out to see just what I’d been up to. I just couldn’t remember them all. Here they are:

Microsoft Office Excel 2003 for Windows: Visual QuickStart Guide was the most recent revision of my Excel for Windows book. Not much new in the way of content because there’s not much that Microsoft can already add to that feature-packed program. It came out in December 2003.

QuickBooks Pro 6 for Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide was a brand new title for me (and Peachpit). I’d proposed it early in the year, when I was looking for work and it took several months for them to say yes and come up with a contract. By that time, I had other work lined up. (Feast or famine.) The book underwent a lot of content changes as I wrote. For example, it was originally going to include payroll coverage, but since payroll is done with a separate program bundled into QuickBooks and the future of the bundling was questionable, we decided to drop it. (Frankly, I think payroll is so confusing that a whole book could be written about it, but don’t think I’m volunteering.) The book came out in May 2004 and is doing surprisingly well. So well, in fact, that Peachpit wants me to revise it for the recently-released new edition.

Quicken Premier 2005: The Official Guide is the sixth revision to my original Quicken Official Guide. It was finished in June 2004 and published in August 2004.

Creating Resumes, Letters, Business Cards, and Flyers in Word: Visual QuickProject Guide was a brand new title in Peachpit’s brand new Visual QuickProject Guide series. The series is great for beginners or people with computer phobias because it shows every single step in a process, with callout lines and numbered instructions. It makes a VQS look like a technical guide for MBAs. And it’s in full color! It’s 160 pages long and costs only $12.99. A great deal. The only thing I don’t like about it is the title — it’s way too long! It came out in September 2004.

Creating Spreadsheets and Charts in Excel: Visual QuickProject Guide is another brand new book for me. This one offers the basics of working with Excel spreadsheets and charts in a format anyone can understand. It’s eight chapters took me eight days to write and lay out. (That’s not the record. My record is a 350-page book that I knocked off in 10 days back in 1993. Of course, I didn’t do layout for that title.) I think it’s a great book and I’m extremely pleased with the way it came out. Like the Word book, it’s cross-platform. It came out in October 2004.

Microsoft Word 2004 for Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide is the latest revision to my Word for Macintosh book. It has a bunch of new stuff inserted throughout the book and a brand new chapter covering Word’s new Notebook Layout view feature. I finished it two days ago and it’ll go to the printer today. I expect to see it by the first week in December and, of course, it’ll be at Macworld Expo.

So in the course of a year, December to November, I finished six books. Of these, three were revisions and three were brand new titles. (That’s not a record. My record is 10, set a number of years ago, and I hope I never do that again. Talk about burnout!)

In addition to writing all those books, I also managed the Wickenburg Airport’s FBO (for a short time, anyway), did helicopter tours in the area, got a part-time job flying at the Grand Canyon, and wrote a handful of articles. So anyone who says I have an easy life obviously doesn’t have the big picture.

I’m not complaining — certainly not! I usually take a week or two off between books and spend that time catching up on things like bills, surfing the ‘Net, shopping, and writing in my blog. If I had a helicopter, I’d be flying, but I’m between ships right now and grounded. This week, I’m trying to write three or four articles that I owe various editors. I knocked off one yesterday and started a second one. I’ll finish that and write at least one more today. Tomorrow, my brother, his wife, and my sister are coming in for a week, and my mother and stepfather are showing up on Tuesday for a week, so I’ll spend time with them.

Then it’s back to the salt mines for me. Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is on its way and I have to revise the existing book to turn it into Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger: Visual QuickStart Guide. I always have the first Mac OS book out in stores and I’m not about to ruin my record this year.

After that, it looks like a QuickBooks revision, but if I’m lucky, they’ll let me write one or two more Visual QuickProject Guides. I proposed a bunch of titles, and they finally seemed to like one of them. Cross your fingers for me. I’m also writing an eBook about iBlog 2.0 for Spiderworks. I’ll probably finish that sometime in December, if I can find time for it between my work on the Tiger book. I’m also working on a book about the Grand Canyon with a photographer and hope to have that ready for publication in May. It’ll be nice to have a book that doesn’t need revising every one or two years. (The Canyon doesn’t change much.) And I’ll always be writing articles. Informit.com likes my work and I like writing for them. FileMaker Advisor also wants me to write for them, but I’m always having trouble coming up with fresh ideas for them, so we’ll see how I do.

That’s it in a nutshell: the past year and the next four to six months. Busy, busy, busy.

Another Chapter Done

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I revise book number 59 or 60 — I’ve lost count again.

These days, I’m hard at work on a revision to my Microsoft Word for Macintosh book. Officially titled Microsoft Word 2004 for Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide, the book covers the latest and greatest version of Word for Macintosh.

The book I’m revising (which covers Word v. X) is only about 300 pages long. It has a companion book that covers more advanced features. For this edition, I’m rolling the two books into one big fat book. That’s what I did earlier in the year for the Windows version of the book (which covers Word 2003). That book is 450+ pages long.

Revisions are not as easy as they sound. Books in the Visual QuickStart Guide series are extremely screenshot-intensive, with 3-6 images per page (on average). The tiniest little change in Word’s interface requires that any screenshot of that interface element must be redone. Since Microsoft changed the way the ruler looks, for example, any screenshot that includes the ruler — basically any shot of a screenful of text — must be redone. Rather than try to determine what elements have changed and run the risk of missing something, I just redo every single screenshot in the book.

Of course, not only do I write the book, but I lay out its pages using InDesign software. When I’m done with a chapter, I create a PDF and e-mail it to my copy and production editors. They print out the pages, mark them up, and mail them back to me. I then make changes as they requested, finalize the files, and send them to the production person on CD or via FTP. The book is in print 3-4 weeks later. The whole process, from my start to book in stores usually takes 6 to 8 weeks. But as soon as I’m finished with one book and have taken a week or two off to clear my head, I’m starting work on the next book.

I’ve got revisions down to a science. For this book, I’m starting with the InDesign files for the Windows version of the book, which has most of the content I need, organized in the right order. I’ve printed out an outline of that book’s contents with a few Macintosh-only features inserted in the appropriate areas. For example, Chapter 13 will be a brand new chapter covering Word’s NoteBook Layout View feature. Then I open a chapter file and go through it, page by page. I edit the text for correct Mac OS terminology and instructions. I replace the screenshots, removing some completely while adding new ones. I modify all the figure references and caption numbers as needed. (This is, by far, the most tedious part of the revision job.) When I’m done, I have a finished chapter, all ready for review and edit.

I try to knock off a chapter a day. Sometimes, when the chapter is short, that’s easy. Yesterday’s chapter was only 20 pages. But Wednesday’s chapter was 28 pages. That may not seem like a big difference, but it is. This will be a 20-chapter book, so I’ll have it done in 20 working days. If I get two short chapters in a row, I’ll try to do them both in one day to speed things up.

The deadline for this book is roughly around Thanksgiving time. I’d like to get it done sooner, since I have out-of-town guests coming in that week. More important, my Mac OS X book is due for revision shortly. That book takes priority over all others. If it’s ready for revision before I’m done with Word, Word will go on the back burner until I’m done.

I wrote somewhere that I sometimes feel like a machine. When I work on revisions like this one, I do. But I’m a well-oiled machine with the parts worn in just right to get the job done smoothly.

What I Do

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I discover that the majority of people in Wickenburg haven’t got a clue what I do.

On Monday, I put a piece of real estate I own on the market. I listed it with Jorja Beal. Jorja has lived in Wickenburg for many years and knows it better than I ever will.

Yesterday, Jorja had to stop by my office to get some keys. I met her in the parking lot. The first thing she said to me was, “I didn’t know you wrote books about Quicken!” She was surprised and impressed. “I didn’t realize we had someone in town who was famous.”

I’m not famous. Well, not exactly famous. There are a number of people who think I’m famous and I occasionally get asked for my autograph, but I don’t really think of myself as famous.

I told Jorja that that’s what I do for a living. Then I asked her what she thought I did. She told me she thought I was a Webmaster. I told her that although I do maintain a few Web sites, there’s no money in being a Webmaster in Wickenburg — unless, of course, you’re willing to grossly overcharge all your clients, which is something I’m not willing to do. I told her I write books for a living, then brought her up to my extremely disheveled office and showed her the “Langer Library”: three shelves of books, starting with titles first published in 1990, along with many of their translations. There are over a hundred books on those three shelves, but if you weed out the translations and the handful of books I contributed to but didn’t author on my own, the total title count is around 60.

I opened my closet full of author copies and pulled out a copy of the Quicken 2005 book and handed it to her. She said, “No, I already have one. Steve Cole gave me one.”

Steve Cole runs Cole Accounting here in town. Steve is a great guy, laid back, patient, and knowledgeable. He gave me a lot of help when I had to tackle the payroll taxes for my employees at the Airport. He also does my husband’s taxes and this year I’m going to ask him to do mine. (Consider this advance warning, Steve, if you’re reading this!) When I finished the Quicken 2005 book and was staring at a blank dedication page, I decided to dedicate the book to him, as a way of thanking him for his help. And when my 20 author copies arrived about a month later, I brought half of them to Steve so he could give them away to his clients who use Quicken. I guess Jorja is one of those clients.

I’m not sure if Steve knows that the books are where the money comes from. He’s never done my personal taxes so he might not.

People might find it hard to understand how a writer can make a good enough living to buy things like real estate and a helicopter. But when you average 4 to 6 books a year and you have one or two titles that become regular best-sellers, it is indeed possible.

Other people in town think I fly helicopters for a living. Wouldn’t that be nice! To be able to do the thing I love best and make enough money to support my lifestyle! The truth of the matter is, the demand for helicopter tours in Wickenburg is pitifully low, so Flying M Air will never become a big income-generator here. And that summer job I had at the Grand Canyon this past summer paid very poorly. It was an entry level position that worked all of its pilots hard, making us fly in very challenging conditions. I may have come away as a much better pilot, but my bank account sure didn’t show much for all that work.

A few people thought I ran the airport FBO for a living. They must have been pretty puzzled when I gave it up.

Other people may think that Mike makes a ton of money and supports both of our expensive habits. That isn’t true either. I support all of my own expensive habits and Mike supports his.

Indeed, I’m one of the people Art Pullis wrote about in one of his painfully elementary articles about the local economy in the Wickenburg Sun. The one where he discussed money coming into Wickenburg from outside the town. Less than 1% of my income comes from within Wickenburg, but far more than that is spent here. I’d spend even more here if I could find more of the goods and services I need here in town.

But I’m working on that. I’m sending Ed Taylor, one of Wickenburg’s two aircraft mechanics and owner of Wickenburg Aero Service, to the Robinson Helicopter Factory Maintenance School in November. When he gets back, he’ll be a helicopter mechanic. My helicopter mechanic. (No more trips to Prescott to get expensive maintenance items done. I’ll be keeping my maintenance dollars in town.) And I hope Ed picks up a few more helicopter customers as well. I’ll see what I can do to help that along.

One footnote here: there is someone in town who knows what I do. Yesterday, I went into the library to borrow a few books. I went to the counter with my battered library card and the librarian went to her computer to do whatever it is she does. (Probably check to see if I owe money for late fees, which I often do.) She was looking at the computer screen when she said aloud, “How are your books doing?”

I looked around. There was no one else she could be talking to. Stupidly, I said, “Who, me?”

She looked at me and smiled. “Yes.”

“Oh! Very well, thanks. I’m starting a new one tomorrow.”

“I don’t know how you do it,” she said.

“I don’t either,” I replied. Then I took the books she handed me and left.

Today I start work on “Microsoft Word 2004 for Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide.” Hey, it’s a living.