Oh, OK. So maybe it is not that way where you are. There is some other stuff going on I am trying to capture in the Swamp Postcard series. But that isn’t near resolution yet. I have issues pending, some of them for quite a while. With the help of an experienced software engineer, I am at a breakthrough. I am moving digital things from their fifth or sixth computer home to the sanctity of Jeff Bezos’ mystical Amazon Cloud.

Let me cut to the chase. We were enjoying a marvelous afternoon meal on the back deck last weekend, the late autumn sun brightening the landscape now denuded of loose foliage. I had a scheme I wanted to bring up, and in exchange for a marvelous meal, the Russians were willing to listen.

Here was the issue: I have ten or so books I have bashed into manuscripts over the tumult of the past few decades. Some of them are either good or not so. A couple are unique. One of them might be a combination of all three. But they were all fun to create, and once done with them, they slipped into some anonymous file on whatever device happened to suit wherever I was, plus a server in another state. I always looked around for the key (and usually uncredited) member of the team. The Editor.

By happenstance, I have been one of them, forced into it by association and tradition. I was dragooned into service by a former Director of Naval Intelligence and was the editor of a professional association newsletter that turned into a magazine that cost around ten grand to produce in hard copy, four times a year. It was an interesting part time job and taught me a lot. Now, living out in the country and with winter coming on, I was hoping I could con Natasha into working on some of the old manuscripts- be, you know, An EDITOR.

Over some superb pasta, the concept evolved. Our Software Engineer took a systems approach to beating digits into orderly words, and overnight provided some links to Mr. Bezos and his world. I looked at them, this not being what I was looking for, but discovered something else. There is a process to turn my wild disorganized thoughts into actual, if sub-optimal, digital books. The only thing missing was the editor.

Oh well. I did a trial run on a manuscript I have been working on for the better part of fourteen years. It started as a minor fool’s errand as a means to occupy my time as a suddenly single guy approaching geezerhood. I had two kids in college and was strapped for cash, but newly rich in unallocated time. The project looked easy and readily achievable. “Visit the first national monuments of the United States, 39 of them remaining generally where the Framers directed them to be placed.”

They were the boundary stones that marked the District of Columbia, carved out of the existing new states of Virginia and Maryland.

The story led circuitously through early surveyors, the bars that surround them now, where the stones were cut, the people who placed them, and the longer story of why Virginia gave them up and Maryland let things lie the way they fell. There were actual Nazis in the narrative, the ones J. Edgar Hoover had executed in the interest of antifacism. Quite unlike the ones we hear about today. A lot of fun. And in the end, three attempts to cross the mighty Potomac River to find the last of the 39 that remain generally where they were placed.

Next up? The unconventional biography of a man who lived and helped create the world in which we now live: RADM Donald “Mac” Showers, one of the best pals I have ever had. But I have to back and edit a couple hundred pages. But that is next, and Socotra LLC will attempt to have it ready for distribution for Christmas.

Others? The original “Nick Danger, Third Eye.” It is the detective story that appeared in the USS Midway ship’s newspaper and transmitted by Naval message to the units in the battle group in the distant Indian Ocean. Then there is “Big Pink,” a set of stories about a big building in a small county and the oddly appealing people who lived in it. Then there is “Cruise Book, How We Won the Hundred Years War.” That was the saga of the last major fleet deployment of the Cold War. And there is more, if you can stand it. Or even if you can’t.

All I need to do now is find a decent editor.

Copyright 2020 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com