It is clear and blue out there on The Patio. Still a bit chill, and the first Production Meeting of the new week lurched into immediate conflict. This did not directly involve the Writers Section, though it was the venue for the first company dispute about production priorities. There is plenty swirling here in town, with Congress trying to wrap up old business before the Memorial Day break. Marketing was struggling with Legal and the Writers about how to organize the new launch campaign the Chairman has directed.

Root of the trouble in the Socotra House Spring initiative? The Chairman had been reading some statistics on the number of car-jackings in the Metro area, and he summoned Splash and some other Salty Scribblers to recall one of the early projects the company had issued twenty years ago. That one had been an attempt to understand the dynamics of the District, and the part of it that had been returned Virginia in 1846 after discovering it was ungovernable. We call it “Arlington” these days, since R.E. Lee’s family house is just up the street.

We were going to run an update on that, since “Stones of the District” was a memorable account of visits to all 40 of the pale Stones that were placed to mark the boundaries of the District of Columbia. The inspiration for the exploration was one of those Metro Section articles in the Post about local history and the odd things people find in their back or side yards. the Stones had once stood alone in their one-mile intervals, hacked out of the tangled undergrowth on land donated by Maryland and Virginia to form the capital of a new Republic carved out of the King’s colonies.

It turned out to be a little more complicated than the Post article had suggested. It is possible to see some of the Stones- even most- in a single relatively complex drive in an urban landscape. There are others, like the one we call SE-9, that took three attempts to visit. With paddles and kayaks on the Potomac. The book was grand fun, since there had been an element of danger in visiting some of the Stones.

Now, something fairly simple might just leave you stranded or dead.

Anyway, the thought had been to drag the book back in a new edition that compared the way things were at the beginning of the nation, in the go-go Millennial days, and now, in what appears to be the decline of a pretty cool global power.

They sent Meat up from Marketing to explain the whole campaign. He is a big bluff fellow with a certain lugubrious aspect to a pleasant face. His first name is Walter or something boring, so he got the callsign he goes by from the association with his last name. That had started civilian life as something related to being “smart,” like the term “Clever.” The Navy had turned that into a harder, more assertive pronunciation that transformed him into the walking personification of a Meat Cleaver.

So that is what he brought to this morning meeting. He waved around the slide that starts this edition of The Daily Socotra. It was supposed to display the backlist titles, leading up to the Big Launch for hte New Book: “A Little Traveling Music.” He has a pitch about that we will get to presently. But the Chairman’s desire to drag up the second edition issue for the Stones book was causing direct problems.

We were happy to take a look at it. It is actually still available on Amazon in a paperback version at a frankly outrageous cost. The only problem in updating it is that that the digital manuscript is probably on that old black IBM laptop we have not seen since we moved the Headquarters from Suite 107 to 109 at Big Pink, or from from 109 down to the Farm when all that other archival stuff disappeared.

Splash had a copy of the expensive paperback that he waved around:

“We can recreate the digital version by shredding the binder off, scanning each individual page into .docx format, editing with the Chairman’s observations and pithy commentary. We are happy to participate in the latter, though think we might be able to get someone from Marketing or Legal to do the shredding and scanning.”

The Writers Section, as usual, has been directed to not think until Legal is happy with what Marketing has proposed as a bold new way forward on exactly who is going to get the scissors to start carving up the old edition. We will leave that to the Departments concerned, and which we hope will do the work.

As a start, we have agreed not to think. Maybe tomorrow, you know?

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