Thank You

In today’s Journal

* Quotes of the Day
* Thank You
* In Other News
* Of Interest

Quotes of the Day

“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” Pablo Picasso

“For most [people], an ignorant enjoyment is better than an informed one; it is better to conceive the sky as a blue dome than a dark cavity; and the cloud as a golden throne than a sleety mist.” John Ruskin

Absolutely true in my case. I hate it when anyone feels the need to suck all the wonder out of wonderful objects and events. h

Thank You

to everyone who voted. I was pleasantly surprised at the overwhelming support for Alternative 1.

So this will be the last edition of the Journal to arrive directly in your email inbox. After this edition, to read the Journal you’ll need to stop by https://hestanbrough.com.

If it helps to alleviate the inconvenience a little, you can now access the Journal three or four hours earlier than you used to. The email version was sent each day at 10 a.m. Arizona time. But I usually post it online by 6 a.m., and almost always by 7 a.m.

(Oh… for Kay L., I received your email and I appreciated your input. But when I clicked Reply and sent a response, the mailer daemon bounced my response as undeliverable to your “Mail for Windows” email address.)

After MailerLite sends this post at 10 today, I had intended to use what I need of the rest of today to move everything from hestanbrough.com over to harveystanbrough.com.

However, I started prepping the big site yesterday and discovered some snags that will prevent me from transferring the Journal over there for some time to come.

Primarily, all the old posts over there (almost 700 of them) pop up on the “posts” page. So that includes some of the older Journal entries (those are also included in my published archives) as well as free stories of the week and other categories.

I hadn’t realized there were that many posts over there. But then, there are just under 1600 posts on the current Journal site too. (grin) Fortunately, I’ve saved all of my Journal posts since 2014 in the free Journal Archives, a PDF copy of which you can download by clicking the links listed at https://hestanbrough.com/the-daily-journal-archives/.

I don’t mind leaving hestanbrough.com behind once I’m able to figure out how to set up multiple posts pages (something to do with categories) over on the big site. When that happens, I’ll let you know. I know how to send posts in different categories to different RSS feeds, but not how to separate them on the actual website. If any of you have any special knowledge of how to do that, please enlighten me.

But it’s all good. As a result of my poking around over there, I did make several beneficial changes. Most notably, I got rid of all those patronage tiers on both the Journal site and my author site. Nobody was taking advantage of the tiers anyway. And really, if you’re a patron or a donor and you want something, you have only to ask.

You can still become a patron or a donor if you want. I also changed the statement on the Patronage page if you’d care to take a look.

As far as the (almost) Daily Journal goes, it’s been a journey already, but it’s far from over (knock on wood). For now, at least, I’ll continue posting new content to the Journal right here at https://hestanbrough.com. If I ever make the switch over to the other site, of course I’ll announce that here as well.

In Other News

I suffered a minor setback yesterday that still gripes me to no end. Recently I’ve been carrying my little 11.5″ HP PowerBook up to the house where I sit outside on the porch and write.

Yesterday I did the same thing, and after I’d written for a little over an hour (and about 1500 words), I got up to let one of the cats into the house or something. And when I came back to the computer, the screen was Just Blank. No Word document, no desktop. Nothing. It wasn’t dark, like it was turned off. It was still light, but blank.

Nothing I did worked to get the thing going again, and I finally had to shut it down and restart it. No worries, I thought. I have Word set to autosave every five minutes or so.

Only when the ‘puter finally came back to life and I opened the document, expecting to see an autosaved version in the left margin, there was only the document with a query in the lower right corner. It asked whether I wanted to return to where I’d left the document a little over an hour ago.

So long story short, I lost about 1500 words. That was annoying. I’m not worried about “rebuilding” them or anything like that. I wrote into the dark the first time, so I’ll just do that again. And I don’t mind tossing out words that aren’t working. But to just lose them like that—ugh.

Guess I’ll have to buy a new writing ‘puter. Well, a new used one. I like the keyboard on that 11.6″ HP enough to drop a couple hundred bucks on a new used one. But in the meantime I’ll write on my 14″ business computer. (And of course, count among my many blessings that I have that option.)

Anyway, once I get my head screwed on straight again I’ll start leaving word counts below again.

Talk with you again soon.

Of Interest

See “Watch how forensic experts use insects to find criminals” at https://interestingengineering.com/video/watch-how-forensic-experts-use-insects-to-find-criminals.

See “Is our planet surrounded by a giant magnetic tunnel? Let’s find out” at https://interestingengineering.com/science/is-our-planet-surrounded-by-a-giant-magnetic-tunnel-lets-find-out. More on magnetism.

See “The Curious Case of the Bog Bodies” at https://nautil.us/the-curious-case-of-the-bog-bodies-235510/. Story ideas, anyone? (Frank O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation,” anyone?)

See “Why do people have slips of the tongue?” at https://theconversation.com/why-do-people-have-slips-of-the-tongue-191383/.

The Numbers

The Journal…………………………………… 990 words

Writing of The Stirchians (novel, tentative title)

Day 1…… 4106 words. Total words to date…… 4106
Day 2…… 3505 words. Total words to date…… 7611
Day 3…… 2392 words. Total words to date…… 10366
Day 4…… 3336 words. Total words to date…… 13339
Day 5…… 3227 words. Total words to date…… 16566
Day 6…… 2821 words. Total words to date…… 19387
Day 7…… 2900 words. Total words to date…… 22287
Day 8…… 1288 words. Total words to date…… 23575
Day 9…… 3584 words. Total words to date…… 27159

Total fiction words for October……… 35361
Total fiction words for the year………… 155743
Total nonfiction words for October… 17120
Total nonfiction words for the year…… 170340
Total words for the year (fiction and this blog)…… 326083

Calendar Year 2022 Novels to Date…………………… 2
Calendar Year 2022 Novellas to Date……………… 0
Calendar Year 2022 Short Stories to Date… 0
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………………………………… 68
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)………………………………… 8
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)………………… 217
Short story collections……………………………………………… 31

Disclaimer: In this Journal, among many other things, I promote Writing Into the Dark. WITD greatly increases productivity and practice, and provides a rapid ascension along the learning curve of Craft. This is not opinion. It is all numbers and facts.