GREAT LAS VEGAS DAY

Today was the kind of day I would love to have all year around. A little cool in the morning, great temperature until it got dark (don't like going off Daylight Savings Time) and it will be a little cool tonight. Okay, that's the weather forecast from Las Vegas.

Speaking of being on Pacific Standard Time, it is a real bummer for it to begin getting dark at 4:30-5:00. That's a little earlier than when I lived in LA because we are farther north, but I wish we could stay on Daylight Savings Time all year. It seems like lots of other people feel the same way from what I see posted on Facebook and the like.

Did this year go fast for you? I was thinking that Easter wasn't that long ago, and now we are getting ready for Thanksgiving. Where did the time go? Stores are putting out Christmas decorations even before Halloween.

Thanksgiving several years ago in LA at Cousin Barbara's house

Would you believe, we go to Baja Miguel, the Mexican restaurant in the South Point Casino for our holiday meals now? They not only offer their regular menu, but have special menus for holidays. For Thanksgiving you can choose traditional turkey, all the fixings and pumpkin pie or pumpkin flan for dessert. Not like the days back in LA when we had a pretty big family there and we traded off hosting the holiday dinners.

Mine was generally Christmas, my cousin Barbara who passed away a few years ago took Thanksgiving and my cousin Trisja generally made the Easter dinner. We usually had about 20 people. Those were great times with a fun loving family. My own kids are spread out all over now- Jason in Northern California, Jakki and my two grandsons in England and Scott in Australia, and my sister Phyllice lives in Oregon, so the memories of those big dinners are just that -- memories to be treasured. I am grateful for all of the years I was able to be part of a wonderful family experience, and happy to have friends and a cousin here to enjoy the holidays with.

LIFE'S LITTLE FRUSTRATIONS

Life in this cyber-world can get awfully confusing sometimes, even to someone who is computer savvy. I was attacked full force this week as I tried to use a mail merge on Outlook. I won't go into details, but I spent a full day trying to get it right. Finally gave up and decided that when I'm ready, I will use a service. Of course, being the bulldog that I am I will try it one more time when my head is clear before doing that.

Thank goodness for my little Dylan. Holding him and petting him returns me to reality.

Okay, so that one was out of the way. Time to devote time to final corrections to the print proof of MURDER ON THE MENU, to be released November 26---but the Kindle and ePub editions are available for PreOrder. So, since my sister Phyllice and I write this series together, we edit and correct together. I received my print proof first and set to work. What I do is create a matrix table with all of my edits or suggestions and send it to her so we don't duplicate. If I've found it and fixed it, that let's her know. This applies to missing words, bad punctuation--things like that. Simple right.

Yep, simple if somewhere along the line the file with the table was not corrupted. I had no idea that was what happened, finished going through the whole book and had a complete table to send her, hit SAVE, and Word shut down without notice, dumping all of my entries. And, yes, I do have Autosave set for every 5 minutes. Those files did not go into Autosave or if they did, they are floating around in cyberspace somewhere.

Back to the drawing board as the saying goes. So, fortunately I use little stickies to indicate every place I find a glitch. Back through the book, but this time I only made a few entries before I tried SAVE. Nope. Word crashed again. And again.

Dumb me. Never thought about a corrupted file and kept trying to retrieve the missing complete one. By the way, that also meant that all the corrections on the manuscript were lost too. By the end of a very frustrating day I finally began from scratch with a new file, when through the book yet another time and  viola! The SAVE  worked and I sent the table to Phyllice.

The good news? We should still be on time.

Morgan's World with Morgan St. James: OMG! This is the first post since July 2018

Morgan's World with Morgan St. James: OMG! This is the first post since July 2018: I guess when I said I wouldn't post every day, that was an understatement. Good Grief! A year-and-a-half? Where does the time go, an...

OMG! This is the first post since July 2018

I guess when I said I wouldn't post every day, that was an understatement. Good Grief! A year-and-a-half? Where does the time go, anyway?

This month I joined the new website Coffee House Tours, and have my own page on that website. They schedule book signings all around the area, so I hope to be appearing at various venues in the coming year. I will keep the locations and dates posted.

It is amazing to think that my first book was published in 2006, 13 years ago, and now there are 18 books in publication. Everyone always said I was prolific. But, I look at some of the authors with 30 and 40 and even 50 books, and then it seems like small potatoes.

Maybe no excuse, but I have been very busy. Two new books released this year, 5 new issues of Writers Tricks of the Trade online magazine since the last post (http://writerstricksofthetrade.blogspot.com for more info), and a myriad of other things.


Dylan, my little associate editor is always at his post under my desk when I am writing. At about eleven years old he, like me, is a senior. We don't know how old he really is, but I adopted him on October 21, 2013 and the vet thinks he is a healthy senior at eleven. He has diabetes and has had his challenges but it is all under control. Dylan is my little best friend.

Here is a promise. No way will another year and a half go by before I post. Even though it isn't New Years yet, I am resolving to post at least every few weeks.

More later, and thanks for following me. 

A POST BECAUSE I'M SO PROUD OF MY SON JASON

This is a personal post because I am so proud of the person my youngest son Jason Pransky has become. He is very intuitive about when someone is in need of help or support, and is drawn to them. Jason is an artist and uses his talent to do something nice and lasting for them, even if the person is a stranger.

I saw this on Facebook today and had to share it. This truly brought tears to my eyes as I imagined the father who lost his child receiving something like this from a perfect stranger. He has been drawn to people he doesn't even know, but people who were dealing with something difficult in their life so many times now, and donated his time and talent to do something nice for them, that I no longer view it as a coincidence. There is definitely something at work here and it is a gift.


Here is the Facebook post from Jason that accompanied it:

Jason Pransky

56 mins · 

Divine intervention of the day:
Going down the road on the motorcycle and heading towards home and I get this urge to go to cycle gear. Stop in and start walking around, about to leave and a bald African American man starts talking to me. We start talking about riding and he tells me he is a Pastor. Then it hit me: I have gotten better at realizing what my role is. I assure him we are supposed to meet and ask if someone in his congregation has had a recent loss. He looks at me and realized I'm "awake" also and tells me a couple just lost their child I gave him my information and said I would make them a portrait to remember their child by. he then told me he believed what I said because he too was going somewhere else and stopped in because it entered his mind God is Good

Writers Tricks of the Trade Issue 2 Volume 8

Writers Tricks of the Trade Issue 2 Volume 8  WRITERS, download your FREE COPY today

SUMMER 2018 ISSUE OF WRITERS TRICKS OF THE TRADE ONLINE MAGAZINE

I have been hard at work on the Summer 2018 issue of the Writers Tricks of the Trade online magazine. Beginning with this issue, which will publish on July 15, 2018, the formatting has been upgraded and other changes have been instituted.

Back issues can be found at http://bit.ly/allWTTissues. My thanks to all of my writer friends who continue to contribute informative and entertaining articles.

Our regular contributor Fred Rayworth always gives us an article with sage writing advice, and Martha Cheves, our resident book reviewer, offers book reviews in every issue that introduce us to books we might not find otherwise.

The Life Stories feature which was open to contributions by writers has become Life Stories by Keith Bettinger. Keith is an award-winning author known for his short stories, often about his life experiences. In this issue, he relates a story from his childhood about why he became a cop. Not what you expect.

What happens when a prolific screenwriter with 60 produced screenplays to her credit turns some of them into novels? Christine Conradt shares her experience, and marketing consultant Ned Barnett offers some valuable advice about promoting your book.

A Spotlight Interview feature has been added, and our first guest interviewed is multi-award winning author Paul D. Marks, who won this year's coveted Shamus Award.

As always, the magazine is open to submissions of articles of interest to writers and those in the industry. Guidelines for submissions are at the beginning of every issue.

Now that the Summer issue is in the proofreading stage, it's time for me to take off my
editor/publisher's hat and go back to working on my own novels. Dylan the Dog stays in his little "den" under my desk where he functions as Associate Editor.