This year — 2020 — cannot end too soon.

Leave aside the horrendous politics, if you can.

Avoid the pandemic, if you can.

I lost a friend of 42 years, after witnessing a nasty death by lung cancer. Other than scribbling my initials on a digital reader with a crooked, arthritic left index finger, I haven’t written a word since.

Times heals all wounds, they say, but the scab on this one keeps getting ripped open. I’m tired of it.

Let’s start a new year. All in favor, let’s just do it.

Welcome to 2021

Back in the olden days — we’re talking IBM mainframes, not MS-DOS — proponents of the new technology promised it would bring all sorts of environmental benefits: Think of all that paper we would no longer need.

Ri-ight.

I had to find a paper file folder (unrelated to writing, because I didn’t do much of that in bad old 2020), I came upon these papers.

That’s about five reams or so, all of about edits, critiques, revisions, rewrites and marked-up proofs of the first two Black Orchid Chronicles books. No full drafts here. Just printed paper with lots of chicken scratching in ballpoint pen. It translates into about three white kitchen bags of ultra-shredded pulp.

Would that I made fewer mistakes, we would have more trees.