Sunday 09/18/2022
In the morning I walked to the P.A. Cafe in Midtown for some breakfast and walked back, three miles yay me.
In the middle of the day I made myself work at developing the ideas for this YA SF novel I’m playing with. I started writing a brief synopsis, as for pitching to an agent, but somehow that turned into a long dialog scene where my main characters help each other (and help me) figure out what the aliens are really up to.
At 3pm it was time to set up and rehearse for a Sunday At Home event. These are informal talks by CH residents, in this case by my writing pal Prudence, who took a lot of good pictures on a trip to Zimbabwe and Botswana earlier this year. I thought it was going to go smoothly, and for the most part it did. But there is always something. In this case, it was the goddam clicker. The clicker is a little hand-held device that has a laser pointer and four buttons. It has a little USB dongle that acts as a receiver. You plug the USB thing into a port, and when you press any of the buttons on the device, the dongle convinces the computer that you just hit one of the four arrow keys on the keyboard. It “just works” for everybody else. It wouldn’t work for me. So half an hour before show time, I have to move things around so Prudence can reach the laptop from the podium and press the actual keyboard keys to advance her slides.
One nice thing, for the first time since the pandemic, there were many, many more people physically in the auditorium than on Zoom. It was like 10 on Zoom and easily 60 people in the real audience.
Had dinner with Stew the organizer, and his wife Kathy and Prudence. Then I think I will go to bed early.
Codgerville 