I Wish I Were Like Tolkien

I have to say, one of my favorite book series is the Lord of the Rings. Yes, I do like them more than the Hobbit. Everyone I know argues that when the trilogy, when  compared to the Hobbit, has too much walking around and a serious lack of dragons.

I'm not entirely sure why I like the trilogy more, I just do. Perhaps its the fight scenes. Although I liked Bilbo's cleverness in keeping the trolls talking until the sun came up it's just not the same as scenes like the battle for Helms Deep. Or maybe it's the lack of female characters for me to bond with. Both Eowyn and Arwen went to the aid of the people the cared about. They didn't just sit around on their hands saying "Oh well I guess the men will handle it." I liked that about them.

When you take all of Tolkien's works together I don't think there is a single bit that isn't riveting. I think the world needs more books like his. No one cares that his works are adaptations of old fables. He created an entire world for us to wander through, which was more than any dusty fable had given us. That's especially true for modern readers.

That's why I think my next work will be one I had started years ago, but never finished. All it has right now is a shaky foundation of a story, but I am willing to work on it until it shines. I guess I shouldn't distract myself with that one yet though, since I have not finished Escape and Evasion. I'm not quite half way through writing that one and then I have to edit etc.

I'm a little torn though. I also want to work on a story involving Zombies since I miss the days my friends and I would sit around and argue about the best way to survive the zombie apocalypse... Gah! There is too much I want to do and never enough time.

I'll just have to sit down and tell myself to focus on one project at a time. And that means finishing Escape and Evasion before I even think about Tolkien-esk projects. Although, I do hope people read my books before I die...Poor Tolkien never got to see his books get truly popular. His son truly did the world a service when he dusted off his father's old manuscripts and got them published.

Lynn's documents are now available!

I finally got the documents up! Now you can go and enjoy old timey photos, letters, and so forth. I'm inept with zip files, which is where most of my problems were coming from. I also didn't blur out last names like I had planed, but hopefully it wont bother anyone. Most of the images are easy to read once you have clicked on them and google zooms in. There is one article that is an exception and I'll figure out to make that one readable later.

I hope everyone enjoys looking through all of these as much as I did!

New documents

I met up with my cousin B. the other week to visit with his family. While I was there we got to talking about my work and he mentioned that after Howard (Lynn, we all call him by his middle name since he didn't like the name Lynn) died B. and his Dad went through a bunch of old wallets and things that Lynn had kept over the years. They scanned them into their computer and B. had a copy of everything.

Long story short, B. loaded all of those documents onto a thumb drive for me to take home. There is some outstanding stuff in there! Copies of Army information and paper work, certificates, more letters Howard received, etc. It's really answering a bunch of questions I had. Thank the stars Howard kept in touch with Lucien (one of the nice French men that helped him escape). Lucien was half French half British, and bless his heart, because he could write in both languages, and a LOT better than Howard. So now I know a bunch more people's names, how they are connected, and how to SPELL them. Good grief, that was driving me nuts.

I'd kinda like to add those documents to my blog as well. I don't think anyone would have a problem with that. I mean, how many of these people can still be alive to care?

The main problem is that I am still learning to use blogger as I go. So I have to figure out a nice way to organize all that stuff under a new tab. It's not like the home page where I write a post and it just tacks on to the top of the page. Then I could make each scanned document into its own post. It's more akin to making one giant post out of all those images and any text I want to add, only in a separate page that you can go look at. For all I know, I'm just not going about it the right way. I guess I'll throw those up like the letters, and if I find a better method later then I'll fix it.

Also, if the images aren't large enough for people to read then that could be a problem. I'd rather not type them out like Howard's. I'm going to throw up a little sample of his writing in there as well. Then you'll see what I was up against.

So you can look forward to that later this week, as long as everything goes according to plan...