COMPUTER WOES

Another morning wasted with computer glitches. No wonder I get discouraged ,  and throw up my hands in disgust. It's supposed to be so much easier to communicate now, but when I typed on my old trusty Royal, or even the electric IBM, at least the words stayed where you put them. This is my second try at today's Blog. The first one suddenly disappeared when halfway done. You never know when you might inadvertently push a button that control something lethal.

It may well be that these sudden outbursts of temperament had a big role in my repeated neglects of the network connections I had established. Even a new computer, which  I hoped would be easier to conquer, has only created new frustrations.

Well now that I've got my grumble off my chest, I might do better tomorrow. Today, time has run out. The other parts of my life demand me. At least I'm showing up.

RAINY THOUGHTS

After three days of rain, it's hard to think of cheerful thoughts to blog about. People are posting pictures of flooded  roads and rivers even here in our mountains.  where I'd never thought I'd see them.
With daily disasters shown on the news, my own problems seem very small by comparison. Yet while I live I must concentrate on how to get people to read my books, into which I put my life and experiences under so many stresses, and which I want to share with the world.
I'm reading others' stories and beginning to realize that everybody has a story to tell, and the help it gives others to share them -- how that gives us a deeper perspective ou own living. So I'm hoping I won't give up this time, but keep on blogging about my Russian childhood during the early years of the revolution, my college love story in the Great Depression years, and my fractured life during World War II.

Am I the oldest person who ever wrote a blog? Most probably not. I will be 99 on my next birthday in October, but it's amazing how many of us nonagenarians there are in the world today. The question is, why should all the younger people read what we write in our blogs? Reading our stories might help them understand how their world got the way it is now.  The memoirs that I wrote in the past ten years tell about my life during three of the most critical periods of the last century. They are described in my website:  norapercival.com.

Why We Write Blogs

Why is it so hard for me to write a blog? It oght to be a cinch after writing four books and editing two others. But I find myself stalled just as badly as when, like many writers, I would dry up during the writing of a book. Suddenly you find yourself finding excuses -- first I need to play three computer games, like an athlete doing his warmup stretches before a game begins. Or I need to look up something on the internet, usually something I might need three chapters later. Or anything to distract me from actually writing a blog, like the legendary sharpening of pencils before setting down to writing, back in the days when we used pencils instead of computers to write with. Why?

My best guess is that I'm discouraged by my problems in setting my books up to be sold via the internet, but also my inabioity to find an effective way to make internet users aware that they existe and of interest to readers in their field. When I sell books in local stores or fairs I do it by attracting passersby  to listen to my story, person to person. How can I reproduce this situation on the internet, so the story goes out and creates public interest .without my physical presence? I know it can be done, since many people do it successfully. I'm hoping some of them will respond to my blog and give me some good advice.

I feel so inept in this new E-world and Google country and Facebook friends and all the rest crowding my inbox. But I must learn to be fluent in it since my age forces me to rely on them  for telling the world about the five volumes I've created in the last ten years. The younger generations, in their search for instant everything don't know, or care, that I can remember and report the terrible years of the Great Depression that's haunting us now, and the chaotic forties when WW II changed all our lives in so many drastic ways, yet created a united effort that bonded our generation forever and now seems to be lost..

My trilogy of memoirs is filled with stories about the real events of the last century.  But  they are written and published and now must be marketed to find their niche in history. And there are so many people, young and old, who want to hear those stories. I only need to find the right links. My new friends on Facebook and Twitter and Linkedin and Goodreads and Dames of Dialogue and all the yet unknown readers who would love my books are out there in the great global wireless world. The real question is whether I'll live to reach them. How will I find the ways?

Visitors!!!!!! -

September is already here. What happened to summer? It feels like we never had one this year. You turn your attention away for a bit, and when you turn back, it's fall! Between the endless political talk and the Olympics and the US Open, and one thing and another, and the year has gone by with no attention paid to what should be the fun time of the year.  Come Oct I will have some special visits - helping me to note my 98th birthday!!!!

Resurrection of a wayward blogger

Reading my old blogs, I can't believe I haven't posted one since June! Trying to figure out why, I've realized that an unusual phenomenon seems to have developed, actually a combination of things.

First, I think I've just been overwhelmed by the reams of Email that turn up in my inbox, all hollering for comment or reply. Between Facebook and messages of the millions of friends of President Obama, individual personal messages from friends and family and readers of my books are often lost in the shuffle.

Add to this the natural slowing up of my normal mental functions nas i approach my 98th birthday, and the recent development of an uge to concentrate one one project at a time. Unthinkingoy I accepted an urgent request from a fellow member of my writing group, the High Country Writers, to take over as editor-in-chief of an Anthology project of our short prose and poetry. For a month or more I was so focused on its complications that it seemed to fill my hours to the exclusion of  almost everything else.

Happily, that effort is now completed -- at least my role is -- so I can retrn to my own life, and make my peace with all the websites I have so shamefully neglected. As my mobility becomes more unsteady, I am determined to continue my efforts to promote my five published books, three of which form a trilogy of memoirs. My major media for making them known to the reading world must be the electronic ones.

There are not too many of us left to tell the stories of the most critial times of the last century -- the years of the Great Depression in the 1930s, World War II, and the chaotic life in eastern Europe created by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, where I was born nearly a hundred years ago. Though my writing may seem too far behind the younger generations to be of interest to them, my five children and eleven grandchildren have kept me involved in their lives and concerned with the 'sturm und drang' of their times.

It also works the opposite way, and my experiences are of valid worth to young people in many ways. The old warning still holds good: "They who ignore the lessons of history will be forced to repeat them."