Sadly, three members of our Writers’ Critique Group have passed on during the last couple of years. We sought permission from the daughter of one writer to include her short story , the last she wrote.Another playwright,poet and prose writer had submitted  work before she died. A third had been a renowned singer, dancer and comic on stage and TV during the fifties in Hollywood, before coming to Australia .Each week we had looked forward to the next fascinating episode of her memoir.

We wrote and included tributes to these dear friends, who are sorely missed, and threw flowers into Abbotsford Bay in their memory. All of these talented women had succumbed to variations of the same illness, after stoic battles to overcome this implacable enemy.

We are almost ready to get a photocopy of our document.Why is it easier to see errors on paper than on the screen? The third member of our committee had gathered all the poetry and prose pieces onto her thumb drive (or so she thought) ‘Girls, use this. We must all be on the same page.’As it turned out,  some pieces were missing, so those had to be sought out, including bios and poetry and prose.

I emailed Committee Member No 3 an attachment of the Anthology to show her the order  of submissions. A few days later I received an anguished call. ‘How come some of the pieces, with edits we  all approved, haven’t come from my memory stick? I don’t understand it. I know you’ve both done a lot of work but…’

Oops. I was at a loss. I’d opened up her thumb drive, pressed Insert and File, clicked on the appropriate document…Only then did I realize this option only chooses stuff from the hard drive of my computer, not the memory stick.So I copied it, file by file ( there’s probably an easier way, but I don’t know it) for checking.

I dashed off an Email, thanking her for picking up the the problem , offering to trawl through the works in the next few days to ensure everything was OK. Fortunately, only the one she’d found had needed  a fix. Most were well edited and needed no changes.

My son, Jase, was helping me get the pages sorted, to designate styles for headings, names, Submission Body Text, Submission Body New Paragraph, Submission Body Postscript, Bio style, character style…

Hopefully, after my computer lesson and fixes with Jase today, we’ll be able to photocopy the whole document, for distribution to selected Editors for a final check.

Now there are other things to consider. Who’ll be our launcher?

A pub we know which hosts poetry readings would be an ideal venue as the launch site .

There’s the ISBN Number and Bar code to arrange  ( this happens at the same time) We’ll need this prior to printing.

The process of editing must be  completed by March, if we’re to be ready to print by April, with a release date in May.

All fingers to the keyboard!