A Stitch in Time Saves a Blow Out at Sea

A torn sail is a good excuse to sit down and do something I rather enjoy: stitching things up. I guess it goes back to my childhood when my mother showed me how to thread a needle and sew on a button. I've never minded taking care of my own sewing needs as long as they were simple.

Repairing a small rip in our old main sail last weekend was done with a piece of sail repair tape and a few big (too big, my wife said) stitches with a sailmaker's needle and thread. Pleasant enough work when your in the harbor or at sea on a nice day running down wind. Here we are tied up on our seawall and were spending the day getting ready for our first sail in a long time--too long. But, VATNA is in good shape, her decks scrubbed, and now her sails are on. We should be able to get out this Saturday between World Series games (Red Sox are in and that make this New England farm boy happy).

As far as writing goes, here I am on the boat doing my usual evening thing: writing/editing. I'm about half way through the process of reviewing the edit my editor did on the A Drop of Wizard's Blood, the last book in the Eye of the Stallion trilogy. This is the third time I've used my editor, Linda Morehouse of webuildbooks.com. As usual, she very thorough and I'd recommend putting out the money for a professional reader/editor when you're preparing a manuscript for submission to publishers or agents. In any event, I'm now going though the manuscript line by line, comment by comment (I love the Microsoft Word editing feature), and mostly accepting her recommendations and learning, too, as I go along. It's slow going to be sure, but instructive to see the kind of grammatical mistakes I habitually make or words I over use and it takes an editor--another set of eyes--to find them.

In any event, I hope I'm a better writer than sail stitcher and I hope Josh Beckett, Big Poppy, and the rest of the boys get the job done this week.