I used my time off productively. That had been my plan, but
not my expectation, the latter being informed by experience. Usually I hope to
get all sorts of things done when there’s an empty week available to do it, and
at the end I realize that all I’ve done is read magazines and cooked a lot of
dinners. Not that I didn’t do those things as well over the Christmas break,
but I also, finally, dug into Nostrum. And yes, Volume 2 is now available on
Amazon. The link is right over there on the right -->
What does the consumer get for the substantial investment of $.99? [I’d
give it away but I can’t figure out how, and $.99 is the lowest one can go.]
Well, first, there’s the collected Epistles of St Jules to the Forensicians.
These are the letters that used to announce the arrival of each weekly episode
of Series 1. Mostly Jules would update ld-l members on the latest curmudgeonish
pronouncement of his partner, the Nostrumite; in return, most ld-l members
would respond that this inane spam was making them rethink their participation
in the debate community. And, of course, one or two of them went over and read
the latest episode. It was a joyous time.
The core of the book is Nostrum Series 2. Of course, you can
easily get this (or any Nostrum stuff, pretty much) online already, with the
big difference that, as with the book version of V1, everything is annotated.
Since Nostrum is based on a true story, it seemed to make sense to, when the
situation called for it, point out the nature of that true story. There’s also
footnotes explaining some of the more obscure references, although admittedly
most of the obscure references, which must have made sense at the time, now
elude me completely. Too obscure for my own good, I guess.
For a while I entertained a Good Guy / Bad Guy website, and
that material is also included in Volume 2, for what it’s worth.
More interesting is the Tennessee Williams High School
chronicles. After the first Nostrum hiatus, I got the idea of a completely new
series, told from the point of view of the participants. They would all have access
to a blog, and the entries would update the world at large of what was going on
with their team. The material is perfectly good, but at some point I realized
that it wasn’t all that different from Nostrum, and that I preferred the
Nostrum format over this one. So, as with all previous Nostrums, I just stopped
in the middle. I am predictable, if nothing else, but then again, the nature of
soap operas is that they begin in the middle and never end. What’s the
difference between never ending and just stopping at some random point? None
that I can see.
Finally, for the true fan, there are a few early drafts of
material for Series 3. I started this and fairly quickly backed off. It was
based on the TOC, and I found that the content was a little too mean spirited. With
the passage of a couple of years, and a belief that nothing I can write would
be mean spirited enough to match the actual event—if members of the VCA are
unaware of my opinion of the TOC at this point, I will simply revert to my
basic, “If the TOC didn’t exist, I wouldn’t invent it,” and let it go at that—I
have changed my mind. The S3 material there isn’t terrible, but the narrative
wasn’t there yet. The good news, or, if you prefer, the bad news, is that I now
think that I have found the narrative, and if you are patient and behave
yourself for a couple of days, well, Wednesday is coming. I can feel it in my
bones.
Meanwhile, I’ve made various changes to my jimmenick.com
website, but these are incomplete. One thing I had hoped to do was throw it
into an attractive modern design template, but that I admittedly demurred from.
After all, I was only off for a week, and there was wining and dining to do and
family obligations and magazine reading and clearing off my Netflix queue. So, it all looks
ploddingly similar to what it looked like before.
Welcome to the Bahamas.
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