“Writers read” is more or less a mantra, although I have to admit, how and what I read has changed since I started writing. I don’t mean changed as in when I was younger and absolutely devoured Victoria Holt, had my stretch of Louis L’amour (really), and the classic science fiction novels that gave way to other interests. I look at books differently now simply because I understand more about the mechanics of character and plot development. In knowing more about how books get onto the best seller lists also means I realize being a “best seller” doesn’t mean the book is something I’ll like. I actually tend to steer clear of them until I get a personal recommendation from someone I trust.

Anyway, I finished a book the other day that was one of these dual-time ones, although there was only a 20ish year gap as a daughter was attempting to learn about the tragic death of her parents. The earlier parts were told from the view of her deceased mother. A number of twists were of course revealed along the way with the “big one” coming in the next to the last chapter. I was sort of on the fence as to whether I was enjoying the story, but wanted to see how everything played out. Now comes my annoyance with the way the “big twist” was crafted. In setting one up, an author has a couple of standard choices. Information is completely withheld from the reader or only hinted at. The other is for a character to “think” or “say” things to the reader that are false until the “truth” comes out. In this case, that was the method chosen as the character of the mother repeatedly described angst over a tragedy from her teen years while knowing full well what had actually happened. Don’t get me wrong, it was consistent for the character to lie in dialog with other characters. It was her “internal” dialog that was unnecessarily deceptive. There was another I stopped reading a while back for something similar.Hubby says I’m becoming nit-picking and there could be an element of that.

Actually, the gap in posting is two-fold. There was, once again a two-day, well, parts of three days network outage like the ones I have previously vented about. And there was, and continues to be, back-to-back functions and obligations that require time and cause me to shift my priorities. Today, in fact, is virtually non-stop although if all goes well, it will include diving. We’ll see what Mother Nature has in store for us.

Speaking of Mother Nature, Military Appreciation Day is one of those annual events that doesn’t have exactly a fixed day. Military Appreciation Month is May. The first time the City held the event, they had it right around Memorial Day, but that has some drawbacks for timing. They swapped and decided to kick off the month with the event and that does work well except this year they weren’t able to do that. So it was Saturday. A tremendous amount of planning and effort goes into getting together the demonstrations of things like military vehicles, weapons on display, a physical challenge for team competition, and so forth. It is all outside and as the day approached, so did a front coming in. The forecast was looking problematic, but the decision was made to continue and hope for the best. The rain did hold off for most of the set-up. Light rain started in and a number of people had their umbrellas and rain jackets handy. Now, who knows if the collective pleas had any impact since they usually don’t, but the rain did stop. Things were wiped off and while it was mostly overcast, clouds are not liquid. There were probably people who decided not to risk it, yet the ones who turned out had fun. I was of course at the downtown museum  although I could see the displays close to me and I spent a few minutes walking around after I locked up. It was a successful day for sure.

I was reminded in a recent conversation of something from my second career I hadn’t thought about for a long time. After I retired and took some time off to write my first book, the novel, Orchids in the Snow, it became painfully obvious I would not be making a living as a writer. Like most other retired military in the D.C. area, I went to work in the defense services contracting sector. I knew I didn’t want to work for a Fortune-500 company and went with a small company experiencing growth. The culture was what I was looking for and their salaries were mid-range which was fine based on our situation. What benefits to provide employees can be rather complex. Their basic package was basic and the intent was to add selected benefits as they were able to. I knew the company had work in some high-risk areas/specialties, none of which I was remotely interested in. But when they added kidnap and ransom insurance as a benefit for those employees who did that sort of work, it was appreciated. (To the best of my knowledge, the policies were not put to test during the time I was with the company.)

When it came to growth, another thing I was unfamiliar with was the founder and his wife decided to buy another company. This wasn’t anything I had experience with, but I usually had lunch with my boss and he explained the rationale and process to me. A second company was later acquired to make the original company become “A Group”, which was in turn acquired by a Fortune-500 corporation. This was a case of becoming, “too big to be small, and too small to be big”. In other words, there are certain contracts set aside for small business and once you pass out of that category, you are then required to compete with the really big guys. It’s difficult to go head-to-head with them and the big guys all know this. Selling the company is often the most advantageous and the original founding members were able to negotiate a nice deal. Another interesting lesson learned in the real world of business.