Month: January 2016

A Tribute to Edith Wharton

Today’s post is a tribute to Edith Wharton on the 154th anniversary of her birth. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. She won the award in 1921 for The Age of Innocence.

I believe her 1911 novel, Edith Frome, was the first novel I read. It made quite an impression on me.

Ironically, Ms. Wharton’s mother forbade her to read a novel until she was married!

Ms. Wharton was born into the upper-class in New York City during the American Civil War, and her family moved to Europe to avoid the toll the war was taking on the United States. She was more suited to life in Europe and died in France in 1937.

Computer crashes and such

Just when I posted that I was going to try to do better with this blogging thing, my computer crashed. The good news is that all my writing was backed up and recovered. The bad news is that I lost some e-mail addresses and all the e-mails I had saved into folders. It seems that my internet provider has a POP system instead of an IMAP system. Who knew? Not I. I thought everything was backed up on my external hard drive, but the e-mails weren’t. What I know about computers would fit on the head of a pin.

To make a long story short, my computer has now been rebuilt after some unavoidable delays due to the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. I’ve been playing catch up for the last 10 days.

It is surprising how much I use a computer, considering how computer savvy I am not. Not having access to e-mail, Facebook, or the latest revisions I made to my The Spanish Coin manuscript for nearly a month freed up my time for other endeavors. I did some household decluttering, spent more time reading than I usually allow myself, and became somewhat lazy.

With a “new” computer in place, I hope to find that at least some of the slowness I have blamed on my internet provider turns out to be due to a dying hard drive.

I have only written one blog post in advance and scheduled it for publication on a future date. Ironically, before my computer crashed I composed a blog that I scheduled for publication tomorrow. We’ll see how that turns out.