Since I first traded WordPerfect for Microsoft Word in the 1990s, I’ve never been able to get away from it. Every once in a while I’ll find something else to try, but iA Writer might be the first one to stick.
It is sad to see a newspaper die. It is sadder still when that death is a particularly gruesome suicide. For just under 15 years I was associated with a small paper in my small town. I wrote a weekly column — this column — for all of that time; for four rewarding years I was also the paper’s photographer.
It’s a feeling that comes on, the way you can tell the night before that when you wake up tomorrow you’ll have a cold. Only it’s worse. It’s not a cold, it’s a book. When one writes a book, the last thought that one has, right after the sign of relief that the damned thing is finally done, is the firm vow never to do such a foolish thing ever again.
With this column, “The View From Mudsock Heights” enters its sixteenth year. It began 15 years ago and and I’ve not missed a week since.