The Writer's Life 3/7 - Great Finds

Today's NY Post features an article on an exciting discovery. Here's the gist, edited by yours truly: One of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's passions is plumbing the sea for wreckage. His latest find is the USS Lexington, which, along with the USS Yorktown, fought the first-ever carrier duel with the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Battle of the Coral Sea in 1942. It was two miles down. 217 of the crew were lost, 2770 rescued. Badly damaged, it was sunk by torpedoes fired from the USS Phelps. It was the first aircraft carrier casualty in history. Here's one of the pics:

The Post's Weird But True column also reports a rare find, which led to a bit of research: 132 years ago a message in a bottle was thrown from a German ship sailing about 600 miles off Western Australia. Recently, a family walking along a remote beach spotted it sticking out of the sand. It was taken to a maritime archaeologist, who tracked it down through records. He said: “Incredibly, there was an entry for June 12, 1886, made by the captain, recording a drift bottle having been thrown overboard." It's been donated to a museum. The second oldest message in a bottle was a mere 108 years old. Here's the recently discovered one:

Here's interesting though unsurprising news featured in a blurb in the Post. In February USA gun sales increased 4.4%, 13% in Florida. Sales of Smith & Wesson's gun stocks rose 18%. It seems this always happens after a mass shooting that leads to fears of a gun ban.

Kim Jong-un is vowing to ditch his nukes. A long line of American presidents has fallen for NoKo's malarkey. Will Trump? South Korea's president seems to have been hooked. I wonder how much money Dear Leader will con out of him. Wanna buy a bridge?

I spent this snow day doing tasks. The most important was the completion of the first serious reading of next year's novel, Inside Out. I doubt I will have any of the problems I had with this year's, Present and Past. The margins look good and I already have the page numbers in place. I'll return to it for the first of three sweeps on October 1st. And I will have no qualms about using "Can a novel be both explicit and meaningful?" in the book's blurb. I didn't tone it down as much as I'd thought... I also sorted through the donation of CD's I received yesterday. About a fifth is Christmas music. One third is either classical, orchestral or atmosphere recordings. Several are R & B, dance and pop. A few are rock. I downloaded eight songs. I passed on long versions of Donna Summers' Hot Stuff and She Works Hard for the Money. Each was more than six minutes, great in clubs but tedious outside them... Now we wait to see how much accumulation there will be. So far not much. A weather guy just said the worst in NYC will be after eight PM. He held to the prediction of eight to twelve inches. I know it's ridiculous to hope it will be a lot less, but here I am, hoping.

My Amazon Author page: https://www.amazon.com/Vic-Fortezza/e/B002M4NLJE

FB: https://www.facebook.com/Vic-Fortezza-Author-118397641564801/?fref=ts

Read Vic's Stories, free: http://fictionaut.com/users/vic-fortezza