Authors and Their Publishers

August 30, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I’ve collected four epic fantasy book series, and the behind-the-scenes revelations of the authors’ dealings with their publishers are stories in themselves. In the first book series I read, The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, the author was apparently allowed to do whatever he wanted, go way off into the hinterlands of his story, and turn the original six-novel series into a massive and overblown fourteen books. His digressions cost him readership (though not money, which is why his wife-editor and his publisher let him do what he wanted), and those digressions, what fans call “The Slog” are what made them prefer the substitute author who wrote the ending after Jordan passed away. Although I’ve reread the series multiple times, I discount the ending completely, and skip over all the digressions, as well as his annoying female characters who tend to think the story is about them, even though none of them are prophesied to save the world from the Shadow. In this way, I edit the books to the way they should have been — a focused six-book series — but apparently, the extra money in the publisher’s pocket offset any need to create an edited masterpiece.

The next series I read, the unfinished Kingkiller Chronicles was the opposite. Although he had written the entire epic before he sought a publisher, they edited the first book so much that the second needed to be rewritten to match the first book. Then, when it came time to publish the final book of the trilogy, it turns out Patrick Rothfuss was at a loss. He’d have to scrap the 300,000 words of the book and start over, which he tried to do, but stress of all kinds — marital problems, mental issues, and trying to live up to his reputation — laid him low. Apparently, he thought he could still finish the project because he offered an unpublished chapter of the final book for anyone who would donate to a certain cause. Fans donated a ton of money, but he couldn’t come up with the chapter. Nor could he come with the cash to reimburse everyone since it went to the cause. Fans are incredibly angry with him, but it’s really the publisher’s and editor’s fault. Since they had the entire series in their hands, they should have edited the whole thing at once before publishing the first book to prevent the numerous problems they caused by doing it piecemeal. That way, the three books would hold together, and they’d each have been ready in time for their publication date.

The third series, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams, the one I’m reading now, had the perfect relationship with his publishers and editors. Even before a single word had been written, they were there, helping, offering suggestions, editing, and they stuck with him through the entire writing, editing, and publishing process. What’s amazing to me is not only that almost unheard-of author/publisher relationship, but with all that, there are some decidedly amateurish writing issues, such as a torrent of similes. Way too many! In one case, I found six similes, all unrelated, in a single six-sentence paragraph. And no one caught that stylistic issue? Still, for better or worse, of the four series I own, this is the only one that was ever finished.

The fourth one, the Master Li and Number Ten Ox series by Barry Hughart was supposed to be a seven-book series, but problems with his publishers destroyed his desire to finish, so there are only three books available. Apparently, the first book, Bridge of Birds, won major book awards, but his publishers never bothered to let him know. They also screwed up release of his books, so that when reviews were published, the books weren’t available. Also, with the third book, they published both hardback and paperback at the same time, which considerably reduced the sale of hardback books, making the publishers decide not to publish any more of his books in hardback, which limited his income. They also refused to consider promoting his books to any other market than the fantasy market, which again limited sales of his books. All of which made writing less than profitable. And killed his enthusiasm for the project.

My experience is closest to Hughart’s in that my publishers killed my desire to write. The first publisher fought with me over every little thing. I accepted a contract with him on the condition that I got to approve the final copy, but he still insisted on editing my books without telling me. Even worse, he (or the college kid he had edit them) actually added mistakes. I gave him one final chance, again with the caveat that if he made any changes, he’d let me see them, but he didn’t. In fact, he took a perfectly formatted book, one that was ready to be published (I’d been formatting books for him for years on a volunteer basis— silly me — so I don’t know what his problem was), but he redid the formatting so that there was no gutter allowance. (The gutter allowance allows room for the binding of a book, otherwise the text disappears into the binding.) He finally fixed the formatting and removed the mistakes he added, and mostly got it correct, but was angry with me for “self-publishing on his dime,” as he said. Though how can it be self-publishing when he has yet to send me any royalties?

My second publisher was great for the first book. He sent me the gallows to check, did a perfect cover, published in a timely manner. A truly awesome experience. Then, I don’t know what happened — Covid maybe? Anyway, whoever edited my second book for that publisher made a terrible change to my formatting, and by the time I realized what a mess of my book the editor had made, it was too late for the problem to be corrected.

[They separated the beat from the dialogue, putting each on a separate line, so it was impossible to tell who was saying what. A beat is the bit of action that is used in place of “she said.” For example:

The way it was supposed to be:

She sighed. “I am so disappointed in how the book turned out.”

They changed it to:

She sighed.

“I am so disappointed in how the book turned out.”

It’s not a big deal with a single bit of dialogue, but with a long back and forth, it got complicated. Even I couldn’t tell who was speaking since the person sighing and the person speaking could be two different people.]

I know the story is something to be proud of, but the way it was published utterly broke my heart as well as my will to write any more novels.

Hughart is dead now, so his series will never be finished. As I am still alive, there is a vague chance that I might write another novel, but I doubt it. It doesn’t seem worth the aggravation.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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Basically, a Basic Story

August 28, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s a book you never finished but still think about?
View all responses

When I saw this blog prompt, my first thought was to let it pass as I’ve been doing with most of the prompts, such as “If you could relive one year of your life, what would it be?” and “What are your five favorite apps on your phone?” Those subjects just don’t seem worth wasting any words on, and neither does this one. After all, if I ever kept thinking about a book I’d never finished, I’d just finish it and get it out of my mind.

My second thought was to write a tongue-in-cheek post, even though most of my whimsies seem to pass people by, but I couldn’t think of anything even dubiously fanciful to say.

Then it dawned on me that there is one book, or rather a series of books that I never finished and that I do think about. The Lord of the Rings. I’ve started those books multiple times because I wanted to like them, but I simply could not get immersed into the story even though the series is considered a seminal work. For most people, I think, the books were a revelation, but as one who had been studying myths, legends, quests, and fairy tales my whole life, the books seemed . . . flat. The framework of the story isn’t new — it’s the quintessential hero’s journey story, where a naïve person (or hobbit, apparently), leaves the ordinary world, sets out on a quest, meets allies and mentors, encounters obstacles, fulfills the quest, faces one last transformative ordeal, then returns home with an elixir or boon to transform the ordinary world.

This framework of the hero’s journey is written in our psyches — it’s as old as humankind and goes all the way back to the very beginnings of literature: The Epic of Gilgamesh. Other ancient examples are Beowulf, The Odyssey, and most of mythology; also, King Arthur, The Fisher King legend, fairy tales, The Wizard of Oz, and the tarot (the major arcana seems to be an outline of the hero’s journey). The examples of pre-Tolkien heroic epics are endless, and yet he’s the one everyone holds up as the epitome of the genre.

A lot of authors who have been called derivative either had never heard of The Lord of the Rings or had been writing before the series was even published, and the similarity comes about because they used the same source material. The truth is, writers have always drawn on those ancient tales for their stories, and so did Tolkien. (In fact, his ending, where Frodo sails away, is part of the King Arthur story.) Still, I keep thinking I should have managed to read his books. After all, I’ve read tens of thousands of books, including one heck of a lot that were boring, uninspiring, and downright awful, so I should have managed to read The Lord of the Ring trilogy. But nope. Each time I tried, I got a little further — into the second book the last time — but never quite got caught up in the story. Finally, to give me some idea of what the books were about, I watched the movies that were supposed to be the closest to the books, so I basically know the story. Which, basically, is a basic story. Admittedly, he did do things like create his own language, develop his own mythology, and use the etymology of words to build depth to his world, but none of that interested me. And still doesn’t.

I do not like fantasy (though oddly, the two book series I find myself rereading are both considered fantasy, which goes to show . . . something, I’m sure), so it makes sense that I wouldn’t like the most foundational book of all modern fantasy.

Still, I do think of the books — not the story — just the books and wonder if someday I’ll finally be bored enough that those books would seem exciting by contrast. But I don’t think so.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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Dealing With Uncertainty

August 20, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
How do you deal with uncertainty?
View all responses

Some people go through life absolutely certain about themselves, their opinions, their place in life, and life itself. Even as a kid I noticed this. There were some grade schoolers who absolutely knew without any tinge of uncertainty about . . . well, about everything. Those kids tended to be the leaders, the ones others would follow, perhaps, because like me, they were riddled with uncertainty. Unfortunately, for me, my uncertainty about myself, my place in life, and life in general, also encompassed those “certain” people, and so I just sort of “uncertained” my way through grade school, into high school, and into the rest of my life.

Because of that pervasive uncertainty, I learned to learn. I wanted to be certain, but I also wanted to be certain I was certain about things that were true, not just the things that everyone else was certain of.

During times of exceptional uncertainty — such as the years after Jeff died when I was left without an anchor, and so just hovered above life, trying to find something to tie myself to — I simply endured the uncertainty. I even learned to embrace it because after all, life is uncertainty. Some people are lucky, and their faith brings them a certain degree of certainty, but as an adult, I was never gifted with that sort of belief.

And so I deal with my uncertainty today the same way I always did, by trying to find out the truth.

This very idea of certainty and uncertainty is one I’ve been struggling with lately. People seem utterly convinced of the rightness of their ideals and politics and even their own righteousness, and yet, to me, they seem ignorant of any fact or historical context or perspective. Which is where my uncertainty grabs hold of me. If they are so certain of things my years of learning have taught me are wrong, maybe I am the one who’s wrong. So I go back and forth, seeking out the origins of my thoughts, digging deeper into history and finding people who know more than I do about certain subjects, and I seldom find I have to contradict myself, mostly, I think, because any idea I had or have was a long time forming. I try not to jump to conclusions, try not to believe something just because I want it to be true, and yet there is that dichotomy between what I have come to know are facts, and what lies and untruths other people are so certain are true.

I’m not in grade school anymore, and so I see that certainty for what it is — a belief some people hold on to because it’s what they were taught or have come to know through ticktock or wherever they get their ideas, and because they need that certainty. Since they are so convinced of their certainty, they feel free to blindly hate those who disagree without ever looking beyond the dark veil of their own certainty. Most people don’t even see they have a veil.

So what makes me think I don’t also have a veil? What makes me trust myself more than the “certain” ones? The same way I trusted myself in grade school — by not trusting. Not trusting the “experts,” not trusting the “certains,” not even trusting myself. And it’s this uncertainty, I think, that leads me often to a truth, sometimes even to a truth I dare not say because of the backlash from the “certains.” Uncertainty leads to study, to seeing what the “certains” are certain is true, seeing where they got their “knowledge,” and heading out from there.

In a discussion in the novel The Wise Man’s Fears by Patrick Rothfuss, a character defended a story he told that the others found pointless. “Not pointless,” he said. “It’s questions you can’t answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he’ll look for his own answers. . . . That way, when he finds the answers, they’ll be precious to him. The harder the questions, the harder we hunt. The harder we hunt, the more we learn.”

And that’s why I trust that my truth is closer to the truth than those who scream their epithets and polish the same old “facts,” and publish their vile insults.

Am I certain? No. And neither should anyone else be, but that’s always been the way. The “certains” are heard because they scream loudest while we uncertains quietly stumble around searching for more of the truth.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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An Interesting Quote

August 4, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What is your favorite quote?
View all responses

This isn’t my favorite quote since I don’t actually have one, but it’s something I read recently that hit a chord.

In the 1960s, psychologist Frank X. Barron set out to discover what made someone a creative thinker. He discovered that creative people seemed to have certain traits in common: independence; unconventionality; a vast inner life; a preference for complexity and ambiguity; a tolerance for disorder; the ability to extract order from chaos; and a willingness to take risks. He concluded:

“Thus the creative genius may be at once naive and knowledgeable, being at home equally to primitive symbolism and to rigorous logic. He is both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, occasionally crazier and yet adamantly saner, than the average person.”

What hit a chord with that quote is that I have many of those attributes while at the same time, I consider myself a rather average person, and certainly no creative genius or any kind of genius, for that matter. (In fact, a teacher once said to me: “I bet you think you have a high IQ, but you don’t. It’s average.” But she did admit I was creative, so there’s that.) I’m pretty much middle of the road in just about everything, and that’s because I can often see both ends to any spectrum, can often even feel both ends.

I consider myself to be logical, but then, there is that other part of me that is more mystical than logical. Both tend to keep me centered in the middle.

I’m not sure about primitive and cultured. I don’t consider myself either, so perhaps that’s another middle of the road thing?

And I am knowledgeable about many things, but unfortunately, I am also aware of huge blanks in my knowledge base where I know there are things to know but don’t know them.

Then there’s the “destructive” part of the quote — though I am constructive when it comes to gardening, for example, pampering my plants for the most part, I can also be extraordinarily destructive. Yesterday, I needed to prune an overgrown bush, but by the time I finished pruning it, there wasn’t much left but the bare trunks and branches that had been hidden in the middle of the foliage, so I destroyed the whole thing. Well, not completely, just chopped it way back so that it would be years before it grew unwieldy again. It certainly helped me get rid of my frustrations with all that’s going on in the world today.

I do think I’m sane, though during most of my younger years, I thought I was crazy. I can’t remember why, now — maybe because I was so different from people I knew, maybe because certain noises made me frantic, or maybe because my mental processes took me places I wasn’t comfortable with. I remember once being terrified of meeting a psychologist who was new to the family because I didn’t want her to be able to see my craziness. Luckily, I never met her, and now it wouldn’t be an issue. Age does wonders for an uncertain mind!

I’m just as glad not to be a creative genius, because being simply me is hard enough.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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The Joke’s on Us

July 31, 2026 — Pat Bertram

Sometimes I wonder if we are the victims of some sort of practical joke, as if those who are running things are giggling up their sleeves at how gullible we are. At the last minute, they will yell, “surprise!” And then they will triumphantly tell us that the Democratic frontrunners for the 2028 presidential election are all a joke and that someone really great is hiding behind the scenes.

Or they will tell us that the billions upon billions of dollars that have been stolen by fraudsters was all a minor misunderstanding, and that there’s nothing going on. It’s all in fun, you see.

Or they will tell us that they knew all along that those thousands of criminals with multiple charges let out on a cash-free bond (or simply not charged) would commit another crime, but so what? Apparently, we’re all spoilsports who can’t take a joke.

Or they will tell us that the push for Americans to cheer the Islamists as they spread terror throughout the world was simply their way of gigging us, and that of course no one supports them, especially not all the woke folk who would be immediately beheaded or thrown off a building if they brought their pride parade to that murderous regime.

Or they would tell us that the push for Communism in the United States isn’t really happening. That they just want everyone to be kind and to “share,” as if that forced sharing isn’t merely theft from the workers (who they profess to support) and given to those who don’t contribute anything.

Or maybe they would admit that just for fun, they turned everything around, that the so-called aggressors they wanted everyone to hate were really the victims merely trying to defend themselves.

Or maybe they are laughing themselves silly at the tragic irony of all those American-hating Muslims living in the vicinity of the greatest terrorist attack on the United States. And laughing themselves even sillier at all the mayors and other petty politicians who think they are world leaders.

Yeah, right. We might all be being duped, but unfortunately, it isn’t some sort of practical joke. Though maybe it is — I had to laugh at a video of people protesting the mayor of New York, and the speech-to-text program translated their yells as “Remove my dummy.” Unfortunately, he might be a lot of things, though I doubt he’s a dummy.

I’m lucky — none of that is visible from my yard, so if I turn off my computer, and go outside, those “jokes” becomes less real. What is real in my yard is no joke — plants struggling to survive in the heat, but so far, so good.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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Best Purchase Ever

July 23, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What is the best purchase you have ever made?
View all responses

All too often, these blog prompts leave me wordless. Literally wordless. In that I can’t think of a single thing to write. A recent prompt was if I could be an animal for a week, what kind of animal would I be. Yeah, wordless. I have enough trouble imagining myself as a human animal let alone any other sort of creature.

Another prompt was about what book inspired me to travel. How would I know? I’ve read tens of thousands of books. There’s no way I could pick out a single book. And anyway, as far as I remember, no book ever inspired me to travel — reading books was how I traveled. It was being left alone in the world with no place I needed or wanted to be that gave me the impetus to go on the road.

But this blog prompt? A no brainer!

The best purchase I ever made by far has been this house. I honestly never thought I’d be able to own a house, never really wanted the responsibility, but it’s been great, especially since it happened so late in my life. It’s nice to know I am where I will be until the end unless something drastic happens. It’s nice to know where I am going to be sleeping every night. It’s nice to have control of the temperature (the rooms I rented were either too hot or too cold, with no vote on where I wanted the temperature set). It’s nice to be able to do what I want with the yard.

It’s just . . . nice.

I was lucky to find a place I could afford to buy. (That window of opportunity has closed, so I truly lucked out!) It took a long-range move to get me here where I can live life under my own terms. Well, my terms and the weather’s terms. The weather does control a lot of what I do — when it’s too hot or too windy or too snowy, I pretty much have to stay inside where I can control my environment. It’s this modicum of control that confirms (as if I needed confirmation!) that this house is the best purchase I ever made, especially during these seeringly hot days. (Spell check wants to change “seeringly” to “sneeringly,” and while that might also be apropos, it’s not the word I chose.)

I wake up every day feeling grateful. And I give a last nod of gratitude every night.

Apparently, my best purchase was not just this house, but a life of gratitude, and that, too, is nice.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, books, dealing with old age, home, house, writing. Tags: , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Singing Our Laws

July 18, 2026 — Pat Bertram

People have often used songs and rhymes as memory aids. In fact, I still have to run through that ditty we learned in grade school when I need to know how many days in a month. You know the one:

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November,
All the rest have thirty-one,
Save February at twenty-eight,
But leap year, coming once in four,
February then has one day more.

To be honest, I only remember the first four lines; I had to look up the mnemonic to find out the last lines because I never need them. I know how many days February has.

A memory song we learned was the alphabet song, though again, I don’t need to ever sing it (and the world thanks me for that small favor) because I do know the alphabet.

Something I didn’t know until just now when I read it, was that in a lot of previous societies, laws were written in verse so that they could be sung in public places to inform people of the rules, and also so that they could be handed down the generations without the usual tendency of people to unwittingly change what they heard.

This made me smile, thinking about doing such a thing today. Can you imagine? We are long past the days of Moses’ 10 laws and Hammurabi’s 282. In fact, we have so many laws, they are uncountable beyond a guess that they are in the many millions, which makes sense when you consider that the Federal government, state governments, and some city governments all have dedicated legislative branches that do nothing but make up laws to pass. Often, those laws become obsolete, such as any laws pertaining to horses and buggies, though they are seldom removed from the books. More frequently, laws are piled one on top the other, though the first law, if upheld, would do the job. Such as insider trading. There are laws against insider trading, but apparently, Congress excused themselves from those laws (how, I don’t know), so now, if they really want to ban insider trading, they have to create new laws to ban something that is already banned. In addition to laws (or under the heading of law might be a better phrasing), there are millions of statutes and regulations. And any ruling by a judge in a trial becomes law if only by precedent.

So, all those laws now extant in the United States. How long to you think it would take to sing that song? Decades? And if they were all etched in stone like Hammurabi’s code, how many times would the necessary stone tablets encircle the earth?

Enquiring minds are simply . . . enquiring.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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Technology in 2046

July 16, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s a piece of technology you’re convinced will exist in 20 years?
View all responses

I’m not convinced anything will exist in twenty years. In fact, I truly doubt I will exist in twenty years, so it won’t matter to me what, if any, technology will exist at that time. Chances are, technology will progress as it always has, with artificial intelligence becoming more and more prevalent and changing human lives in ways we can’t even imagine. Of course we can’t imagine — the changes will be coming from non-human intelligence, something so alien that it certainly doesn’t care about anything human. Any pretense at human emotion emanating from those ones and zeros will be just that — pretense.

Besides, we have no idea, really, when and if a cosmic catastrophe will happen. Over the billions of years the earth has existed, there have been many such events, events that seem to have changed the earth’s environment almost overnight. We all know of such events — the dinosaur extinction and the wooly mammoth extinction, to name two. The prevalence of flood myths, of the world standing still, of night becoming day all seem to reference other extinction events.

The truth is, despite all our vaunted science expertise, we really don’t have that much knowledge about how the sun — or any other cosmic body — affected the earth over those billions of years. Our human history is such a tiny fraction of the earth’s history. We live in a rather temperate and stable time, when we think the way the world is today is the way it always was and always will be. What else explains the prevalence of mobile home parks being set up in tornado alleys, towns being constructed on flood plains, and people building cabins in fire zones? When terrible things happen to people in these areas, it’s always a shock, though it shouldn’t be. What is, wasn’t always. A dry flood plain today wasn’t always dry, and it’s still subject to rare and not-so-rare floods.

And if the cosmos weren’t enough of an inimical neighborhood, we have the political situation, too. Here in this country, it used to be the goals were the same, the differences in political parties were due to differences in the means of achieving those goals. Now the goals are so widely divergent they hardly seem to be describing the same country. Most people want us to remain a constitutional republic, but a growing vocal and volatile group wants to tear the whole thing down, get rid of the constitution, the government, the entire criminal justice system, and let chaos and poverty take over. (Which I don’t understand. What do these people think is going to happen to them when they have destroyed this country? They will be living here, too. Or are they so stupid as to they think they will be the ones running things? Or so brainwashed as to believe the country will suddenly become a utopia with no crime and Kumbaya everywhere?)

Some people believe we’re headed toward a civil war. Others think we’re heading toward a world war, complete with nuclear weapons going off everywhere.

I don’t want to believe either of those scenarios, just as I don’t want to believe in a major cosmic event, but what I’ve learned during my many years is that the world does not run on my beliefs. If it did run on my beliefs, we would be living in a utopia because everyone would be spending a lot of time at home, working in a garden, reading, or writing rather tame blogs without a lot of emotion, and certainly no rage or outrage. Just kindness and smiles for everyone — well, almost everyone.

Still, let’s assume there are no major upheavals, civil or cosmic, and in twenty years, the world is more or less continuing on the same road to total technology as it is today. I still wouldn’t have an answer to the question because I’m not convinced of much of anything, though I’m pretty sure technology will have outpaced my need for it. To be honest, it already has.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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Lifelong Learner

July 13, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
Are you a lifelong learner?
View all responses

For sure! I have always been a dedicated learner. From complicated subjects such as quantum physics to simple subjects such as the etymology of words, anything new to me has always been grist for my mental mill.

A lot of this desire to know is innate. I tend to think most of us are born with such a desire — all you have to do is watch a baby explore his new world or try to answer a toddler’s non-stop questions, to realize how true that must be. I’m not sure why so many people lose that interest, nor am I sure why I retained mine. Well, I do know two reasons — one is that I have always spent so much time alone, that there was no one to quench that desire to learn. Another is that when I was very young, everyone seemed to know so much more than I did, things like names of streets and the different shapes of leaves, which left me always trying to catch up.

It turns out that the reason they knew more was that they could see. I still remember after I got my first pair of glasses, I was looking out the car window in total amazement, and then I saw . . . street signs!!! And I realized that’s how everyone knew so much more than I did — they could see.

That realization didn’t make a difference, though. I still learned as much as I could as quickly as I could so I’d catch up, but I only ended up tormenting myself. I was one of those weird girls who read her school books the first day of school and then sat there bored out of her skull the rest of the year. So my learning came outside the classroom from any books I could get my hands on. (I wasn’t as fanatic as my brother who read the encyclopedia from cover to cover, though I did leaf through them — and the dictionary — and read what interested me.)

Somewhere along the line, perhaps because of the Taylor Caldwell books, I discovered there was a whole world of history we were never taught, and that gave me another area of study. And then, of course, there was health, writing, traveling, and so many other subjects that encompass the whole of the world.

Today, I keep my learning to gardening. It’s more of a hands-on kind of learning — trial and error — rather than book learning, but still, it’s learning. Come to think of it, though, I do spend a lot of time learning about the current state of the world, though I tend to think that subject is going to end soon since there’s nothing much I can do about any of it. But isn’t that the way of learning? Much of what we — or rather I — learn is simply learning for learning’s sake.

I suppose eventually, I’ll mostly be beyond this learning stage, not just for current events, but all subjects — though since my desire to learn has lasted decades, perhaps not, but still, there comes a point in almost every subject where I reach the end of what can be known (or what I can know, anyway) and then there’s no real point in going on. For example, I no longer am as fascinated by particle theories as I once was. It seems that particles can be broken down further and further until they reach a point where they no longer act as particles but as waves. So perhaps everything comes down to thought waves, brain waves, all sorts of waves. And if, in fact, everything exists as a possibility until it is “seen,” then that sort of makes learning less about finding out what exists and more about creating what might exist, which, to me, is pretty much a dead end.

Anyway, that’s more about my desire to learn than you ever wanted to know, but there it is.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in being me, books, history/myth, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 10 Comments »

Being Noticed

July 12, 2026 — Pat Bertram

It rained the night before last, enough rain that not only did I not have to water yesterday, it was too muddy to work in the yard.

So I went for a walk. It felt good being out and about despite the heat and humidity, though I actually did more visiting during that hour than walking. First, I chatted with a neighbor who was thrilled with the almost two inches of rain, and then we moved onto other topics, such as theft. Solar garden lights are disappearing around town. Both of mine outside the fence went first, then someone came into my fenced yard and took one of my expensive solar lights, so I put the remaining light in the garage, where it will be safe. Useless, but safe.

Apparently, kids are stealing them to use as nightlights on their bicycles. Even if they were caught, no one would do anything about it. The sheriff, of course, couldn’t care, and the new local police force . . . actually, I don’t know anything about them other than that this town decided not to rely on the county anymore. And that they have brand new vehicles. I guess I should count myself lucky I have no information about them — it means I have no need of their services.

I continued my walk, and on the way back, as I paused to look at a tiny rosebush, a woman came rushing out of her house and said, “I’m so glad to see you’re okay.” I’d been introduced to the woman once, and had never spoken another word with her, but apparently, she’d noticed I hadn’t been out walking for a while. She mentioned that another woman, one I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen, had also been asking about me. It’s nice to know people notice and care, but the truth is, by the time they realized I was missing, my corpse could have been moldering in my house for months. But still, it is nice. And weird, too, in a way.

It’s funny — every time I go walking, I realize how much I miss it, but then something happens, like the ground drying out and my needing to do yardwork as it did today, and I never get a chance to get back in the swing of daily walking. But maybe. Someday. When it’s not hot. Or windy. Or cold. Or snowy.

Oh, who and I trying to kid. There’s always an excuse. But yesterday, I did take a walk, and it was nice.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in being me, home, life, writing. Tags: , , , , . 2 Comments »
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