Journal

December 18, 2019

Journal Box (DOG EAR)

‘ve written novels which have been represented by agents and published by publishing houses. I’ve self-published. I’ve self-promoted. I’ve given speeches about my subjects in public (shudder!). I’ve flogged in book shows. I’ve even written radio programs. And, of course, I blog (right?). I even proof-read for others. But here’s a new one. Now I’m a magazine editor. The south-east division of the National Model Railroad Association has had (for reasons unclear to me) issues with, well, getting out its issues. Nothing has shipped for a half-year (should be quarterly). This makes the fact that everyone identifies me as a […]
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February 20, 2020

Toil (DOG EAR)

kay, I just got out my second edition of the Journal Box, the National Model Railroad quarterly newsletter. On the good side, it was not the suddenly can-you-do-it rush it was the first time around. And I wasn’t fighting an unfamiliar tool (MS Publisher). And we had a hard submission deadline – Feb 15th at midnight, and NO EXCEPTIONS (last time they were trickling in two days later, tormenting my formatting with every inclusion). So things were a lot more stable. Still, last Thursday I started cleaning up a copy of the first one I’d done for the second. Looked […]
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May 14, 2020

Print Ready (DOG EAR)

t’s that time of the quarter again. Tonight is deadline for The Journal Box, a model railroading publication that I assemble four times a year. And it’s a real labor of love. This is the all-important election edition so I’ve been getting biographies of candidates (as well as the division reports). And these communications come in all sorts of formats – I get emails, text files, Word docs, and even PDFs (which I need to strip the text out of). All of these I gather into one Word document so I can sort them and then shift them to Publisher. […]
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November 9, 2023

Out of the Box (DOG EAR)

was starting to gear up to assemble the winter issue of The Journal Box. This is a model train newsletter for the local region of the National Model Railroad Association. Years back, a friend of mine needed an editor (the entire publication had fallen off the face of the earth). So I agreed to step in and do it, even though I didn’t know anything about Microsoft Publisher. Slowly learned it and started assembling these quarterly, adding a bit of a whimsical touch and some jokes here and there as I filled the pages with layouts, news, and coverage of […]
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