The Starter Family
I was flat-out astonished to see my name in the obit and funeral program as “survived by.” I mean, they had to acknowledge my brother Dave, because Dave was the only one there when Jerry actually died. (He famously gave away Jerry’s eyeballs post-death: the poor nurse took the word of his “son” that that’s what Jerry would have wanted.) However, I’m pretty sure Jerry’s friends looked at the obit and said, “Wait, there’s another one?”
The Seeds
I don’t know why, but the box-in-a-box filled with mementos from Jerry’s funeral is also full of grass seed. I hope this isn’t some Oklahoma tradition, because that seed is all in my Dustbuster now.
The Novel
The novel is a 5 inch high stack of papers, all numbered, all out of order. Three different typewriters. Gary suggested we take it to an optical scanner, only I think it will be enough of a chore just to sort the pages. Besides, I know Dave said he kept a copy, so it’s possible someone else already did that. I glanced at one page and there was some spicy dialog; that’s all I know so far. The prospect of sorting the pages is daunting.
5 responses to “Big Box O’ Jerry Part Four: The Miscellany”
I have a sorting suggestion for you based on my time as a file clerk right after I graduated high school in 1979. (Obviously this is a very old school method, but it’s what I would do if I lived nearby and could offer to sort for you.) I’m spelling this out in detail not because I think you’re dim, but but because it’s one of those things that some people intuitively grasp and others simply do not…just a matter of how we’re wired and my wiring is optimized for shuffling papers.
Let’s say you have 1000 pages. You start by dividing it into 10 piles: 0-99, 100-199, 200-299, etc. Don’t try to get the pages in order at all, just get the into their centennial groups. If you get that done in one night, you can stack the piles in alternating directions (one widthwise, one lengthwise, one widthwise, etc) and leave them until you want to work on them again.
Next step is to take your 0-99 pile and divide it into 10 piles and sort by 10s. Once you’ve got the pages divided into tens it’s easy to quickly put 10 pages into order. After you have 10 pages in order 1-10, you can start piling them upside down in a box or something so that you’ll end up with a neatly stacked page-ordered novel when you’re done.
There are probably ways to do this much faster. This one has the benefit of being very workable in small stages while watching TV or conversing. It can also be customized to the amount of table or floor space you have available to work with. You can start with 4 piles of 250 pages each, you can start with 2 piles of 500, you can start with umpteen piles of 10 pages…my recommendation is to keep the number of piles as small as possible and drill down into the smaller divisions slowly.
If the pages are all the same size, you can just run it through a photocopier to scan it (behold, the things academia teaches you). At that point, if you have a tool that lets you swap page ordering (NAPS works well for me, but I haven’t tried it on anything novel-sized – it might get sluggish to an unwieldy degree at that scale), you can sort some pages, save the pdf, go live life, re-import that pdf, sort some more pages, save it, repeat.
It’s reasonably likely to be easier to physically sort the pages and then scan it via a digital photocopier feed, rather than shuffling things around on a computer – the digital copy is just easier to take on the road with you. (but either digital or physical could be a brainless activity done when you wake up too early in the morning, or while you listen to something, etc.)
(If you want, look up computer science easy sorting algorithms and see whether you like, say, bubble sort; I emphatically do not suggest trying to implement a physical version of Quicksort. But whatever you do, as Beth notes, it is key to pick a sorting method that does not require you to do it all at one time.)
(and I have no idea re: grass seed; was it stored in a garage and got grass seed spilled on it? Is it a Tradition? Did your brother pack up all the grass seed that he was instead supposed to sprinkle over the new grave? No clue.)
Beth – That was spooky – that’s almost exactly what I did. Thankfully, it wasn’t all random – he appears to have taken the the original (which I only have thirty pages of), chunked it in twenty page sections, made a copy, and wrote edits on the copy, and then incorporated them in to one of the copies I have. And then, scrambled all the sections. So, 365 pages, 2- 3 copies, it only ended up taking three hours or so. (And thank God I had those original pages 1- 30. Imagine – like a jigsaw puzzle missing all the edge pieces.) I had many stacks going in alternate directions, and then the handwritten drafts are set off with paper wrapped horizontally around them.
KC – Well, I do plan to do some scanning, but optical scanning, because if it has any redeeming qualities I want to edit it, and I’m not typing this thing. It’s an odd project, isn’t it? Spitefully editing your dead father’s novel? Or devoted editing it.
Once you have an image/pdf of the thing, OCR either can be applied or is already applied (depending on the scanner). (any character recognition is not perfect, but typed English-only no-diacritics ought to give you decent results from most programs; some of the cloud services claim to do OCR on handwriting, but I haven’t seen real-world results from that)(I’ve got at least one OCR program installed on this computer if you want.)
Probably a mix of spiteful and devoted, but yes, definitely a bit odd (but not odd in a bad way unless it’s a truly terrible book). But I don’t have anything against odd?
Thanks for the OCT info. I could scan it a little bit at a time, but I probably need to steel myself to read chapter one, first. it might be really, really bad.