Well, that's a bummer. I had really hoped that the book would see the light of day at some point, as I felt it was important and had a unique take on that era. I'll read the essay with interest, however.

Thank you. Publication of the cut-down version is a possibility--I'm talking to a publisher who is at least interested. Someone (:-)) said the longer original was really two books, which suggests I didn't do a good job of merging the two aspects. At any rate I tend to agree that it's too long, and I found that I couldn't really preserve that dual aspect while cutting it significantly.

I could be charged with being too negative in saying that the shortened one is "so-so" as a memoir. I say that in comparison to, say, Mary Karr's first one, which is a brilliant and vivid narrative that mine can't compete with. But I'm not so modest as not to think it's as worthy as some recent memoirs that have gotten attention, e.g. Sohrab Amari's fire and water book (I can never keep that title straight).

I don't remember your mentioning that before. Looks interesting.

When I was writing that first version I was very conscious that I was going to need a good editor. It's probably not a good idea to start out that way. :-)

Glad you think so. I decided to go ahead and make the jump rather than fiddle and fiddle. I spent a while trying to get a link to recent comments from the navigation bar, because on small screens it puts that at the bottom, so you have to scroll a long way to see that list. But Typepad does not currently provide a way to do that.

I'll continue to tweak it. I just noticed the navigation links at the top are to the test blog so I need to fix that.

"have to look"? You should be seeing the new design whenever you visit the blog now.

"Why don't I have time to do the things I want?"

I've been asking that question for most of my life. It used to have a fairly straightforward answer--because I am solemnly obligated to do this, that, and the other instead. For instance, hold down a job. But now that I'm 85% retired*, the question comes back pointedly. "Well, I don't know. Why *don't* you? You have all this theoretically free time.

*I just had reason to check how many hours of paid work for my old employer I did last year and it came to about 8 weeks.

A very different font, definitely. Sans-serif vs serif is the big difference. It's actually larger than the old one, so it's not the size. I keep thinking it may be a little too big, actually. Whether one finds sans or serif easier to read is pretty much a personal preference, I think.

The line length varies with the size of the browser window, which the old one didn't. That's part of the "responsive design", as they call it. So you can resize your browser window to get a line length that's comfortable for you.

I'm pretty sure there's actually more, not less, space between the lines. Maybe it's the line length that's giving you that feeling.

Well, yeah, the essay's okay too. ;)

Personally I like serif better, but this is quite readable nevertheless. Maybe it is the font size that helps.

I notice that when actually typing in the combox the font is somewhat smaller, however. Don't remember if it was always that way.

Looks good, Mac!

By the way, in case you've missed it, the barely-useful Search function is missing. That's by choice. I'm going to try to set up a Google search for it although I'm not sure if I can integrate it with this design. I sort of hate to do that as I've been avoiding Google products, but it's really frustrating to have a Search function that at best only half works.

I hadn't thought of it that way. Excellent point.

That works. But it's sort of a pain.

You don't actually need the brackets.

Happily, then, [ and ] are adjacent on the keyboard (usually) and don't require the shift key. Though that doesn't apply if you're on your phone.