Graduation

One of the students I have been tutoring and mentoring for two years is graduating today with his postgraduate diploma. He tells me he will return next year if he is awarded his Masters so I may be going to another of his graduations. The only difficulty is that as a Solomon Islander he is afraid of my guide dog so Jay is going to stay home with my neighbour for the afternoon. I hope he is ok as I have only left him for short spaces of time before.

Reading is still a very difficult occupation for me at present, I am engrossed in Katherine Mansfield's life on my VRS and seem to be getting through 1-2 hours a night of this fascinating story. I wonder if she had received more support from her family if she would have been more successful and lived longer. I am only too well aware of the fate renegades suffer when they choose to ignore family, perhaps a little understanding if she had approached them may have saved her.

I received the latest issue of NZ House and Garden yesterday and promptly devoured the first two stories. Increasingly I am having to use my Humanware MYReader CCTV to read magazines and other publications with tiny print which makes it very time consuming. I wonder if publishers realise when they put print on photos it makes it very difficult to read under any circumstances.

I interviewed a famous cellist and conductor at the weekend, she destroyed 4 days of work by rewriting everything I wrote editing and changing then demanding we put in an advertisement for a concert which will occur after the publication of Dionamic. Now she is demanding to choose the photographs we put in, what a b!

I heard a radio interview yesterday in which they said the issue of ISBN numbers had increased by many hundreds of thousands over the last 10 years. While much of this could be attributed to an increase in self publishing I was surprised to hear this was not so. Only 30% of the numbers issued were for online and self published books which bodes well for the old fashioned publishing business.