Write, Revise, Edit, Repeat

On the Nature of Time

Where did June go? I’ve been trying to write at least one post every month. Hardly a goal at all, but I seem to have missed it entirely for the month of June. Hello, July! I did get out to see my family in Cleveland, which was really wonderful even if it was a sad occasion.

Clay Bodies manuscript-in-progress

While I didn’t stick with the 1000 Words of Summer that I was so excited about, I did manage to write about 12k words over the month of June, but word count can be misleading. It doesn’t account for all of the rewrites where you end up with the same number of words, but in a more compelling arrangement. Overall, I ended May with 55k words and ended June with 67k, where I am still at. 262 pages. I don’t think it will get much longer at this point. Mostly, I write a little, cut a little, write a little, cut a little. I’ve gone back to the beginning and am working my way forward, rewriting the crappy parts and deleting things that ultimately don’t belong in this particular book.

My research continues to unearth surprising facts, which is mostly a good thing. I am trying to synthesize all of the new-old information. I can imagine writing another 20k words, but still ending up around the 70k word mark (the midpoint for an average-length memoir) when I’ve finished the manuscript.

For research, I’m currently reading/listening to The King and Queen of Malibu by David K. Randall. You might be thinking, don’t you already own that book? Yes, indeed I do. But finding time to sit and read is hard. Listening while driving or working on other non-writing tasks has already gotten me to the halfway point in the book—much further than I’d gotten in the two years since I acquired it in hard copy.

A little disappointing is that there isn’t much in there about my great-grandfather Rufus and his role with Malibu Potteries, in spite of that being the income source which funded much of the fight against putting through the highway that we now know as PCH, or Highway 1. However, it is providing lots of historical context and information about the people Rufus worked for and what life was like back in that era.

Quest for a Sunflower

Weekends, my husband and I make the rounds of antique stores in search of pieces of Brad Keeler Artwares, e.g. my grandfather’s ceramic figurines and tableware. True, you can find many of his pieces on eBay, but where’s the fun in that? It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, to use a gross analogy. But whereas we used to routinely find his work out in the wild, it’s become increasingly rare, and the ones we do find are generally the more common pieces. With that in mind, I have been looking more at eBay, focusing on pieces that are especially hard to find.

During one of my google research sessions, I came across an entire archive of copyright entries from the Library of Congress; scanned index cards that list the name of the applicant and the name under which it was being registered, description of the item, etc. I was surprised to find one where he was the copyright applicant but not the copyright owner. There are only two that I’m aware of that were done this way, though there may be others out there that I haven’t discovered yet.

The one I’m sharing today is a large sunflower serving dish. It was a promotion for the makers of “Breast O’ Chicken Tuna.” (Don’t ask me about the name. I just work here.)

Through my connections online I met a collector named Barrie Getz who has some interesting things in her collection including molds for some of the pieces. She sent me the below, which is a match to the index card. The sunflower serving platter was an exclusive, for a giveaway in a contest promoting canned tuna.

So I’ve been searching and searching and finding nothing, until one day I decided to just search “sunflower serving dish” in vintage and antiques. And there it was.

I found it while standing in line to board my flight to Cleveland! I immediately bought it. You might have noticed that it’s not signed by Brad Keeler, so how do I know for sure that it is his? Well, I noticed the copyright says B.C. and referencing the copyright entry I know it was registered to Barnes Chase Co.

It was being sold by a seller who had no idea what they had, and I had been unable to find it because there would be no way to know just by looking at it.

Now it’s mine! And it’s pretty!

I’ll close with a cute kitten that I also bought off eBay. I’ve written about the tell-tale “pie slice” of white in the eye of Brad Keeler Artwares figurines, but I was wrong to say that it’s always there. In fact, there seem to be variations and a number of the cutesy animal figurines have entirely different. Add to that that I’ve been noticing that other makers also include the pie slice reflection technique, so, yes, I am still learning. But whatever I learn, I plan to share. Until next time.