A short note today. I’m preparing for a presentation that I’m putting on in the morning on Edgar Allan Poe. I had been asked to do a presentation on Poe in August for a Sci-Fi event because Poe is one of the early masters of the science fiction genre and many sci-fi writers owe a big debt to him for his fanciful stories that relied upon popular pseudosciences of his day. But Poe also is responsible for inventing the detective mystery story. And this weekend the book store that invited me to give my presentation in August is having an event to honor the mystery genre.

They already had their event planned before the book store owner knew about me and my interest in Poe. So the schedule was already laid out and I wasn’t on it. But he had a cancellation last week with one of his performers and asked me to step in. So I’ve been preparing my presentation.

It won’t be as good as I’d hoped. Nothing is going the way I had planned. I don’t have the right equipment for streaming video from my PC and one week was too short notice to get what I needed so I’ve made a note to get the proper equipment before August. The book store owner’s projector is in the shop and mine is being recalcitrant so we’ve hit a snag there too. I may end up nixing my idea of streaming a YouTube video from my PC to a big screen or TV. If the audience is small enough then I may just run it from my laptop. That will be an on-the-spot decision.

To top it off, I can’t find my book of collected works of Edgar Allan Poe, a nice leather bound edition that I’ve had for years. It is no doubt packed up in a box somewhere and I went through all the boxes in my closet to look for it last night to no avail. It is likely in a box in a corner in my basement and I am just not up to digging through all that mess tonight. Oh well!

That means I’m going to have to give a short presentation tomorrow and keep it very simple. I’ll likely print poems from the Internet and read from that then talk a little bit about Eddy’s sad life. Short but sweet. Wish me luck.