Week in Review: Week 42

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“Southbury Sunset,” October 21, 2022.By Howard Fielding. Offered under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Despite the lack of posts, it was a productive week on multiple fronts.

First, the extra time from the postponement of my interview with The History Channel allowed me to dive deeper into the Bubble Wrap origin story. I now have a new theory that makes sense given family history and a history of the inventors. Marc Chavannes had numerous European patents before coming to the U.S., and all point to a very different goal than we thought.

I’ll post about that later. It also gave me time to contact the current management of Sealed Air Corporation about the company history. Most of the original team have passed on by now. The current team are all younger than the original Bubble Wrap. For that matter, I was only a toddler when the first bubble came out of a machine.

Second, I pressed on in my journals and got some more fodder for posts from a young writer. The personal journals go on for one or more pages a day. The desk calendars, though, kept only entries about written projects. There’s nothing about the “Margery” play in 1978 or 1979, except to set a goal at the beginning of 1979 to finish the play by the end of the year. Shortcutting through the desk calendars spared me many hours of reading two years’ worth of the personal books.

I didn’t even open “Margery” in 1979. Most of that year was spent freelancing, job-hunting, and working for local newspapers, just as I had set out to do. It wasn’t until 1981 that I started making notes about rewriting/retyping the play. So that gave me material to close the next chapter in “Harry Houdini and the Witch of Beacon Hill,” the book I am writing about writing the play.

Next week: More research on the history of Sealed Air, both for this blog and the interview. I’m also following up on an opportunity to volunteer writing and website building for a nonprofit. Deadline work on a church project will take up the rest of the time. I always put my clients first before my own work, and God is client #1.

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