Milam's Notes
IntroductionMilam's Notes was originally inspired by Long's Notes,
written by Lazarus Long, a fictional character in a Robert A. Heinlein
science fiction story. My best recollection is that the story was
Methuselah's
Children but that might be wrong. I don't remember for sure.
Also, I don't remember when I first began Milam's Notes. It
must have been sometime during the early 1970s. Anyway, when I began
Milam's
Notes, I intended for them to be the same sort of thing that Lazarus
Long did in the story. In recent years, I haven't added much to the
collection. Most of the thoughts that would otherwise have been added
to the collection have, instead, gone into the
Frontiersman. When I first began Milam's Notes, I wrote them on 3 x 5 note
cards. When I first transferred the collection from the original
note cards onto 8 1/2 x 11 paper, using a typewriter, I organized them
chronologically with the undated notes first. The chronological order
made it simpler to update the collection by simply adding new pages at
the end. Later, for some forgotten reason, I moved the undated notes
to the end of the collection. Some time after that, again for a forgotten
reason, I revised the collection into reverse chronological order.
During the middle 1980s, I switched from a typewriter to a computer and
reorganized the collection into topics. With a computer, I could
easily insert changes wherever I wanted them and reprint the collection.
Therefore, the chronological order wasn't necessary any longer.
Milam's Notes is still organized into topics but, within each
topic, there isn't any particular order to the notes. I recall trying,
for a while, to sort the notes rationally within the topics. However,
most of the notes are independent of one another so any rational ordering
of them within the topics is elusive. Even putting a particular note
into a particular topic can be somewhat arbitrary. More recently,
I've put the notes into whatever order in the topics would cause them to
fit the pages the best. That has changed from time to time as I've
used later versions of the word processor. Such later versions have
often resulted in changes in the way that things fit on the pages.
The order in which the notes appear isn't relevant anyway. Read them
in whatever order you want.
Occasionally, over the years, I've corrected the grammar, the punctuation,
and the choice of words that I used in some of the notes. I'm still
doing so and will probably continue to do so. However, for each such
change, I try to make each revised note convey more correctly the idea
that I'd originally intended when I first wrote it. Also, I've occasionally
removed notes that no longer seemed appropriate, sometimes in the light
of more recent thinking. Therefore, Milam's Notes aren't as
I originally wrote them. Regarding such modifications of my own previous
work, I distinguish myself from The Ministry of Truth in Orwell's 1984
by the fact that the original version of the collection remains available.
Many of the intermediate versions are also available. I doubt seriously
if all of the intermediate versions remain in existence. In the normal
confusion of life, I expect that I probably lost some versions and forgot
to print other versions before I changed them.
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