Showing posts with label Bucks County Courier Times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bucks County Courier Times. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Goodbye, Mr. Briggs
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| A STACY BRIGGS III: The guardian of meticulous |
the worlds of science, science fiction and fantasy, and whom many fans of the genre – if not the general public – knew.
This time that’s not the case.
Few people will know who A. Stacy Briggs III was, and why should they?
He wasn’t an actor in some genre TV show or movie – though he was quite the character. Nor was he a creator of a comic book, novel, film, or television series beloved by us geeks. He wasn’t even one the many behind-the-scenes talents who help produce one of those things. In fact, as far as I know, other than a love of reading, Stacy Briggs had nothing to do with the worlds of science fiction and fantasy.
So why, then, am I placing him up there with the likes of Ray Bradbury, Leonard Nimoy and Stephen Hawking and devoting my monthly column to him?
Because, as well as being a friend, colleague and sometimes mentor, Stacy Briggs was a true master of his craft: writing.
You see Stace – as those who knew him often called him – devoted his life to newspaper journalism and the telling of stories. He may not have been known by many outside the newsroom, but for the last 50 years, the citizens of Bucks County, Pa benefited from his work at The (Doylestown) Intelligencer and the Bucks County Courier Times.
As a fellow former colleague of ours said at his recent memorial service, “Stacy was the guardian of meticulous.” Nary was there ever a coma out of place in the stories he edited or the pages he proofed. And forget about a grammar or spelling errors. Nothing got past his infamous red pen.
Lord only knows how many times he used it on me and on the stories and pages we produced together. I always tried to produce clean copy, but no matter how many times I went over my own story or read over copy from another reporter, Stace would always find something I missed.
This could be annoying, especially when we were pushing deadline (or past it), but I always appreciated that desire to get everything right. While he would rib me from time-to-time (okay, it was more like constantly) about my less than perfect spelling, it never came from a mean place nor a desire to prove he was better than me or anyone else. He just wanted everything to be correct, and as Mrs. BlueScream often reminds me, Stacy and I did share one common trait. We were/are both CDO (which is similar to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, only the letters are in the correct order – the way they should be).
In fact, one of my fondest memories of working with him came one summer Saturday evening, when we were putting out the Sunday paper. Mrs. BlueScream had given me a new t-shirt for my birthday, on the front of which was the saying: “Is anal retentive hyphenated?”
I had worn the t-shirt just for him, and as soon as he saw me in it, I remember his brow furrowing and him casting me one of his disapproving looks and saying, “That’s NOT funny.”
But Stacy was more than just the newsroom’s grammar Nazi and punctuation police. He cared just as deeply about getting the facts of a story correct as he did about the way a story was told. Like most decent copy editors, Stacy could take the worst piece of writing and polish it until it shone. Yet unlike some other editors, he took time to coach the writers he worked with to produce better copy so he didn’t have to do that.
At his memorial service, person after person told stories of how Stacy influenced them: from the former sports editor who’d occasionally receive marked up copies of his section with Stacy’s comments on how to make the stories better to a reporter who said that when she first started at the paper, he recommended that she use the same “voice” she used in her columns in her news stories to make them more interesting and compelling.
All these stories started me thinking about all the ways Stacy influenced me and my writing. It took a while, but I suddenly realized that my often obsessive desire to find exactly the right words or phrase to get my point across comes from my time working with him. Yes, it often slows me down as I write and rewrite the same few lines struggling to get them just right. Yet I know in the end the time I take to do that is worth it, because it’s improved my writing ten-fold.
So for his contribution to the craft of story-telling and his influence on me to always strive to get it right (or write?), I think A. Stacy Briggs III does belong enthroned among the superstars of sci-fi/fantasy, that I’ve written about in the past. Because anyone so devoted to his craft and to helping other story-tellers deserves some recognition even if he shunned it during his life.
I just hope that he’d approve of this story and find no reason to red pen it.
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Proof I can create more than just a virtual desktop
I liked that slogan so much, I made it the motto for my company, Price Consulting Services, LLC and even put it on my business cards.
Well four years on, I’ve finally gotten a chance to prove I could actually do just that.
In fact, I’ve spent just about the entire month of August building a mammoth, 9½-foot-wide news anchor desk for a local online sports show called Game On.
While you can check out the fruits of my labors at the link above, I’d thought I’d share with you a series of pictures documenting its construction, from picking up the wood at my local big-box hardware store to its final delivery on set.
STEP 1: Designing the desk in SketchUp
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STEP 2: Buying the lumber
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| It's truly amazing how much lumber you can actually fit into a Honda Civic! Everything you see on the cart at left, actually made it into my truck and stayed their for the 20 minute drive home! | |
STEP 3: Cutting the parts down to size:
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| Using my compound miter saw, I cut out all the various parts for the desk base and then used my table saw to square up all those parts. It took me an entire day to do this. | |
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The top and bottom sub-assemblies had to be glued up in a few stages because the weird angles made clamping it all at one nearly impossible.
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After the top and bottom sub-assemblies dried, I attached them to the legs to form a right and left base. At 9.5 feet wide, I had to make the desk in two parts, so the finished product would be easier to move.
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STEP 7: Fitting the base to the top
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STEP 8: Covering the base
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STEP 9: Assembly complete!
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| From the front, (left) the desk has a nice rail and panel look to it. But since the rear (right) will never appear on camera (at least not on purpose anyway!) I didn’t make any attempt to hide the 2x4s that give the desk its strength. The circular knobs on the center legs and top center support are actually window latches that are used to lock both sides of the desk together. | |
STEP 10: Painting
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| The desk got two coats of gray primer (left) and after that dried, I began to apply its final topcoat (right): a glossy black paint.
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The "Game On" program is shot on a green-screen stage so a CGI background can be added later. The producer has since told me that now that they have such a nice desk, they are thinking of building a real set around my desk! | |
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