An Arrow Through The Air

Still Thinking About This Blog

2012-02-19T16:10:00.000-06:00

Last June, when I started up my writer's website and included a blog with it, I decided to keep An Arrow Through the Air, but to try to change the focus. The blog at davidatodd.com would be about my writing in a way that fans would care about, while this blog would be more about my writing journey. And I'd throw in a few other things, such as book and movie reviews.

Since the title of the blog is a great metaphor from the writing of John Wesley, I thought I could make this blog about metaphors of life. The problem is, metaphors of life just haven't been coming to me. Possibly it's the engineer in me, and all the straight-forward technical stuff I do that keeps me from thinking metaphorically. That's a problem with my poetry. I tend to tell stories without putting in many metaphors. Or if I do use a metaphor, it's master metaphor, more allegory-like than a small metaphor to make a point. A chink in my poetic armor, you could say.

I'm at my office today, a Sunday, having come here after a great worship service and Life Group class. I have some things going on the end of next week and the week following, and I wanted to get ahead of the curve a little. I found I did all the things I wanted to do within a half hour, which gave me some time, if I wanted to take it, to finish some research for The Candy Store Generation, to clean up some stuff that wasn't on the to do list, to send out notices about our writers group meeting tomorrow night, and to come to this blog. Now that I'm here, I can't think of a single metaphor of life to write about.

Perhaps something will come to me at a time when I least expect it, and I'll be at a point where I can capture it and put it in tangible form for later development. Perhaps I need to quit trying so hard to come up with metaphors, and let them come naturally. If they don't come that may be an indication that I'm not supposed to be a poet.

This week I spent more time in my current reading book, War Letters. These are letter from Americans during our various wars, from the Civil War, World War 1, World War 2, Korean War, Vietnam, the Gulf War, and Bosnia/Kosovo. I still have 120 pages to finish the book. I keep looking in these letters for things that can become metaphors. Instead, in the Korean War letters, I found fodder for The Candy Store Generation. That's a good thing, but it doesn't help me with my other writing goal.

Maybe I need to get back to critiquing poetry. I haven't critiqued a poem at the Absolute Write forums in around six months. I think when I get home I will critique a poem there first, before I work a little on TCSG and reading. We'll see how it goes.

All of which probably does little to enlighten my few readers, and probably explains whey I don't have many people following my blog.

Movie Review: Iron Lady

2012-02-16T21:11:00.000-06:00

Lynda and I saw The Iron Lady at the Carmike Cinema on Tuesday night. Being a fan of Margaret Thatcher, and having seen a number of trailers, I was interested in seeing this. It is an excellent movie, and I found only one item about it disappointing: It was too short. The showing started at 7:05 PM. When you figure the ads for other movies and the concessions probably took 15 minutes, the actual movie started about 7:20. We were walking out after the credits at 9:05. That meant the actual story was just a little over 90 minutes. Since many themes were not fully explored, I would have liked at least another half hour.

I liked the way the movie started, with Thatcher walking to a small grocery store unnoticed, some number of years after she left the prime ministership. She then returned to her apartment to hallucinate about her dead husband. The thoughts of that old woman kept going back to two different eras, with one vignette into a third. The views of Thatcher's entry into politics as a young, single woman provided information I had no prior knowledge of. There was also one view of Thatcher's childhood.

Most of the flashbacks were to the years Thatcher was prime minister. This time I expected to know much about. However, I was surprised to be watching scenes I knew nothing about. The riots by striking workers, the IRA activities in England, the bombing of the hotel where the Conservative party was holding a convention—I didn't know of any of that. And I realized: Thatcher was prime minister from 1979 to 1990. I spent five of those years in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. In the pre-Internet, pre-cable and satalite TV era, those two countries were not actually places where news coverage was complete. I never heard of most of that. It gave me a greater appreciation for her accomplishments. I had an idea that she changed the U.K. with relatively little opposition. I learned instead that she did it in the face of much opposition.

The move was well put together. Meryl Streep is very believable as Thatcher. The mixing up of times, including Thatcher interacting with her dead husband, kept you on your toes as to what was happening. Given the amount of time in the movie, they really didn't explore some things as much as I wish they had, such as Thatcher's road to conservatism in her youth, or the relations between she and her children. They alluded to some degree of estrangement, but weren't very specific.

The Iron Lady may have run out its string in the theatres, but if you haven't seen it, and have a chance to see it, by all means do. It's well worth the price.

Every day more examples for "The Candy Store Generation"

2012-02-14T11:31:00.000-06:00

It seems California is so broke that they have totally cut State funding to libraries. Over at the forums of the writers site Absolute Write, we writers have been engaged in a debate over this. Unfortunately, the debate has devolved into politics, rather than a roundtable discussion. I guess that’s to be expected with such a topic.

I don’t generally get into political debates on this blog, as I want the subject matter to be as inclusive as possible. This is about my writing journey, and how through that I want my life to have more impact than just an arrow through the air. But my work-in-progress, The Candy Store Generation, is a political book. And the subject matter of that political book dovetails nicely with the story about libraries in California being the latest in that State’s financial woes. At other places where writers gather, the conventional wisdom is that if your blog isn’t attracting visitors you aren’t giving them anything of value. Hopefully this will be of value, as it describes something of my book.

I hope some of you will go to the Absolute Write thread and read some of it. No password is necessary. The essential information is that the State is cutting funding to local libraries. The State is broke. They don’t have money to fix roads and bridges. How could they possibly have money at the State level to fund libraries at the local level? Solutions proposed by some of the posters are: tax the rich more (even up to 90 percent); don’t fund road improvements as libraries are more important; go to a partial fee-based system; raise sufficient funds at the lowest possible level of government (township, city, county) to fund the library. That last one is my proposal.

This all seems to be symptomatic of something I feature in TCSG: the fascination with other people’s money (OPM). One of my chapters is titled “The O.P.M. of the People.” Borrowing is using OPM. The local community, in receiving tax money from the State to fund their local library, is using OPM. But wait, you say, didn’t the people in that local community give money to the State in the form of income taxes, real property taxes, personal property taxes, sales taxes, excise taxes, and just about every form of taxes you can think of paid by their residents? Sure they did, and the community wants it back. They don’t understand that those funds come back to them after a 5 percent handling fee—only 5 percent if they are lucky and they happen to have an efficient State government. Or maybe that’s a classic oxymoron.

The other problem with OPM through taxes is that even the wealthier communities will want their share. The City powers-that-be will see it as a way to avoid raising taxes, and will be only too happy to get some “free money” from the State. And being wealthier and perhaps better able to lobby or fill out grant applications, they are as likely to receive OPM from the State to fund their local library. Except it really isn’t OPM. It’s their own money returned to them after a State handling charge minus whatever part is transferred to poor communities. So it’s pretty much a shell game.

When it comes to taxes, there may be no such thing as OPM. If you live in this nation, you pay taxes. The AW thread has a contention that 80 percent of library patrons don’t pay taxes. What rubbish. Everyone pays taxes. I know what that poster was thinking. Since approximately 50 percent of the population doesn’t pay income taxes to the Federal government, everyone thinks these people don’t pay taxes. Since public library users could reasonably be expected to come disproportionately from the poorer classes, who can’t afford to buy books for themselves, the 80 percent of library patrons not paying income taxes is a reasonable assumption.

But I still contend that these people do pay income taxes; they just don’t write their checks to the Feds. They write their check to the landlord, who takes a part of that payment to pay his income taxes. They write their check to the grocery store, which uses a part of it to pay their taxes. And the part of it they use to pay their employees is in turn sent in to the Feds to pay their taxes. So those who don’t write an income tax check to the Feds still pay income taxes. They just don’t know it. And everyone thinks “tax the rich.” Where do they think the rich get their money? And why would they think the rich just won’t raise prices higher to cover their higher tax bill? I really believe taxes at all levels fall heaviest on the lower classes regardless of who writes the checks to the government.

I’ve been struggling with some of the content for TCSG. I think today I found something to use as an example.

Progress on the Harmony

2012-02-10T11:23:00.001-06:00

As I’ve written on this blog before, for several years I’ve been working on writing a harmony of the gospels. I won’t repeat what I’ve written before, but direct those interested to any of these posts for a description.

Can the four gospels be harmonized?

Analyzing the Chronology of Gospel Events
To Post or Not to Post
Still Writing with the Flow

I thought I should give a progress report. Early last year I was working hot and heavy on what I call Passage Notes. These are where I put parallel passages side by side in a table, divide them into small units, and explain the process I went through to harmonize the passage. I made a lot of progress early in 2011, maybe even through mid-year, then pulled off. My mind was tired of it at that point, and other writing interests had hold of whatever gray cells I could muster.

Then late in 2011, having completed a number of other projects, I picked up the Harmony again. This time I went to the Appendixes. These differ from the Passage Notes in that they analysis of broader issues that must be addressed in a harmony, such as the chronology of Jesus’ life and apparent or actual duplication of teaching, events, miracles, etc. As I began again this work, I had ten appendixes identified by name and purpose, and eight of them started or complete.

First I took time to address how many appendixes were needed. I looked at some other publications of or about harmonies, and saw what they covered and what they ignored. I compared that to what I considered important by way of explanation, and came up with a final list. I’ll need thirteen appendixes to explain what I feel needs to be explained. As of November/December of last year I had seven of thirteen either complete or well along, one about a third done, and five as title only or maybe an opening paragraph.

So I set to work on the appendixes, and by mid-January had completed three of those, plus the one that was half done is now seven-eighths done. At that point I shifted back to the Passage Notes. As I resumed work on them I looked ahead and saw that I really didn’t have as much to do on them as I thought I did. I thought I might have six months more writing to do, but I actually finished the Passage Notes yesterday—subject to editing and proofreading, of course. So now it’s down to two and one-eighth appendixes, and the book will be complete.

I know some people will ask, “Why spend so much time on a non-commercial project?” My only answers are because I want to, and because I can. It has been a rewarding experience. I have a much better understanding of the gospels as a result of this, especially how our orthodox understanding of Jesus requires all four gospels. No one of them tells the whole story, though each of them, in their own way, tells a complete story. How’s that for inspiration?

So the long work is nearing completion. Yesterday and today I worked on adding bookmarks and cross-references between the Passage Notes and the harmony text. I will likely finish that on Monday or Tuesday. The next step will be to print a proofreading copy. I’ll slowly proofread it while at the same time get back to work on the last couple of appendixes. I believe I may have some text done on one of them, residing somewhere in a separate document. I also want to add some references to all the appendixes. I consulted a number of scholarly works throughout the writing, but haven’t added the references. It’s time to do so.

Somedays

2012-02-07T14:43:00.000-06:00

Someday: I'll conquer my weight problem. The urge to use food for comfort will subside; the overwhelming urge to have my belly full will diminish, and my body with it. The forty year struggle will be over.

Someday: I'll get ahead of the financial curve. Debts assumed for others will be paid, or reassigned. The mortgage will be paid. My salary will get above where it was in 2003. The need to accumulate things will be gone. And the constant pressure to worry about having something for retirement will be over.

Someday: The anger at "things" that come up in life, generally things outside my control, will be gone. The anger was learned, not natural. So hopefully, someday, I'll return to my natural state.

Someday: I'll learn to use graphics software, so I can do my book covers myself.

Someday: We'll have more than 2 people attend writers group.

Someday: ...The stupid pharmacy automated calling system will stop interrupting me when I'm typing blog posts.

Movie Review: "War Horse"

2012-02-01T08:05:00.000-06:00

After not seeing War Horse when we had some opportunities to, we finally made the time last night. It's a good movie. It's now at the end of its run. Only seven of us saw the 7:10 PM showing last night. I can't imagine they would have many at the 10:20 PM showing, not in this retirement community. So this review probably comes too late to help anyone else make a decision of whether to see it or not. But review it I shall.
It's the story of a boy and his horse in Scotland. The boy's dad, a closet drunk, buys a thoroughbred yearling at auction, for a ridiculous price, when he's supposed to buy a work horse. Somehow the boy trains the horse, and gets him to plow. But due to the price of the horse and farm losses, the family can't make the rent. So the tenant farmer sells the horse, the only thing of real value that he has, to the army, as England is about to fight what we now call World War 1. As the boy and his horse part, he vows to find the horse wherever he is. The boy is too young to enlist, though not by much.

The bulk of the movie follows the horse, Joey, as his officer-owner falls in the first action, he's taken by the Germans, he winds up with a French jam maker and his granddaughter, ends up back with one side in the war, then the next, then gets caught in no man's land. He is rescued from there by the combined efforts of a British soldier and a German soldier under a mini-truce, and, though severely injured from barb wire, is led back to the British side. The boy who trained him is now in the Army in that very sector of a long, long front, his eyes bandaged after a gas attack. When he hears that a special horse has just been rescued, he figures it's Joey, whistles for him, and the horse responds just before being put out of its misery because of its injuries.

As I said, it's a good movie. But I was a bit disappointed. I didn't think the trailers did much to clue us in as to what the story was about. The reliance on coincidence to bring Albert and Joey together at the front is a bit hard to take. Some of the special effects, such as a snowstorm near the end (or was that flying ash, I wasn't sure), could have been better.

On the other hand, the depiction of how the war destroyed the land was excellent. The scene where Joey was part of a horse team pulling artillery was excellent. The home scenes before the war were great.

Maybe the build-up of the movie was over done, and caused me to set my expectations too high. I was expecting a once in a decade production, and all I got was a great, great movie. If you have a chance, if it stays around in theatres a bit longer, by all means see it. It was good wholesome entertainment, and the $9.00 I paid (two seniors tickets) was well spent.

"Mom's Letter" featured in Short Story Symposium

2012-01-30T14:33:00.000-06:00

Take a look:

http://shortstorysymposium.blogspot.com/2012/01/moms-letter-by-david-todd-short-story.html

This short short story actually has two covers. Here's the one on the Smashwords version thumbnail.

Too Old To Play

2012-01-26T08:53:00.000-06:00

Just a quick announcement that my new short story, "Too Old To Play", went live at the Amazon Kindle store today. It's about 2,300 words, and tells another part of Danny Tompkins dealing with his mother's death, both as a teenager and then years later as an adult.

I hope to have it available soon at Smashwords, and thus for other e-reader formats.

Writing Dreams

2012-01-25T09:08:00.001-06:00

Literary agent Rachelle Gardner posted today on her blog a question from reader about writing dreams. Here's the thread. I made posted a comment, which I think will make for a good blog post here. The question Rachelle asked was: Have you had to adjust your dream (i.e. dream of being a writer) along the way?

Yes, I have constantly adjusted my dreams for writing. I think they have followed a bell curve. At first I simply wanted to get the story that was in me into print. That required that I finish the novel, which I did in early 2003. I then began to study the publishing industry and learned my novel broke a number of rules for what they would publish. Rather than diminish my dream, after a bit of sulking it seemed to expand it. They followed the bell curve upward as I expanded my writing to try to keep up with my dreams. I wrote more things, in more genres, in more types of writing, than I ever had in mind at first, all following the dream. The dream fed itself. It seemed that the upward leg of the bell curve was very steep.

Those dreams to be published peaked, I think, around the end of 2010, when I rounded a bend on the publishing track and found more hurdles; hurdles which I didn’t see myself as having the energy to cross. The downward leg of the bell curve was very steep at that time.

But rather than end at the X axis, which would have been giving up, the curve stopped at an intermediary place: e-self-publishing. From there I find my dreams on an upward leg of a new bell curve, beginning from that higher plateau rather than from zero. The upward leg of the dream curve is not as steep as last time, and the vertical rise is happening more slowly.

Once dreams are broken, it’s hard to dream as big again.

Can't Judge a Book: Thinking about Book Covers

2012-01-19T12:19:00.000-06:00

I have two works ready to publish as electronic books, all but the covers. One is a short story, “Too Old To Play”. The other is my New Testament-era novel, Doctor Luke’s Assistant. The covers for each are commissioned. I received drafts for DLA last night via e-mail. Actually, I don’t think you could call them drafts, as they are earlier than that. I think we are at the concept stage.

That has me thinking about covers today. The old adage is “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” Yet the conventional wisdom is that the quality of a cover can make or break book sales. So while you can’t judge a book by its cover, that’s exactly what the American book buying public does.

But, electronic books aren’t print books and thus don’t have covers, you say. Oh yes they do, and publishing pundits say the cover of an electronic book is just as important to sales as with a print book. So even with e-books we find the cover is a driving force with sales.

Why is this? Why can’t I just put a generic cover on my books? Something like the one here for “Too Old To Play”? Put some typical back cover copy under the title and author name, and let the buyers come. Seems that would be a much better thing for authors. And it would make the old adage true.

So I’m currently in a cover research mode. I’m finding no end of easily accessible advice and examples. The Passive Guy blog has posts on covers. That led me to The Book Designer, and this post on cover design.

After the two covers mentioned above, I’ll be needing one for In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People (unless it gets picked up by the agent I recently submitted it to). I’m planning on going to a couple of book stores tomorrow night to look at covers in the genres and get some ideas. At noon today I think I’ll go to the nearby thrift store with a large book department and see what’s there. Those will be older, and likely won’t reflect current practice.

This morning, before work hours, I browsed through covers on Amazon. I noticed a lot of sameness in what are called genre books. The quality of the covers is good, but they lack originality. Look at the covers of successive books of “bonnet fiction”. They all look the same. In that case, that’s probably a good thing, as a buyer knows what to expect in the book based on the cover.

I believe I have some decent ideas for covers, such as what my son finally produced for Documenting America, which came from my suggestions. But my mind can’t make my hands produce what my mind conceives. Now it’s all based on software. Does that make it easier or harder? In some cases easier, as described in this blog post. I like the way the text superimposed on the photo. I like the way you can play with font sizes, styles, and colors. This is all done with software, and I should be able to learn software.

Well, I have no real conclusion from all of this. Generic covers don’t work; designed covers cost, either time or money, and require both artistic abilities and skills. Research is required. Development of skills is required. And again, the whole weight of what is needed to succeed in this extra career I’ve chosen is becoming overwhelming.

A Blustery Day, A Quiet Meeting

2012-01-17T09:55:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I left the office about 5:25 PM to attend the first meeting of the year of BNC Writers, planning to stop at the public library along the way. The reason for the library stop was only to see if my book Documenting America, which I donated to the library, had made it to the shelves and into the electronic card catalogue.

On the short walk from building to pick-up truck I fought the wind, now coming out of the east across the front of the building. It was from the south earlier in the day. A sailor would probably describe the wind as “fresh”, though this land-lubber doesn’t really know what that means. It seemed like more of a gale. Certainly as blustery as A.A. Milne’s blustery day. The shift to the east means the center of the storm is south of us, and moving past. Although, radar doesn’t show an actual storm. But a shift in the wind means change, and change is good, right?

Three miles later I was at the library, and it was closed. I forgot that the City and most governmental offices had the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday off. Most businesses in this part of the world don’t, so I lost track of the status of the library. Checking on my book being impossible, I drove the half mile on to church, arriving 45 minutes before our writers meeting should start. I unlocked the upstairs, outside door, posted the sign, went to the room and made a minor re-arrangement, and waited. This was to be our first meeting after the holiday break. Two of our regulars had e-mailed me to say they wouldn’t make it. We have fifteen on our mailing list, so that left twelve other possible attendees other than me. Of those twelve, only four had ever attended any meeting.

But I refused to be pessimistic, as difficult as that is for me. I pulled out scrap paper and wrote my next column for Buildipedia.com. It’s not due until Friday, so I’m way ahead of schedule on it. Then I made up a to-do list for at home after the meeting. Then I began writing this blog post on paper. 6:30 PM came around, with no one else there but me. It promised to be a quiet meeting. I decided to give it till 7:00 PM before leaving.

Five minutes later Linda walked in, afraid she would interrupt a meeting already begun. She often has work or family conflicts, and hadn’t been at a meeting in over two months. She brought nothing for the group to critique. Ten minutes later and no one else having showed up, I read my short story, “Too Old To Play”. As I read it I saw a number of typos, and one or two places where the words could be better. Linda found a couple of redundancies. Ten or so minutes and we were done.

We talked on for another half hour: about childhood experience with death (the subject of my short story), about writing in general, about our writers group and how we could help our fellow writers. We had a productive meeting, the two of us, if kind of quiet. I could hear lots of background noises. The sounds of a major basketball practice in the gym were evident, as was a vacuum running somewhere. The wind blew against the building side, and I recognized uplift noise of the roof.

So we parted. The next meeting is not until February 6, unless I can convince anyone to come on the fifth Monday for an extra meeting. And we retreat into our quiet little writer worlds, interrupted by day jobs and family responsibilities and church activities and…a thousand other things. The writing dream seems as strong and as elusive as the winds, buffeting all around yet impossible to catch. Constantly shifting. Some days blowing a gale, other days as still as the inhabitants of a cemetery.

I will continue to chase that wind, obeying God, and doing what I can to see the dream come true.

A Blog in Search of a Theme

2012-01-12T12:47:00.000-06:00

I didn’t mean to go a week without writing to this blog, but life got in the way. Work, health, and other writing endeavors pulled me away, and I neglected here.

One of the problems is I’m still searching a little for a revised theme for An Arrow Through the Air. My other blog, at the davidatodd.com website, is for documenting my writing life and promoting my writing. I figure that, if I ever have hoards of fans, that other blog is where they will go to keep track of my writing news. This blog I hope to make something different. I thought of building on Wesley’s “arrow through the air” metaphor and making this blog about metaphors of life. That still seems like a good idea, but I haven’t been able to bring it off yet.

So I continue to flail about here, posting about writing, about life, about health, about death—about anything that happens to be in my mind at the moment. In my mind right now is accomplishment. Yesterday I completed a number of small tasks at work, as well as taught a brown bag class on the noon hour. At home in the evening I proofread my second short story, typed the edits, formatted it for Kindle, uploaded it, created a dummy cover, and saved it as a draft. I’m not going to upload it until I receive the final cover. Although, if it takes too long, I may use the dummy and activate the e-book. Or, possibly I’ll learn graphic software and start doing simple covers myself.

Also last night I came very close to inputting all checkbook entries for 2011 into my budgeting spreadsheet. That included finding and correcting a nagging error in the spreadsheet. I still need to find out why I have a discrepancy in some of the categories (too much in housing, not enough in medical), where apparently I made an error in allocation early in the year. But I think I’ll wait until I have all the year entries made, and see what needs to be done about reallocation.

Today, I have had similar accomplishments even to this time of day (12:36 PM CDT). I have completed many tasks for my day job, including finding and processing a nagging invoice for $300 to a contractor. My time sheet is up to date, with annotations. My December billings are out the door. A major clean-up of my office has begun, as I transition out of project work and into full time training. And I made progress with my co-presenter on the full day class we’ll be teaching at the erosion control conference on February 26^th.

For personal stuff so far today, I called a credit card company and took care of one problem. I went on-line to check for debits not recorded in the checkbook and have those up to date. I went through three months of expense reimbursements so that tonight I can record them in the right categories on my budgeting spreadsheet. And the noon hour isn’t over and I have time to work on this.

Tonight, Lynda and I will most likely watch a couple of episodes of The West Wing, season three. I’ll try to finish my budgeting spreadsheet for the year, including allocating those expenses. And I hope to work on one remaining medical reimbursement claim for 2011, maybe even complete it for mailing tomorrow. Writing tonight? Probably not, but that’s okay. Perhaps with these many tasks completed, I’ll have a productive writing weekend.

On Heinlein's Rules

2012-01-05T15:23:00.000-06:00

At some point in the past I alluded to Heinlein’s rules for writing. I said I would come back and discuss them, but never got to it. Now I have.

These came from Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988), in an essay titled, “On Writing Speculative Fiction” published in 1947. I have never read anything by Heinlein. A little research reveals he wrote science fiction, both short stories and book length. He, along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, were considered the top three science fiction writers of the 40s, 50s, and 60s.

In the referenced article, Heinlein gave his rules for writing. They are:

1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you write.
3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4. You must put the work on the market.
5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

This is usually interpreted as: Don’t self-edit; don’t rewrite; trust the instincts that are in force when you are writing your first draft, which comes from the creative side of your brain. Self-editing comes from the critical side of the brain, and will not produce a better result than the first draft. This flies in the face of what is reported to be Hemmingway’s comments, “The first draft of anything is [crap].” (sanitized for a PG website). It flies in the face of the current conventional wisdom, which is write, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, etc.

Dean Wesley Smith, on his blog, has made frequent mention of Heinlein’s rules. Smith says he does three drafts of any short story or novel. The first draft comes first (duh), as quickly as the creative processes of the brain can be put on reproducible medium. He then does a typos and grammar edit. At this point it is given to a trusted first reader. When that reader gives comments, Smith has two ways to go. If the comments are minimal, which he says is most of the time), he makes those few changes and submits or publishes the work. If the comments are more substantial, he abandons the story, in the belief it is fatally flawed and no amount of non-creative brain work can fix it.

This may be a bit of oversimplification, both by Smith as he describes his process and me as I’m summarizing it for this blog, but I think I’m pretty close to what Smith writers. He encourages writers to not rewrite. Create the story/book fast, trust your creative instincts, and run with it. At the same time, he acknowledges that not all writers are the same. This might work for some, he says, but not for others. That acknowledgement, however, doesn’t change his recommendation. And he is very critical of any workshop/MFA environment that encourages extensive edits.

For me, I just don’t see how Heinlein’s rules could work. I do tend to write fast, using maximum creative powers without a lot of critical thought or self-editing. But for book-length stuff, the plots are so complex that I don’t see how I could possibly not edit. As an example, in In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, by the time I came to the final scene I decided to use the point of view of the protagonist’s mother. The protag was not in a position to observe everything going on, nor was his girlfriend, but his mother was. I think the last scene worked well, but that left me with a character making critical observations when she really had a bit role before that. So I really need to go back and review all the scenes she’s in, and see that they are consistent with how she acts toward the end of the book; or, if not consistent, at least produce a reasonable character arc.

No, I don’t see how Heinlein’s rules work for me. An unstated part of Heinlein’s rules is that you have to keep writing. Write creatively and fast, complete it, submit of publish it, and move on immediately to the writing the next piece. In the time you would extensively edit a completed piece you could write one or two more new pieces. You will learn and improve more, Smith et al say, writing more pieces than “improving” completed pieces. Plus, they say, the completed piece is already at its best before the critical brain destroys what the creative brain has done.

Do I agree with Heinlein or with Hemmingway? I have no answer for this. I just throw it out to see if it generates any comments.

A Quiet New Year's Eve

2011-12-31T21:58:00.000-06:00

Lynda and I are in our reading chairs, each with our laptop, listening to the NY Philharmonic concert on PBS. Right now they are performing Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue", one of my favorite pieces. Since my tax dollars paid for the program, I might as well listen to it.

Earlier, we went out to eat at a Chinese buffet with Lynda's mom and brother (here visiting from Santa Fe). This was my birthday dinner. Yes, I'm 60 years old today. Our celebration, other than the dinner, was to go to Wal-Mart and do our weekly shopping. Yesterday, though, Lynda brought cake and pizza to the office, and everyone gathered for a brief party. That was nice.

So 2011 ends, a momentous year, not to be judged by the quietness of the last day of it. 2012 promises to be quieter than 2012, I hope. Other than getting a new roof next week, some siding repair, inside repainting due to the leakage. Other than giving three papers at a conference in Las Vegas in February. Other than self-publishing at least three books, and five if I can do it.

Yes, 2012 promises to be a quiet year.

Christmas Morning

2011-12-25T11:26:00.000-06:00

It's Christmas morning. The house was quiet when I got up around 10:30 AM. We are at our son's house in Chicago. I guess he and his partner had been up earlier, but were not when I got up. Now almost everyone is up, the TV is on with some Christmas special, and I hear many voices. There are no young children in the house.

How different from 50+ years ago. In the Todd household we had quite a Christmas ritual down. It started Christmas eve, when we put the tree up and decorated it. Many other decorations went up that day, some after we three kids went to bed.

One thing that had been in place for a week or so was the manger scene, on top of the sewing machine in the dining room. The only figures in it were animals. Mary and Joseph were across the room in one direction, the Magi across the room in another. I don't think we separated the shepherds and sheep from the stable. On the days leading up to Christmas, Mary and Joseph began their trek to Bethlehem, moving across the room. They arrived at the stable on Christmas eve.

Christmas morning we put baby Jesus in the manger in the stable, and started the Magi on their trek. Twelve days later, on Epiphany, they arrived.

That seems to have been a good tradition. It was a somewhat accurate version of what the Bible says happened. I wish we had done it with our kids.

Another part of the routine was that we could open our stockings and one present before going to mass. The rest of them had to wait until after church, after lunch, and until family gathered. Or, if we were going to our grandparents for our evening Christmas dinner, we had our family presents in the early afternoon, then more at the grandparents in the late afternoon. I suppose not many parents these days have tried to train their children to wait on presents.

Once we children were old enough to attend Midnight Mass, the routine changed some. We still couldn't tear into presents, but the waiting time was greatly reduced, not being interrupted by morning church.

Merry Christmas everyone. May the Holy Spirit fill you today, and make it a special day of celebration of Jesus' birth.

Interview: Joe Pote, author of "So You are a Believer Who has been through a Divorce"

2011-12-23T09:43:00.002-06:00

Joe Pote is a fellow Arkansas writer who I've come to know over the Internet. He has a book out titled Are You a Believer Who has been Through a Divorce?:

A Myth-Busting Biblical Perspective on Divorce. Let's have Joe tell us a little about his book.

AATTA: Can you give us a brief description of what this book is about?

JP: Sure. This book discusses God’s heart toward Christians who have experienced divorce. The church has developed a system of biblically unsubstantiated myths encouraging legalistic attitudes toward believers who have experienced divorce. These myths act as barriers, distancing relationships with both God and fellow believers.

In this book, I address seven of these misconceptions, discussing both the basis for the myth and what the Bible actually says in context of the complete scripture.

Readers will experience the liberating joy of lifted guilt and renewed intimacy with God as each myth is exposed in the light of God’s truth.

AATTA: We would normally expect a book on this topic to be written by a pastor, a theologian, or a Christian counselor. You’re a structural engineer, one of my professional kinfolk. Why did you decide to write this book, and what qualifies you to write a book on this topic?

JP: Yes, I am a structural engineer. I have neither a seminary degree, nor a psychology degree. I do, however, have a strong background in biblical study and inductive interpretation of scripture. As a child, I was literally raised in church, attending multiple church services and Bible studies each week, and I have continued to study the Bible throughout my adult life.

Several years ago, I went through a divorce. It was a devastating experience, at many levels. As a child, growing up in church, I had been taught that Christians don’t divorce; that Christian married couples find a way to work through any issues, without ever even considering divorce as a potential option. Yet, here I was, a Christian with deep convictions and a strong love for Christ, going through a divorce.

In processing that reality, I began studying what the Bible teaches on the topic of God’s heart toward His children who have experienced divorce, and was surprised by what I learned. I began to realize that much of what I had believed about God’s view of divorce was simply incorrect. I had accepted certain myths as truth, based not on scripture, but on words, actions, attitudes and impressions observed as a child, growing up in church.

In the years following that divorce, in conversing with other Christians with similar divorce experiences, I discovered that I was not alone in those misperceptions. In fact, these same myths are widely believed and accepted as truth by many people within the Christian church. For believers who have experienced divorce, these myths directly interfere with our relationships, acting as barriers as we seek to draw close to God, as well as to our fellow believers.

AATTA: There are a lot of books on the market discussing divorce from a Christian perspective. What makes your book different from any other book on this topic?

JP: The Bible really doesn’t talk very much about the specific topic of divorce of a marriage covenant. Most books on this topic pull their information from a few of the passages that do mention divorce, while ignoring other passages that don’t support their viewpoint. Then they lift a few sentences out of context, using them to create an inflexible set of rigid legalistic rules, which they attempt to apply to every situation.

Although the Bible says relatively little on the specific topic of divorce of a marriage covenant, it has much more to say on the broader topic of covenants, in general. In this book, I draw from this broader scope of rich illustrations of God’s heart in regard to covenant and redemption.

I also review passages that specifically reference divorce of a marriage covenant, discussing them within the context of the entire passage in which they are presented, as well as within the context of the broader body of scripture.

AATTA: You have titled the first chapter of your book, “Myth 1 ~ Divorce is Sin.” By calling this viewpoint a myth, you clearly indicate disagreement with the position that divorce is always sin. Does that mean you believe God approves of anyone suing for divorce, for any reason at all?

JP: No, not all! In fact, I spend far more pages of this book explaining the importance of honoring covenants than I do explaining that divorce is not sin.

However, I think it is very important to make a clear distinction between violating covenant vows, and choosing to justly end a covenant that has been repeatedly violated. The Bible is very clear that violating covenant vows to love, honor, cherish, protect, and forsake all others is sin. The just dissolution of a covenant that has been repeatedly misused as a tool to enslave or abuse is not sin.

AATTA: I’ve noticed that you use the phrase, “believers who have experienced divorce,” rather than simply saying, “divorced believers.” Is there something you don’t like about the word “divorced”?

JP: Yes, there is, when used as an adjective. In fact, I discuss this topic in the chapter titled, “Myth 4 ~ Divorce is a Perpetual State of Being.” To summarize, we tend to categorize people as being married, single, widowed, or divorced. Within the church, we often extend these categorizations to also include divorced-and-remarried.

We affix the label “divorced” to people, and never remove it no matter what happens, for the rest of their lives. That’s just not scriptural. Divorce is an experience I have lived through, not a defining characteristic of who I am. My covenant relationship with God through Jesus Christ defines who I am.

AATTA: The very first sentence of the book’s Introduction asks a question, “What does Jesus look like going through a divorce?” What is your answer to that question?

JP: Well, I obviously wrote an entire book in answer to that question. It is difficult to answer without first providing all the background contained within the book.

However, as a concise answer to a concise question, I would say that Jesus, going through a divorce, looks much as He did leading the exodus of His people out of Sheol, the place of the dead. He walks with His child, justly redeeming them from their covenant of bondage, and delivering them through the divorce.

AATTA: In this book you target seven myths held by many people within the church, today. People tend to hold very strong opinions about matters of faith. In writing this book, are you intending to stir up controversy?

JP: No, it is not my intent to be controversial; though I’m sure some will take issue with my position. Actually, as a writer, I am more concerned about whether or not I have adequately explained my position. If someone understands my position and chooses to disagree, I am completely fine with that. I just hope they will take the time to first read the book and understand the position, before disagreeing with it.

My intent in writing this book is to share a message of hope and healing with people who have suffered the devastation of a failed marriage. I pray that God will use this book to liberate fellow believers who have experienced divorce to a greater fullness of joy in the love and redemption of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Author Interview: Susan Todd and "Five Smooth Stones"

2011-12-18T17:00:00.001-06:00

My cousin Susan Todd is also a writer. She has both fiction and non-fiction published, and recently started a blog titled, No Rhyme or Reason. She and I have discussed writing for many years, and have read each other's writing. She recently served as a beta reader for me on my second novel, providing me with excellent character feedback in addition to proofreading.

Among Sue's books is one titled Five Smooth Stones. It sounds like it would be a non-fiction work about a biblical theme, but let Sue tell you about it.

AATTA: Give a short summary of what book is about.

ST: It’s about five women who start out thinking that they are each unique in their own way, and they are. But they soon learn through an unexpected prolonged stay at a Bed and Breakfast just how much they have in common and the commonalities bond them together.

AATTA: How did you choose the characters?

ST: The characters really chose themselves out of a rich abundance of human nature. Just looking around us at the variety of people we meet, friends and often times family, we probable know someone like these ladies.

AATTA: What was your intention is writing this book?

ST: It was an interesting challenge personally to interact with characters that I had to create with personalities that differed from my own. I started out, as I hope the reader will, having likes and dislikes in the beginning. After all, not everyone is our cup of tea. But the more I got into each quirk the more I began to shelve some of my own judgments. As I wrote I began to see a link between their differences. I began to write from the perspective that possible what one saw in the other, that they didn’t like, was either a similarity or something they lacked. Then I began to wish these charming characters could see what I was seeing. And so they did.

AATTA: What do you want the reader to take away from Five Smooth Stones?

ST: I hope that if they see themselves or someone they know acting like these five, and that they will take another look. . Because in the end we are not really all that different in the area of basic needs. There is something to be said about reconciliation. Everyone has some redeeming quality. I once worked with a very contrary lady that I thought that God had not given one good quality. Even though I could not find one on a personal note about her, I came to appreciate the fact that she knitted beautifully!

You can find Five Smooth Stones at CreateSpace, an Amazon company, and on Amazon as well.

Her other published books are:
God said, "Tell Them I Am"

Eternity's Portal

Whales in the Pond

Almost Ready for Christmas

2011-12-15T17:05:00.000-06:00

The Christmas rush is not so bad this year. A lot of this may have to do with not putting up Christmas decorations, as I discussed in this post. We don’t seem to have as many seasonal events to go to, and all but one are completed. Tonight I plan on putting up the string to drape Christmas cards over. Based on the few coming in so far, I doubt I’ll need the second string this year.

So we are in better shape at this point in the Christmas season than normal. Or at least I am. Today we got the van back from the shop, a number of maintenance items done, including one that might have been a disaster (very worn tire) on the trip we will soon take. The insurance company replaced the cracked windshield, which is good. Also the insurance company is going to make major repairs to our house due to hail damage. The adjuster and the designated contractor are duking it out now over a couple of items the contracted feels are needed, but which the insurance company at first didn’t authorize. It should all work out.

Our Christmas letter is written. Tonight I’ll print it. Lynda said she would address the cards this year. I hope she will start tonight so that we can mail them by Saturday. That might be a first: to have all our cards out before Christmas.

Writing is taking up a lot of time right now. Or maybe I should say my writing career is. I’m not actually writing much at present. I’ve had some issues with the Amazon listings for my book. At first the e-book and print book versions for Documenting America were not linked. Through the CreateSpace help system I got that taken care of. But the print version page shows four people as translators of the book. How did that happen? So I’m trying to get that taken care of, through the CS help system again.

Today I spent a little time at Goodreads, editing and expanding my author profile. When I did that, then went to my author page, and it included a dozen books, none of which were mine! So I went to Goodreads tech support and contacted them. The auto responder said it might take three to five business days to address my issue, but I’ve already had an email saying the problem is fixed. Sure enough, my author profile now shows my two books, and only those. Note that the URL may not work, as they are going to change my author name to David A. Todd. If that happens, I'll come back and edit in a proper link.

This Goodreads thing is going to take hours to figure out. Actually, I’m not sure I’ve ever properly edited my CreateSpace profile or my Kindle profile. And I think an Amazon profile is a separate critter. Meanwhile I read some advice recently that said I should be using LinkedIn as a professional social media. I’m not sure I have the brain power left to join one more place.

Christmas is nine days away, and I’m more pleased it is, this year, than any year in recent memory.

"I Love To Tell The Story" by Susan Barnett Braun

2011-12-11T14:46:00.001-06:00

I met Susan Braun at the Write-to-Publish Conference in Wheaton, IL in June 2011. We are writers more or less in the same place in our careers: struggling, trying to find an agent or publisher for a completed book, unsure of our place in the market. At that time I had already made the move into e-self-publishing (though still hoping for commercial publishing for other works), and Susan was not far behind me.

She has now published her memoir, I Love To Tell The Story: Growing Up Blessed and Baptist in Small Town Indiana. It is available as an e-book and as a paperback at Amazon.com.

But let's let Susan tell us something about the book.

AATTA: Give us a one sentence summary of what your book is about.

SBB: It's possible to grow up in a Baptist church and emerge unscathed (and actually blessed) by the experience.

AATTA: Why did you decide to publish your memoirs rather than just writing them down for your kids?

SBB: I enjoy reading memoirs. However, I noticed a pattern in so many memoirs where the protagonist has a terrible childhood, full of abuse or events that she later construes as very negative. Looking back at my childhood, I have wonderful memories. I wondered why no one was telling the positive stories, and I decided to publish mine as a way for those of us who've had happy childhoods to celebrate our heritage. A pleasant childhood, by the way, doesn't necessarily mean a childhood with no conflict. A happy childhood can also be pretty darn humorous.

AATTA: The title of the book, and of each chapter, comes from a hymn. How does music play into your memoir?

SBB: Growing up Baptist, we sang a lot of hymns. They didn't mean a lot to me at the time: they were just a fact of life. But now that I've grown up and go to a church that has largely given up on hymns for "praise and worship" music, I've come to realize just how meaningful hymns were and still are in my life. Their lyrics and melodies are so rich, and many of the words sustain me to this day. Each chapter in the book is titled for a hymn that ties in with the theme of that chapter -- it just seemed appropriate.

AATTA: I notice lots of references to things you remember from the 1970s -- TV shows, music, etc. What was it like to relive those years?

SBB: It was cool and groovy, to be sure! As I immersed myself in my childhood again, I mentally lived for months with The Love Boat, The Flintstones, bell-bottom pants, President Nixon, and baloney with the red strip along the edge ... it was nostalgic, and also made me think about how much has changed in our culture.

AATTA: Groovy? I guess that's an expression that's coming back. Many of the memories you document are pretty specific. Do you really remember those things in such detail?

SBB: Actually, I do remember my childhood in more detail than many others do, perhaps ... I've spoken to folks who say they have no memory whatsoever of who their second grade teacher was, for instance. This floors me, because I most certainly remember Mrs. Gebhart :) Seriously, though, I'm not sure why I remember childhood details so well. Part of it is probably that I kept diaries for a decade or more during childhood, and I still have those. Also, I'll admit to a bit of creative license: perhaps I moved an event that happened when I was 12 to age 10, just so the story flowed better.

AATTA: What do you hope a reader will take away from your memoir?

SBB:I hope he will come away feeling good about life! I hope she will have memories that return from her own childhood, and that there will be many "Oh yes -- I'd forgotten about that!" moments. I hope that any reader would see the book as a pleasant escape to a time that was simpler in many ways, and that, really, it's okay to have had a happy childhood!

A Muted Christmas this Year

2011-12-07T09:48:00.000-06:00

That’s the best way I can describe out Christmas season so far: muted. We have put up no decorations. We attended one party so far, of our adult Life Group at church. I wrote the first draft of our Christmas letter that will go out with our cards, but so far Lynda hasn’t reviewed it. And we will significantly reduce the number of cards we send out. We have done no Christmas shopping.

The reasons? Busyness. Health. Apathy.

I’m still working through the whole rheumatoid arthritis outbreak that hit me in July. I’ve seen a rheumatologist twice, and actually all affected body parts seem much better. I’ve been able to resume walking for exercise a little, and can sleep mostly pain free. Lynda has been taking physical therapy for bound-up muscles that don’t want to work the way they did twenty years ago, or even five. I think she’s marginally better than she was at the beginning of the summer. Meanwhile, we aren’t particularly excited about the physical effort involved in decorating. We may yet do some.

We won’t have much of a Christmas here this year. We’ll drive to Chicago a few days before to be with our son and his partner in their new house, and will return a couple of days after. Lynda’s brother will be in town, so we’ll have some quiet times with him and their mother. Rumor has it that we will possibly have a visitation of grandchildren and their parents over New Years, but we’ll have to see if the rumor is true.

But, as it turns out, we have one other very good reason not to decorate right now. Back in April or May we had a hailstorm—enough pea to grape-sized hail to cover the deck like snow. Then, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, we had another hailstorm of similar size and intensity. At some point in the Spring one of our skylights began leaking, allowing a trickle of water to run down the skylight well then along the ceiling then down the adjacent wall. I couldn’t remember if this leakage was before the first hailstorm or not. At least four times since then, in heavier rains, water has come in.

It suddenly occurred to me over the weekend that maybe the two hailstorms had caused roof damage. And maybe, though I couldn’t remember for sure, the hailstorm had damaged the skylight. If so, this would all be insurable loss. So Monday I called the insurance company and initiated a claim. I asked them, while they were at it, could they assess damage from a couple of blown off and loosened pieces of siding up at the top of the chimney, 30 feet above the ground in an inaccessible place. That happened in a different storm, I told them, but would they please evaluate it.

Yesterday the adjuster came out, and by the end of the day we had a sizable check in our hands. Of course, I left the house today without picking it up to deposit it. We will be getting a new roof and new skylight. They will re-do the sloped ceiling in the large room where the damage took place. They will paint the stained wall in that room. And they will even fix the siding on the chimney, all as one claim (even thought I did not represent it as one claim). Today the restoration company called me, wanting to come out today to look it over. I think the repairs will move quickly.

What does this have to do with Christmas decorations? The room where the damage is is the room where we put our Christmas tree, and most of the other decorations. If we had put the tree up before Thanksgiving, and the Christmas village and the garland by the fireplace and along the banister, and the manger scene, and the many Christmas knickknacks as we usually do, these would have been more things to protect. I probably wouldn’t have bothered calling the insurance company until January, if I remembered to call at all.

I find that Christmas decorations might help with the Christmas spirit, but I’m good not having them this year. Christ in my heart is decoration enough.

The Christmas Plot

2011-12-01T11:05:00.000-06:00

I am so tired of the Christmas plot. Maybe it’s because of the TV channels we are watching this year. Normally, I don’t watch much television except for news and a little sports, maybe an occasional movie. But this year the wife wants to watch some of the Christmas shows. So we’ve been watching Lifetime and ABC Family and Entertainment network shows, seemingly made-for-TV movies. I normally try to multi-task by reading or writing or working on crossword puzzles, but I’ve actually watched a couple.

Here’s the Christmas plot on these channels: A early-30s career woman with a non-committal or philandering significant other has a chance to go somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas, or at least do something new, where she meets a virtuous hunk who works in a charity. She has trouble completing her mission, falls for the hunk, leaves the skunk, and winds up with the hunk. At some point she wishes upon a star or a Christmas tree or…something.

Case in point: An Indianapolis newspaper reporter, who has been limited by her boss to writing fluffy features, is sent to a small town in Indiana the week before Christmas to unmask a secret Santa who anonymously does a good deed of expensive charity each year. She goes to the town, quickly focuses on the richest man in town as the secret Santa. He’s out of the country but then comes back. He’s a hunk, his wife dead, no kids, and devotes his attorney skills to saving the rain forests. Just before she left for the assignment her significant other left her for a woman with whom he had a one-night stand. She falls for the rich guy, who she finds is not the secret Santa. Her S.O. comes to the town trying to make up since his new girl was a fraud, but she dumps him. She finds the secret Santa, an unlikely candidate given the size of the charitable gifts, but decides not to unmask him. At the end she leaves the Indianapolis paper to take over the editorship of that small town paper, and will certainly wind up with the hunk. Oh, yeah, since there was no room at the inn she was staying at the local rest home, which happened to have been run by the secret Santa.

Case in point: A career woman who is mistress to her married boss has a minor auto accident in front of the house of a hunk with two kids. In the accident an electrical shock changes everything. That man who lives there says they are husband and wife of ten years, and they have two kids. They all think she is wife and mother to them. Except she’s never seen them before, has never been married, and certainly has not had two children younger than ten years old. Various friends say she is married to him. The show progresses and she comes to terms with the problem. Oh, yeah, his job is running some kind of neighborhood charity. Eventually she finds being this man’s wife is much better than being the mistress of a philanderer. At the end of the program she relives the accident, wakes up as who she was. But it’s still the house of the charity-running hunk, whom she meets for the first time but knows all about him (not because of the ten years she didn’t spend with him but because of the five days she did, or didn’t) and will end up with him. We never learn if the two kids are in the house, the product of a former wife.

Case in point: A trust-fund 30-ish woman is about to be cut off by her jet-setting parents, unless she finds a job or husband. This one doesn’t have a philandering S.O., but has played the field. She’s on the street window shopping when a letter to Santa, dropped by a postman, blows in front of her. The girl asks for a new wife for her father, since his wife (the girl’s mother) died. The letter gives an address. She stalks him, learns he has a multi-truck snow removal business but seems to spend more time running a struggling soup kitchen, the charity of his dead wife. The woman begins volunteering at the soup kitchen and both the daughter and the man begin to like her. But he’s dating another woman, a cold-fish he knew somewhat in college, and is planning on marrying since his daughter needs a mother. The trust-fund baby falls for him, but is exposed as a fraud, then uses her last trust fund payment to rescue the soup kitchen from eviction—on Christmas eve of course. At the end of the show the cold fish is out and the trust fund baby is in.

And on it goes, ad infinitum. Is there no originality in these script writers that they have to use such limited plot lines? Or, is it more that the audience of these few channels are 30-ish career women with philandering SOs, or women who were there once, and so this is what they will tune in to?

We all want to see a happy ending, and character arcs that show growth in the good guys (or girls), and perhaps some movement or the bad guys toward the good side, or at least remorse at them having been bad. So perhaps the script writers are giving the broader American audience what we want.

It’s December 1st. Only 24 more days of the Christmas plot to get through. Must concentrate harder on the multi-tasking.

Another Memory About Edward

2011-11-22T14:43:00.000-06:00

[from the eulogy I gave]

Edward's entrepreneurial spirit first showed itself at scout camp. His first year at Camp Yawgoog was 1966, the year after my first year. He went to the commissary and made a very important discovery: They didn't sell gum. I suppose this was because gum on sidewalks, under tables, and under chairs can be messy. Not being a gum chewer, I didn't notice this my first year.

The next year, Edward came prepared, his footlocker containing lots of gum, of all flavors and varieties. He sold gum by the stick, no doubt earning as much from each stick as he paid for the entire pack. I hate to think about how much he made, and what he did with it. I suspect it mostly went to the commissary.

That wasn't enough, however. Edward also realized that the thing other boys were most likely to forgot to bring to camp was soap. So he also stocked up on soap. He sold these, also at a sizable mark-up. A worthy service to his fellow boy scouts, no doubt.

But even that wasn't enough. From time to time Edward would go to the washout, look for soap left behind by someone, and confiscate it. Then when a boy would come to him to buy soap, he would say, "I've got new soap for such and such a price, and I have used soap at such and such a price." I wonder how many times he sold the same bar of soap to the same kids.

R.I.P. Edward Oscar Todd 1st

2011-11-15T12:53:00.000-06:00

On October 30, 2011, my brother, Edward Oscar Todd 1st, died at home after a long illness, at age 57. He fought excessive weight for years, then diabetes, then numerous complications therefrom. He was cremated and his ashes will be scattered at sea. That seems a suitable disposition for a commercial fisherman who made his living from the sea until his illnesses advanced to disability.

I want to put one of his childhood pictures on this post, but don't seem to have it electronically. I'll get it and add it later.

I asked to say a few words at his funeral mass, and was granted the privilege. My topic was the growing up years. I spoke without notes, but want to get the stories in writing so that others in the family could read them and have them. Here's the first installment.
=========================

I want to share memories of Edward during our growing up years. I know many of you knew him as Ed or Eddie, but in our family we never used diminutive names. It was always Norma, David, and Edward.

The first memory isn't actually a memory, but rather a story Mom and Dad told. I imagine Edward was around two years old when this happened, so I would have been four. At the Church of the Epiphany, our Episcopal church in Providence, RI, the baptismal font was at the back of the church. Whenever an infant was to be baptized, the priest would invite all the children to go back to the font to watch. We sat in the front pew, left side, so the three of us made the walk all the way to the back of the church for a baptism. One Sunday we were back there to watch. The priest held the baby, dipped the sea scallop shell in the water, and baptized by pouring. At the end, Edward ran from the back of the church to the front, and yelled at the top of his lungs, "Mommy! Daddy! They washed the baby's head!"

The next memory fast forwards several years. I suppose Edward was maybe 8 years old, or at most 10. It was a quiet weekday night. Dad was at work at his night job in downtown Providence. Edward and I were watching TV with Mom, and Norma was somewhere in the house, probably in her room. It was getting close to bedtime, when Edward asked Mom, "Why do women wear bras?" Then, before she answered, he added, "Is it to make their breasts look bigger?"

Knowing Mom, I'm surprised she didn't answer, "Sometimes." But she didn't. She gave a good answer of the purpose of this particular woman's undergarment. Edward was satisfied, and trotted off to bed. I had the privilege that two extra years of age gave of staying up a half hour extra. So I told Mom that I would talk to Edward, straighten him out about what types of questions he should be asking. Mom said that I would do no such thing, that what he had asked was totally appropriate.

More to be added another day.

My First Real Earthquake

2011-11-09T13:47:00.000-06:00

Monday night we were in Oklahoma City, the final night on our trip to Rhode Island for a family funeral. At some point during the evening, maybe a little after 9 PM, we felt the house shake and the rumbling of an earthquake, along with the sound of it.

This was my first real earthquake to be in. I say "real" because I've been through two previously. Both were small. I don't remember where they were on the Richter Scale, but certainly less than 3.0 and maybe less than 2.0. The first of those happened a couple of years ago while I was driving in or near Bentonville, Arkansas, and I never felt it.

The second happened perhaps a year ago. I was at home in Bella Vista, Arkansas, on a Saturday, I think, when hear a loud, sharp SNAP like sound. It could almost have passed for an odd thunderclap, except the skies were clear that day. I thought it might be an earthquake, went to the computer, and soon found it was. There was no movement with that—only the sound.

So Monday evening when the house began moving and we heard the rumbles, we had to think for a moment about what was happening. Five or so seconds later and it was all over. Or at least I did. Our son-in-law said they had a much larger one Saturday evening, clearly moving the earth, lasting for about 30 seconds. Plus there were after shocks between that big-ish one and the one we felt. So had was more ready than we were. These all took place around Prague, Oklahoma, a small town between Tulsa and Oklahoma City.

Last night, just after midnight, there was another earthquake in about the same spot. 3.0 on the Richter scale, they say. I guess I should have felt it, but was either asleep or rolling about trying to sleep. And, looking at the USGS site for earthquakes, I see there was one we slept through early Tuesday morning, a 4.7 intensity one, and even one we drove through at 7:05 PM Tuesday evening, a 3.6 intensity one. When I say "drove through", we were already 60 miles past the epicenter, and didn't feel a thing in the car.

So, one more thing to check off the bucket list: "Live through an earthquake". Not that it was really on my bucket list. And not that I really have a bucket list. I was scheduled to be in San Francisco at a conference way back in 1989 when the earthquake hit SanFran, but had cancelled the trip. I notice the USGS website with the best map scale doesn't show a couple of these yet. Once they do, I'll update this blog post with a link.

Life is a Whirlwind

2011-10-31T13:26:00.000-05:00

This is one of my favorite metaphors to describe life: a whirlwind. Every day is packed with activity, some days almost to the breaking point. The whirlwind isn't a tornado, with its damage. Perhaps it's more of a waterspout, a whirlwind over water. It throws up a lot of spray, but in the absence of a man made object it doesn't cause damage.

Of course, the whirlwind is to some extent our own making. We crowd life with all kinds of non-essential activities. Young parents make sure their kids are involved with team sports and gymnastics and dancing and church activities and...whatever else you can think of. Teens continue the practice, adding dating to it. Club sports become school sports. Naturally when they become adults they continue the cycle of endless activity.

I have done the same thing. I don't remember my childhood years being a whirlwind. We came home from school every night. The only evening activity was boy scouts, which began in 5th grade. I didn't start school sports until sophomore year in high school. Didn't even try out in junior high. In college the busyness began, mainly due to working to pay the college bill. Even the early adult years weren't all that bad. Lots of church activities, and raising kids, but not really a whirlwind. Even the overseas years, in retrospect, seem leisurely. Maybe not right at vacation time, the planning, packing and going, but the day to day life was a breeze.

Now the kids are out of the nest, and the last way I should describe life is as a whirlwind. But that's exactly what life has become. It's all my own doing. Wanting to be a published author has added complexity to life that is most easily described as a whirlwind, two orders of magnitude added to what could otherwise be a leisurely life. The writing isn't too bad. It's more the promotion that adds to the to do list. I'm not handling it very well.

Of course, many other things dare to tread on the path I've established for myself, such as funerals in southwestern Kansas one Saturday and in Rhode Island the next. Kind of hard to get any real writing work done in the car, or on a plane. Concentration at those times is rather difficult.

So I think that is an apt metaphor. Not a simile. Life is not like a whirlwind, it is a whirlwind. Possibly this poem somewhat describes it.

Conflicted

I long to live that day when I will rest,
and cease to tax my brain. Then I will die
and stand before my Maker. Yet, I'm blessed.
I long to live! The day that I will rest
is somewhere out there, far beyond the quest
that now demands I try, and fail, and try.
I long to live that day when I will rest
and cease to tax my brain. Then I will die.

Book Review: "Mr. Baruch"

2011-10-27T21:14:00.001-05:00

Among the 2,100 or so books (give or take 100) that were in Dad's house when he died was Mr. Baruch by Margaret L. Coit [1957, LOC no. 56-10289]. The book was republished in 2000, and maybe in 2005 No doubt that was updated. Baruch died in 1965; hence the book I read was written during his lifetime. I think it could be considered an authorized biography, as Coit appears to have had access to all of Baruch's papers.

In the Preface, Coit compares her work of writing Baruch's biography with the earlier one she wrote about John C. Calhoun. Both were South Carolinians. The two lives together spanned almost the entire American period from the American Revolution to the Cold War. Both men had an impact on America, in Calhoun's case as an elected official and in Baruch's case as a capitalist, advisor to presidents, and elder statesman.

I had vaguely heard about Baruch, in my adult life, as he was mentioned in a novel I read, but I could not, before reading this book, have told you anything about him. His parents were Jewish, his father a doctor who began practice during the slavery days in South Carolina, but who moved the family to New York City shortly after Reconstruction. Bernard, upon graduating from college, became a Wall Street speculator, though primarily in commodities rather than stocks. In sugar, copper, mining in several areas, and knowledge of industrial processes, Baruch made millions several times over between 1895 and 1915.

When America joined the belligerents in World War 1, Baruch was tapped by President Wilson to run the War Industries Board. Tasked with making sure American industries put out enough war materiel to supply our troops and aid the French and British in beating the Germans and Austrians, Baruch successfully tackled the problem. By the end of the war, his was a household name, the rich Wall Street man who had organized the war production effort, supplied the troops, and made the world a safe place again. He was part of the US delegation at the peace talks in Paris.

Given his close association with Wilson, it was understandable he was not tapped by later presidents. A lifelong Democrat, the three Republicans who followed Wilson had little need for him. He and Roosevelt didn't see eye to eye over the public debt, so Roosevelt used him sparingly during the New Deal days and then in World War 2. Baruch chaired study committees and drafted recommendations, but took no administrative positions. Truman used him early on as an advisor, and then as the chief US delegate to initial talks on controlling atomic energy.

Despite his relatively thin government service in later years, those who remembered him from WW1 seemed to have latched on to every little piece of news about him. His legend and reputation grew. By 1948 he was as popular as Truman. He was considered America's leading citizen, called her "elder statesman", and had the good opinion of the entire nation.

Coit does well to show all this in accessible language that is, at the same time, scholarly. Her many footnotes, all of which deal with sources and not extra explanations, are impressive. My only gripe is that she sometimes went off on tangents. Who cared how the office of a senator with whom Baruch worked was decorated? She did that quite a bit, which slowed down the work. On the other hand, she did a good job of showing important and essential information about with whom Baruch dealt. If she had just avoided the tangents, I think my praise of the book would be unqualified.

This book cost me nothing, except travel expenses round trip from Arkansas to Rhode Island (which, spread among 2,100 books, isn't much) and the 10 square inches of shelf space it's occupied these thirteen years. This is a keeper. I'm going to use it to write some articles on Baruch, then it will go on my shelf. Perhaps one of my descendants will, some day, discover this volume among my possession, and learn about this great man from it.

Life is Like...A FEMA Floodplain Project

2011-10-18T22:17:00.000-05:00

These always start out slowly. You begin by gathering data. Survey the landscape. Understand the rainfall and run-off patterns. Learn the design criteria and how to apply it. Get your act together, access FEMA's application, fill it out, get a higher authority to sign it, and send it off with a steep check for the fee.

Then, you wait to see if your application for whatever it is you want to do to will be accepted by FEMA. Most of the time it won't. After waiting what seems an inordinate amount of time, more often than not your application will be denied until you have given more information, or changed something to match how FEMA wants it matched. So, in order to pursue your goals, you change what was needed to satisfy that higher authority and FEMA, submit it again, and wait. This will go on until you have a submittal acceptable to FEMA. They will then approve your application.

Now you can pursue your real work, the work for which you have to do something in the floodplain. Maybe it's build an $80 million museum of American art with two buildings spanning and three buildings hugging the creek. Maybe it's make improvements to four roads, all of which cross the same creek. Maybe it's improve another road that crosses two creeks, except you find that the floodplain was incorrectly mapped by others of lesser ability, and you will have to fix all their mistakes along with gaining approval for your own changes.

At last, sometime out there, far beyond when you thought it would end, your project will end. You will assemble your files and archive them. You will send your last billing out and receive payment in full for all that you have done.

Yes, life is much like a FEMA floodplain project.

A Little More on Thomas Carlyle

2011-10-14T14:18:00.000-05:00

I haven't written anything about Thomas Carlyle for quite a while. That's mainly because this whirlwind I call life hasn't allowed me to read him for a long time. Every now and then I pull out a volume of his correspondence with Ralph Waldo Emerson and look up some tidbit I half remember, or just read a pair of letters for enjoyment. Sometimes on a Friday afternoon at the office, when taking a break, I'll go to the Carlyle Letters On-line site and pull up one to read. I find it difficult to read these on-line, for some reason, and so rarely finish the letter I pull up unless it's a short one.

At Suite101.com the topic editor for the Great Thinkers topic posted on the forum asking members to write articles for her topic. I thought that Thomas Carlyle would probably qualify as a great thinker, and that maybe I could write an article or two about him, possibly generating a wee bit of revenue with subject matter I like. So about a week ago I pulled up one of Carlyle's letters, not quite at random. However, instead of reading it on-line, I did a quick copy and paste into MS Word and format for tight printing yet easy reading, and printed the letter. I took it home to read in the evening. Alas, way led on to way, and it was just a half hour ago, at work, that I started reading it.

And very quickly I remembered what I like about Carlyle. He is a phrase maker, a wordsmith, a poet when not intending to be. The letter I accessed was one Carlyle wrote Dec 24, 1834 to William Graham. I'm not quite sure who Graham was in relation to Carlyle, but I the letter was addressed to Scotsbrig, where Carlyle lived for a while. Part of the letter involved remembrances on the death of Edward Irving, who was a mentor to Carlyle and some kind of acquaintance to Graham. Here's part of what Carlyle wrote.

I can assure you, the sound of it sent new life thro' me, like a breath from old true Annandale in the middle of these Babylonian fogs. Surely friends should improve, on far better reason than wines, by long keeping! The very enemy that we might have for twenty years would almost become a friend. While death thins our ranks, mows down our stateliest, oh surely, surely let the survivors rank themselves the closer, and await what is appointed them not single but together!

Now that's phraseology, IMHO. The idea expressed in the middle of the quote, that friendship should improve with age, with better reason than wine improves with age, is a great idea. I don't know if that would be considered profound or not. I don't know that elevates Carlyle into the great thinkers category. But it's a great idea excellently expressed.

And that's why I like Carlyle: for his great ideas excellently expressed.

Metaphors of Life

2011-10-12T12:41:00.000-05:00

In trying to figure out how to maintain two blogs, maybe start a monthly newsletter to market my writing, get back to writing an occasional article for two content sites, final editing my first novel prior to e-self-publishing, working on a current non-fiction project, and soon getting back to editing my second novel, I'm considering a theme for this blog.

Taking off from Wesley's "arrow through the air" metaphor, I'm thinking of making this blog a "metaphors of life" site. To do that most of the posts would have to take a situation I encounter, or maybe create, and turn it into a metaphor for some aspect of life.

It sounds like a good idea. The problem is I struggle with metaphors. That's strange for someone who fancies himself a poet, isn't it? I have to struggle to find those situations from which to build metaphors. Consequently the vast majority of my poems are weaker than they could be. My best poems incorporate metaphor and simile.

Well, it's a goal and direction, and I'm considering it. Stay tuned. I won't give up things such as book reviews, but will be trying to incorporate much more on metaphor.

A Health Update

2011-10-09T17:30:00.000-05:00

They say arthritis pain is dependent on weather. I've never been able to tell if that's true. However, the last few days have been beautiful weather and my pain is less. I was in Little Rock on Wednesday evening through Friday noon, driving back Friday afternoon. I was in quite a bit of pain while there, and the drive back was difficult. It would have been almost impossible if I hadn't been able to set the cruise control and bend my right leg into a comfortable position.

Friday evening and yesterday I took it easy. I worked outside for just 45 minutes or maybe an hour. Rather than tackle larger logs and cut them to length or split them, I decided to get smaller deadfall, 3 to 4 inches diameter, and drag them to my cutting area, then cut them to length. No splitting was required. That short amount of work seemed to help my joints.

The rest of the day I spent doing easy inside things, such as filing months of financial papers, and cleaning various areas in the house, and eating meals, and reading forty pages in my current reading book. By bed time my joints were all feeling pretty good.

While my joints are better, my blood sugar was up last night. Just a few too many carbs during the day. That made me sluggish as I tried to figure out what to write next. I didn't feel like research reading for the next volume of Documenting America. I didn't feel like writing a blog post. I did some research of writing articles for Decoded Science, a web site where I know the owner and she invited me to begin writing for them. But I had a problem accessing the site, something I think I was doing wrong. Unfortunately I didn't have the brain power needed to figure it out. When I left The Dungeon and took my blood sugar, it was quite high. Perhaps that was the reason for my sluggishness.

Today has been a better day. Good life group class, good worship service, good meal at my mother-in-law's, a bit of rest watching football, and all systems seeming to be working well. I'm not sure I'm ready to write a lot, but perhaps that will come tomorrow. Time to write some articles, and research a new book.

Overdoing It

2011-10-05T15:01:00.001-05:00

Last Saturday dawned cool and clear, with a touch of southerly breeze. I decided it was time to shake off my physical troubles of late and go outside and do some work. One thing I do for exercise is cut wood, the dead fall on the vacant lot south of us or from the common property east of us. We have lots of downed trees, from 3 inch diameter up to 12 inch that need cutting.

Well, they don't really need cutting, but it seems a good way to get some exercise. I finished cutting a large tree that came down and almost hit the house. The lower portions of the trunk were 12 inches diameter or a little more. I cut it into 24 to 30 inch lengths and piled them, not really planning to do anything with them. Then, last year our daughter and son-in-law in Oklahoma City began burning wood in their fireplace. Not for heat but for ambiance. The bought the starter logs and wood bundles you see at many stores in these parts.

So I decided to take the wood from my wood pile, cut it to shorter lengths, and split it. Then I figured Lynda could take a nice amount each time she went to OKC for grandmotherly duties. Well, that next time was Monday just passed, and Saturday dawned no only clear but also without any wood split. So I dragged out the maul and the wedge and set to my task.

What I quickly learned is my fingers and hands are much too weak to wield the maul with any force. So I got the sledge, a lighter instrument, and tried to split logs with just it and the wedge. I found this worked fine. A few taps with the maul seated the wedge, then a few good blows on the wedge split the log. I worked at it for two hours, resulting in the wood pile you see in the picture.

Now, this may not be much production, or much of an accomplishment, but for me it was great. I felt my hands working more or less the way they should. My knees were not hurting, and the longer I got into my work the less I felt any knee pain (that that, you ehrlichiosis bearing buggies). Of course, I was tired at the end of my work. A brief nap in my reading chair and a shower were most enjoyable. But I felt great.

Until about bed time, and the next day. My left knee felt pretty good, as if I popped something back in place as I mauled. But my right knee was pretty much toast. I got around on Sunday, but with knee weakness and pain. Slowly it improved through the day—faster than the muscles recover after playing baseball for the first time in the spring. I walked both Monday and Tuesday noon to no ill effects.

Then, last night I walked about two miles at a fairly fast clip so I could get it all in before dark. By bedtime I could sure feel it in my right knee, worse than it was Saturday night.

So, what should I do for this RA flare up, brought on no doubt by that useless tick? Exercise is supposed to be good for RA. Maybe just no quite so much exercise, and a little more gentle. I'll try that for a while. I skipped my noon walk today, even though the weather was gorgeous. I'll let my knee heal a little then try it again, at a gentler pace this time.

Health, Wealth, and Happiness

2011-09-30T13:51:00.000-05:00

That sounds like a good title for a blog post, doesn't it? Health, wealth, and happiness.

Life is full of good stuff and bad. I've had my share of it this week. Here are some examples.

Yesterday I had a low blood sugar attack, late in the afternoon. Since I haven't bought glucose pills yet (will rectify that this weekend) all I could do was hit the vending machines. I had $1.00 so bought some chips for 80 cents. That didn't do the trick. So I borrowed 40 cents and bought a regular, sugared Coke and consumed it. I had to just sit back in my chair for more than half an hour till it all took effect. By then it was time to drive home. The worst part of it was it sapped my energy. After we tried out the new Mexican restaurant near us, I had no energy to write last night, one of my normal writing nights.

My knees feel better. I have good days and bad days, with the bad days getting progressively worse and the norm rather than the exception. One thing I'm doing, however, is paying more attention to how I put my legs when sitting. I find that I have a bad habit of twisting my legs in odd positions. An hour later when I stand up, I can barely move. So I've been trying to recognize when I'm doing that and keep my legs nicely bent, but relaxed. I learned that years ago with my shoulder and with my right leg. Is it helping? I don't know, but today my knees are significantly better. Is it greater awareness about small things such as just mentioned, or is it...

...better eating and slight reduction in weight? I've noticed this through the years: When I'm losing weight I feel better. When I'm gaining weight I feel worse. The exception to this seems to be when weight loss is fairly rapid I don't feel my best. I suspect that might be due to release of toxins stored in fat being broken down, but I haven't found reliable references for that. This week I've lost a couple of pounds. I've eaten well, in that I've cut back on portions for most meals and eaten better stuff. Maybe this is having an impact. Or maybe it's just the cooler, dryer weather.

My novel is only 5000-6000 words away from being finished! If I could have written last night, I'd have different numbers to report. But that is a very good position to be in. I haven't thought too much about the last two chapters—except for the last scene at the hospital (oops!), so I don't know how quickly the writing will go. Plus at this stage of the novel I have the point of view of six or so characters to juggle. But it's a good feeling. And that leads to...

...ideas for articles have been popping into my head. After the novel is finished, I'll take a week or two to write a few non-fiction articles about engineering and literature. I haven't written for Suite101 since February, and a couple of editors are looking for articles in their section. Plus the owner of Decoded Science has asked me to write for them, on a revenue share basis. In those two weeks I hope to get six articles written.

Among the bad things, unless something different happens today, I will have gone the entire month of September without a single e-book sale. I didn't promote much, since I'm sort of waiting on being able to finish the print version of Documenting America. While I see myself as a writer of books, writing articles also had a certain appeal. I'd like to keep both types of writing in my portfolio.

And, a good thing, I'm reading for pleasure again. For whatever reason I did very little reading from May through mid-September. About all I did was reading for my Wesley studies books, which are now on hold, and reading the many periodicals we get at home. But last year I began reading the book Mr. Baruch, about the life of Bernard M. Baruch, Wall St. speculator, advisor to presidents, statesman of another era. It's a scholarly book with many end notes, but an easy read. I've been reading 5 to 10 pages a night, more on the weekends. I still have a couple of hundred pages to go, so at this rate I won't likely finish till late October. But that's okay. I'm enjoying that part of the journey.

Time to post and go exercise my knees a little. I walked 14 minutes at noon, with little pain. As I've gone thither and yon in our office, I find I'm moving faster and with less pain, more like a 59 year old rather than an 80 year old (as I've been of late. It's a good feeling.

Still Trying to Get Healthy

2011-09-28T10:56:00.000-05:00

Darn tick!

I don't know when it bit me. Or if more than one bit me. A couple of years ago I had the symptoms of tick disease, but didn't go to the doc and apparently my body fought it off, for all of the symptoms disappeared. Then around Independence Day this year they came back. By the third week of July I was a physical basket case. I went to the doc, got the normal anti-biotic treatment, and slowly got better. That is, the pains in my rib cage went away, my neck loosened up (though still not to pre-tick condition), and the drab feeling went away. The tests showed that I'd had the disease for more than six weeks. So how come it suddenly hit me again?

However, my rheumatoid arthritis has coincidentally flared up to the worst it has ever been, and has been getting worse by the week. I'm now being treated for it, which I never had to be before—except for occasional over the counter pain pills on the minor flare-ups and four steroid shots over two decades. This current treatment takes a month or so to bring relief, and I'm only about two weeks in, with no relief so far.

To contrast my current status, when we went to Chicago June 4-14 for Charles' graduation and hooding, I was feeling the best I'd felt in years. I hadn't had any RA symptoms for five or six years (except for the ring finger in my right hand, which flared up in Dec 2009 and has never subsided), and my weight was the lowest it had been since 2001, and still dropping. I was getting great exercise walking and working in my wood lot. My blood pressure was so low I had to cut my pills in half, then quit taking them all together.

Now, my fingers, wrists, elbows, rt shoulder, and both knees are extremely painful. The knees are the worst. My walking is greatly curtailed, even though we are having great walking weather. I've had to mostly give up my wood lot work. Sleeping has become a cycle of waking and turning to find a non-painful position. OTC painkillers don't seem to work, though I suppose it might be even worse without them. And my weight is back up almost fifteen pounds in three months. My blood pressure is still pretty good, however.

All because of a stinking little tick. At least, that's what I attribute this to. I suspect that sometime between June 15 and July 4 I had another tick bite, getting a fresh dose of ehrlichiosis chaffeensis, with my autoimmune system over-compensating and causing all the joint pain. I'm sure the weight gain is a combination of fluid on my joints and failure to cut back eating to match activity levels.

Today is a beautiful day. I'm going to walk twelve minutes no matter how much it hurts. I'm going to cut my normal lunch portion in half and just be hungry for the afternoon. I'm going to drink my water like a good boy, in the process cutting back a little on the coffee. By Wednesday of next week I hope to report a 2-3 pound weight loss, a little easing of joint pain, an increase in physical activity, and completion of my novel.

Wait, how did that slip in?

All Consuming

2011-09-23T16:59:00.000-05:00

[typed this once and lost it all; I'll try to recreate]
Yesterday, at the close of a busy day, I made out a to-do list for when I got home. Nothing fancy, just a list of six items I wanted to accomplish that evening, such as "go through mail" and "return EMB taxes to file". One item was "write at least 500 words on In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People". One, "prep book for mailing", I decided to leave till at work. I also had a few unwritten items on the list.

When I got home, after heating up leftovers for us, I did a few chores that had been accumulating that I wanted to get done before I would allow myself to tackle the to-do list. That took till almost 8:00 PM, at which time I went into The Dungeon. I did just a couple of things on e-mail and Facebook (part of the unwritten list), then went straight to writing.

First I re-read what I wrote the previous night, and made a few edits to it. Then I began new stuff. The characters are beginning to converge on New York City for baseball reasons. By 10:00 PM I had 1,408 words added, a complete chapter, and had finally filled in the gap between a scene I wrote a year ago and all that comes before it. That was a good feeling. I did a little more editing, and headed upstairs around 10:30 PM to relax before going to bed. I read for almost an hour, a most enjoyable time. Then I went to give myself my Lantus shot, and there, next to my kit on the kitchen table, was the to-do list. I had forgotten about it. All I could cross off wast the writing portion. For everything else, 11:30 PM was too late to be doing it.

All my time to work my list had been consumed with writing. Why does it consume me so? Why did I, when my butt occupied my writing chair, forget all I intended to do and focus so exclusively on writing that my plans were not just laid aside, they were forgotten?

Of course, I was writing important stuff. Most of it was scenes that had been playing out in my mind for months, but which I didn't want to write ahead of other text. Other stuff was new, such as how I decided to have the protagonist's parents miss the most important game of his career through an airport going through a security breach. Important scenes should take concentration to write. But, all scenes in a novel are supposed to be important.

There I go again, letting my characters and story overwhelm even this post. Somehow I have to find a better balance, to be able to write yet carve out some time for other needed things, those things that must be done for me to be a good Christian, husband, father, grandfather, employee, churchman, and homeowner. Maybe by the time I start the next novel I'll find that balance. With only ten to fifteen thousand words to go on this one, I don't think I'm going to care much if I find the balance before I write, "The End."

Early Fall Prediction

2011-09-19T13:04:00.000-05:00

Lunch: small in volume, calories, and carbs
Temperature: 74 F
Wind: NW between 5 and 10 mph
Sky: not a cloud to be seen
Knees: painful
Blood sugar: feeling normal
Woolly worms: out in force
Characters: in my head

Thus was my noon hour walk, just concluded. It was very pleasant. Even though my knees were aching, they've been worse recently, and the knowledge that the walk was good for them made me mostly forget about the pain. I did only one lap up and down the street of the commercial subdivision. Before the RA pain in my knees I did a lap in about 9.5 minutes. I'm considerably slower now. Although I didn't time it I'd say I walked between 10.5 and 11.5 minutes.

That's not enough walking to make a major dent in any health issue I have, but every little bit is good. If the weather stays like this, and my knees show just a little more improvement, I hope to be up to two laps by the end of the week. Then maybe I can drop a little weight, and get back to where I was in early June, before the combination of ehrlichiosis and 110 F temperatures sidelined me.

And yes, the woolly worms were crossing the sidewalks in front of me. I didn't count them, but surely I saw between 10 and 20. I resisted the urge to squish some of them. In fact, I'm not sure exactly what woolly worms are. Are they a beneficial species, or a bad one? Are these the early form of the beautiful moth, but which destroys decorative plants during their growth? People say you can predict how bad the coming winter is going to be by observing the woolly worms. I haven't read that book yet, so I'll make no prediction. Maybe I'll make an post on Facebook, and see what responses I get.

And Ronny Thompson, Tony Mancini, Colt Washburn, John Lind, and Sarah Jane Riley, and a host of their acquaintences, friends, foes, and three dead people were all in my head, kind of swirllng around. Each of these has another 15,000 to 20,000 words to make their big splash in the world. Mancini still has to say the words from which the book title comes: "I'm going to kill him in front of fifty thousand screaming people." Washburn still has to...have something happen to him, or do something stupid to someone, so that he pays the penalty as the bad guy he is.

Sarah Jane has already figured out her life is a mess, and that she can straighten it out, but has yet to take that step. John Lind has been silent for a few chapters. What will he do after it was his investigative reporting that threatened to bring ruin to the Cubs quest for their first World Series victory in more than a century? Can he make it up to Cubs' Nation?

And how will Ronny Thompson be reconciled to his parents and his girlfriend? Will he be? In the last thousand words he discovered his girlfriend has been lying to him, and he's cut off all communication with his parents. Yet tomorrow he has to pitch the biggest game of his life, and then a bigger one right after that. How will he handle it?

Last night I wrote the scene that is the "second plot point". This is the moment in the protagonist's life where something happens to him, perhaps in part his own doing, where he makes the decision to carry the quest to completion. This scene, on the Brooklyn Bridge, has been consuming some of my gray cells for over a year, but I refused to write it ahead of time. I finally got to that point last night. It came out pretty good, I think, almost exactly as I envisioned it.

I don't know what the woolly worms are predicting as far as winter is concerned, or if they really have any true prophetic value. But I make these predictions: These incessent characters will continue to haunt me until they have had their denoument. I will continue to be obsessed about finishing the book. And In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People will be finished in three weeks, give or take a couple of days. Then let the editing begin!

The Silence of Friday

2011-09-16T10:46:00.000-05:00

I came to the office at the usual time today. I found someone else already here and the coffee made. So I was at my desk, lunch in the fridge and coffee in my mug, at 06:50. I read the Bible and prayed, started my computer then pulled up the three Word files I work with in my pre-work hours, and continued my routine. I printed my daily log to the printer not too far outside my office, and nothing happened. The icon said it went to the printer, but nothing came out. The printer was turned on, but nothing came out. Figuring it was the network printer server that was down, I ignored it.

As other people began to arrive for their work day, I couldn't help but notice how quiet it was outside the office door. Normally I would hear pages being emitted from that printer/copier. Normally I would hear the plotters just a little farther down the hall whirring and drawing. Normally I heard conversations begin. But today, nothing. I checked my desk clock and computer clock and cell phone clock to make sure I wasn't an hour early, but no, it was just a very quiet morning. The department head who occupies the office right next to mine was gone, so the conversations he usually has, which I can't help but overhear, were also contributing to the silence.

A few minutes ago I found out the printer server isn't down, only that one printer, lacking a part that won't arrive until Tuesday. Since we have flex time, and some people work four 10-hour days, we have a few less people here on a Friday. Why no one is using the plotters I don't know, but presumably those will begin their whirring before the day is out.

The quietness, though, is unnerving. How can I get any work done in such total silence? Even the downspout that's on the exterior of the building, just four feet from where my ears are, which was conveying some water as I arrived at work, has gone silent. I've got to edit and add to an important floodplain report that has to go out next week. Where is the background noise that fills in the gaps when my eyes reach the end of a line and my brain must tell my head to shift, my eyes to move, and begin reading the next line? I have a radio I could turn on, but the reception is lousy with this receiver in this building.

It's strange how much we don't notice ambient noise. I suppose that's true everywhere we go, not just at the office. It's probably true with all our senses, not just hearing. There's background seeing, smelling, tasting, and feeling. Take away that background, and how noticeable is the missing!

I'm trying to think up a clever analogy-ish closing for this, but one escapes me for now. I've typed over an hour, with numerous breaks in between. The ambient noise has crept up a little. I hear footsteps behind me in an amongst the cubicles. There's someones computer beeping, a voice being cleared, a door being closed. All very faint, but still audible, still welcome.

I suppose I could train myself to work without the background stimuli, but suspect it would be a difficult retraining.

So, I have made a useless blog post on a difficult Friday, when I should be working but can't due to the extreme quietness. Let the retraining begin.

Letters from Saudi Arabia

2011-09-14T20:53:00.000-05:00

Regular readers of this blog, not so much recently but over the years, will know that I love letters as literature. I keep hunting books of letters, over the Internet, in used book stores, wherever I can find them. Today on my afternoon break, after I taught a brown bag class, I opened a PDF file I downloaded some time ago of Martin Luther's letters. I only read about 1/3 of the introduction and the first letter in the book, but I enjoyed it.

Every morning at work, in my before-starting time, I spend a little time formatting the letters of John Wesley. I downloaded these as MS Word files from the website files The Wesley Center website, year by year, volume by volume. I'm currently formatting volume 6 for better printing, putting footnotes where they should be, italicizing references, watching for those odd optical scanning things that the webmaster never corrected. I figure I'll be at that another year or so, then I'll have all eight volumes.

About six or eight years ago, maybe even longer, various relatives began returning to us the letters we had written to them from our years in Saudi Arabia (1981-83). We got them from my mother-in-law, her sister, my dad's house, which included those to my grandmother, Lynda's dad's house, and from her grandmother's estate. I quickly saw the value in these and typed them into MS Word files and saved them. Alas, that was at least two computers ago, and we haven't had that computer on for several years.

I thought those were all the letters we had sent that we were ever going to get back, but a couple of weeks ago Lynda was wanting to find a particular childhood picture that her brother had a question about. In looking for that, we searched through a box we took from Lynda's mom when she moved into her retirement apartment. In it were letters and from various people over a forty year span. I looked through them, and to my surprise found a bunch of letters of ours from Saudi Arabia.

One of those I immediately recognized, the first one Lynda wrote from there. I knew I had typed that, so I thought these must have been duplicates. Then I looked at the salutation on the letter: "Dear Mother, Dad, Norman, Grandma, & Grime,". What I looking at was the original. Had I typed from one of these duplicates? A couple of nights ago I found the originals that I had originally typed from copies. We now have the original of that letter plus two of the copies we mailed. Three out of five aren't bad.

As I began going through these newly discovered ones, I found it as fascinating as reading letters of Wesley from the 1700s, maybe more so, as the Wesley letters give me information, but these give me memories. Here's an excerpt from a letter Lynda wrote to her mom.

June 23, 1982 Wed
Dear Mother,
...The sewer backed up again last night. I got to spend some of the AM cleaning the bathrooms. Hope it doesn't happen while we're gone. The dryers are still only working half the time in the laundry room. I still have a load in drying and it's almost 5 PM after washing this AM. We are now told BVA doesn't have the money for washers & dryers & we've heard nothing more of phones.

Next day: Well, Dave got home early from work yesterday, the kids got up from their naps & we went o laundry room to get the last load of towels. Later we went to Hardee's for dinner with the Jacksons. We hadn't been out for about a month & so it was good. Karen is flying with her kids to the states tonight....

We are excited about flying out the 30th. Charles is sure anxious "to go see Grandma."....

I'd almost forgotten about that sewer backing up so often. What memories that brings up. Or, from the older batch, here's one I wrote. The location isn't given, but it would have been either my office in Al Khobar or our apartment at Palm Meadows Village just outside of Khobar.

Friday
16 October 1981

Dear Dad,
Just have time to write a quick note. I'm leaving for Riyahd in the morning to spend 2 or 3 days. I was supposed to go Sun-Monday, but just got a message today that I am to be there tomorrow.

We are all pretty well. Sara had an eye infection that has cleared up after we began medication. Chas. has had a cough, but does not appear ill except for that. My cold has been lingering for three weeks now – persistent cough & congestion. So far I have not missed any work.

The weather is cooler—below 100 deg F & not as humid. We have been swimming twice at the pool and once in the gulf. today we left the children with a sitter after church & at[e] at chinese [sic] food —it was excellent.

Enclosed are two checks to cover expenses. Say hi to all.
Love,
Dave & Lynda, Charles, & Sara

It was mailed at Rochester NY on 21 Oct 1981, and Dad endorsed the envelope "Received Oct 24, 1981 Saturday answered Oct 29, 1981. Nothing earth shattering but good to read, and to remember that anything below 100 degrees seemed cool to us back then.

So, I have lots of pleasant reading ahead of me. Maybe it's good that we didn't have a phone. We had to write all these letters, and so the memories live through them.

More on Time Management

2011-09-13T12:50:00.000-05:00

This last week I wrote over 9,000 words on In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. I'd say that was effective time management. In a comment to my last post, a good friend, Gary, asked if documenting my time management was a good use of time. I replied that for my engineering work it was close to a necessity.

Since I came to Arkansas, I've been involved in nine (give or take 1) lawsuits. Sometimes it's us being sued by a client or a third party. Sometimes it's our client being sued by a contractor or a third party. I've also been involved in three mediations, generally between a client and a contractor, with us supporting our client. The last six or seven of these have happened after I began doing a fairly good job of tracking my activities. How good was it in court to be able to say, "I first met Mr. Finch on November 1, 2006, and his wife on March 12, 2007." Those people had both said they had never met me, but in my diaries, contemporaneously recorded, was a record on those days of meeting them. One point scored for the good guys.

Writing doesn't involve lawsuits, of course, though I suppose questions of copyrights could possibly arise. Professional writers say always data your drafts, either in manuscript or on the computer, and save everything. They say keep a diary of progress on a book. I don't exactly do that, though I might jot down on paper what my word count is at the end of each day that I work on it.

So what's the purpose of talking about managing time? Of documenting time spent? For the first question, I suppose it's my way of giving myself an incentive to get off my lazy butt and do something—of sit on my butt in front of the computer and write. If I talk about doing it, I'm more likely to do it than if I don't talk about doing it. As far as documenting the time I spend on writing, part of that is to show the IRS, should I ever be audited, that I'm serious about this second career, despite the relative lack of earnings. I suppose I also have a dream that someday, perhaps a century from now, a researcher will research my writing life for a thesis or dissertation, and will be interested in the day-to-day attempts to carve out time and write.

Dreams are good, so long as they don't immobilize you from pursuing them.

The Time Management Problem

2011-09-09T10:19:00.000-05:00

The older I get, especially now that I'm certainly closer to death than I am to birth, I have come to realize that time is our most important asset, and our most nonrenewable resource.

At work I'm currently trying to close or offload all my study, design, and construction projects so that I can be a full time trainer. We've grown to the size where I should be spending almost all of my time on training. Yet, I have these nagging projects that just won't go away or won't resist coming to closure. Today I'll be dealing with four projects that fall in that category.

In addition, I'm planning a new training course that I’ll teach at brown bag sessions stretched out over three or four months, between 5 and 8 sessions. Plus I'm working on two of the three papers I'll present at a conference in February (the third is done). Plus I have to make presentations to two different engineering groups on Sept 26 and Sept 27. Plus I'm trying to write some standard specs and change some standard details. It's a lot of small balls I'm trying to keep in the air, every now and then catching one and tossing it in a nearby basket. Except if I miss the basket the ball comes back for more juggling.

So what I'm finding is I don’t do multiple task management as well as I used to. Twenty years ago I would have been bored if I didn’t have fifteen tasks to juggle each day. Now four or five prevents me from adequately focusing on any of them. So I spend a little time on one, see that I can’t really finish it, or even take it to the next level closer to completion, so I shift to another one with the same result, then to another one, etc. By the end of the day I’ve worked on ten tasks, got a few things done, but feel incredibly unsatisfied with my performance. Some days are better, but still nothing is getting closed.

With writing it seems to be the same as with engineering, except maybe I'm doing a better job at compartmentalizing. On a typical weekday, I spend 15 to 20 minutes working through my Harmony of the Gospels. This might not seem like much, but since this is a non-commercial project, one that is more for my own benefit than for selling, I can't justify a lot of time. And the type of stuff I'm doing on it now is easily done in small junks of time. Then I spend 15 to 20 minutes in the letters of John Wesley. I consider this research/development for future writings. Again, what I’m doing right now—formatting volume 6 of the letters—is easily done in small chunks of time.

Other free time at the office is mainly dedicated to writing research. Sometimes I read agent/editor/writer blogs. Sometime I research books similar to mine, sometime I do hard research into any number of things. Occasionally I'll read something about the art and craft of writing.

At home, dedicated hours for dedicated tasks is harder to set up. This week has been good. I get home about 6:15 PM, finish eating by 7:15 PM, either walk for half an hour or watch TV while multitasking (maybe a crossword). At 8:00 PM I go downstairs to The Dungeon, and am there till close to 11 PM. During that time I write, review what I wrote the day before, work on coordinating plot elements, perhaps do a little research, and take as much of that time as possible to work on my most prominent work-in-progress, currently In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. For the last month and a half this has been working, as the book has gone from 26,500 words on August 2 to 57,600 now. I would say my net actual writing time for the last three days has been about an hour and 15 minutes each day, and my production was 4,400 words. Those aren’t polished words, finished words, but they probably aren't too bad.

But, in all of the above, I have not once mentioned blogging. That has suffered. I went from 3 times per week updates for this blog to about once per week. My other blog, my "official" writing blog, is about the same. I'm going to try to improve on the during the rest of September, but carving out the time to think about a post, draft it, proof it, edit it, and actually publish it has been difficult.

Bare with me, loyal readers. I will return to more frequent posting, once I get my time resources in better working order.

More on Lit Crit

2011-09-02T12:48:00.011-05:00

After my previous post on literary criticism, my friend Gary comments, then we exchanged some e-mails about it. Gary is, among other things, a literary critic. Not for a career, but he does this. Where I would critique a poem or book of poetry, he would provide a traditional literary criticisms of it, interpreting the poem or book according to how it spoke to him.

They used to have us do that in school It seems for several years in a row we studied Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening". Each year the teacher would say how this was a suicide longing poem, or a death wish poem. The narrator—whom they always said was Frost speaking autobiographically—wanted to lie down in the woods and die instead of facing his heavy responsibilities. Well, I don't see that in that poem. I see a pretty picture, a farmer, laborer, or businessman in olden days returning home late from some engagement, taking a moment to enjoy a thing of beauty. That was never good enough for those teachers, however. If you didn't see the suicide wish in it, you were stupid. That killed poetry for me for thirty years.

Then there were the questions on the quizzes, or in class. "What was the poet thinking when he wrote this?" Or, "What is the poet's intent with this stanza?" Hey, stupid teacher, the poet's dead. He died before I could talk to him. How the hell do I know what he was thinking or what his intent was? I can't know that. All I can do is say what the poem says to me. I guess that kind of questioning was another thing that helped kill poetry for me for those several decades.

So where does that leave me relative to literary criticism? The teachers wanted me, the whole class, to write our answers with certainty. "This is what the poet was thinking...." "This is the poet's intent...." "The poet added this hidden meaning...." And I think that certainty is what bugs me most. Interpret the poem all you want. Unless you talked with the poet, or unless he left a documented trail of explanations, it's all personal interpretation. It's a guess. You can't state it with certainty. Yet, that's exactly how you are supposed to do it.

Confidence is one thing. How you state that confidence is something else. To say, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is a suicide poem seems to me not confidence but hubris. To say, In "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" I see a man contemplating suicide" is confidence. The critic is confident in what he sees in the poem. To say what the poet mean, in terms of absolute certainty, is wrong—again, except when the poet has left a paper trail saying "this is what I meant in that poem."

I suppose this applies to all lit crit, not just poetry. I've seen interesting things in my own poems. When I post them for critique, not criticism, I often get critiques that are more like criticism. I was especially amused when one critter described one of my poems as referring to death. As the poet, I know what I meant, and it was far, far from being about death.

Have I sufficiently flogged this horse? I hope so. Maybe on to other subjects with my next post.

Getting Used to Presenting

2011-08-31T11:52:00.000-05:00

In a little more than an hour I'll step before a packed conference room, with the video conferencing camera and screens running, and make a training presentation. At least, I hope the conference room will be packed. The topic of my presentation is: "Dealing with Regulated Floodplains: Part 1 - Floodplain Basics".

Floodplains have been a huge part of my civil engineering work in the last three years. Part of that has been detailed engineering analysis of floodplains. Another big part of it has been coaching our project managers through the process of developing in a floodplain. Another part has been working with a local city as their floodplain engineer, helping them comply with Federal regulations. It's worked, since they won an award in 2010 for their floodplain management activities.

I do these presentations as "brown bags"; that is, it is intended to be a lunch time presentation. However, since we have offices in three time zones, any of which may want to conference in to any given presentation, we do them at 1 PM Central Time. Almost no one eats their lunch at ours, maybe not at any of them. I usually eat my lunch after, since it's kind of hard to eat and present at the same time.

I've been making presentations like this in the company since 2001. At first they were for our small but growing department. Then we opened some of them up to other departments. When I moved to the training position in 2006, they went "global". For a while we did it at two different times. Now, with a down-sized company, one time is sufficient. So I've ben on-camera with these for five years.

The camera doesn't bother me. I barely know it's there. The audience doesn't bother me much. But the whole idea of presenting in general is not my favorite thing. I wouldn't mind getting up and reading something. But preparing a document to be read, which can fill a one hour training class, if a time consuming activity. It would take me two weeks to do it for a one hour class. So I present sort of extemporaneously, from notes and knowledge of the subject. I prepare mostly by knowing the subject, more than practicing what I'm going to say.

I've never been totally comfortable doing this. Nervousness? Not really, just always concerned that what comes out during the class will be truly beneficial to those who attend. A lot of the things I talk about are dry topics that don't lend themselves easily to lively discussions: construction specifications; floodplains; erosion control; construction management; drainage. I try to find ways to make them lively. Part of this is animation of the voice. Part of it is showing myself to be excited about the topic. None of it is easy. I have to make myself do this the way I do. It seems to work. People seldom fall asleep. And after one particularly animated class a few years ago, the CEO said to me, "I think you've found your calling."

Part of what I do during these classes is treat them as "media practice" for when I'll someday be on camera or microphone for promoting my author activities. If I can do it for engineering, why not for poetry? Or fiction? Or non-fiction historical/political books? Or Christian non-fiction? The topic may change, but the need to show poise and to not say anything stupid are the same. Today I get some more practice at that.

And, I have at least four (and maybe as many as nine) visitors coming from local governments to hear this. Let's hope that poise shows through.

The previous post is messed up

2011-08-21T22:24:00.001-05:00

I don't know what happened, but when I went into the last post to try to correct a formatting problem, I lost a bunch of it. Now I can't edit the thing. I'm going to leave it in place for now, and try to fix it tomorrow. I'm much too tired now, and my eyes don't seem to want to focus.

22 Aug 2011: Okay, I managed to fix the previous post and add more to it. I'm not sure it's quite as good as the first time around, but the readers may be the judges of that.

I Don't Get Literary Criticism

2011-08-21T22:19:00.007-05:00

File this under "old news", but I'm just getting around to it due to some recent reading that reinforces my old prejudices.

A couple of years ago at the Absolute Write poetry forum we had a thread about critique vs. criticism. Now I enjoy poetry critique, but I've never really liked literary criticism. I contributed to the thread, including this:

Criticism, on the other hand, is evaluating completed poems and comparing them to some standard that the critic holds regarding poetry. We might not state the standard, but it's always there in the background.

To this a most learned lady replied, a professor of some sort, obviously highly educated, also very sure of what she says. Her reply to the above was:

Be careful about conflating the common use of criticism with literary criticism; they are not the same. Literary criticism, and critical theory, are ways of reading texts that are interpretive, rather than evaluative.

One way of thinking of criticism is to look at it as a reader attempting to find personal meaning in a text, to discover how, and why, a text (a poem, a song, a novel, a letter, an advertisement) does or does not "work" for that reader.

Which brings me to the reading I did that finally spurred me to write this post. At the Chicago Publishers Row Lit Fest in June, I picked up the book The End of the Poem by Paul Muldoon. There were drawn from a series of 15 lectures Muldoon gave at Oxford University in the first decade of this century. Now I don't know Muldoon, had never heard of him before. But the book was marked down from $17 to $4, I liked the title, the TOC looked interesting, and so I bought. About two weeks ago I finally got it out of the bag and began reading it.

This is a book of literary criticism, I guess. Muldoon starts out evaluating Yeat's "All Souls' Night", which he ties line by line to various works of Keats, and to other works of Yeats. He looked at lines, structure, even the date it was written, and showed how this line and that line Yeats had borrowed from Keats, and how he was signalling that he was borrowing from Keats. At the end of the lecture/chapter, I found myself more confused than elucidated.

He then went on to Ted Hughes' "The Literary Life". He evaluated this one all right. It appears to have been about an encounter Hughes and Sylvia Plath had with Marianne Moore in 1958. The poem definitely seemed to be about a real encounter, and hence at least somewhat or maybe entirely autobiographical. At one point Muldoon wrote:

I want to concentrate in this chapter on that aspect of the phrase "the end of the poem" connected to the notion of there being "no barriers" between the poem and the biography of its author—including the hinterland of the letter, the journal, the gossip column....

In addition to this, Muldoon does this same line by line (not every line, but many of them) tying of the poem to other works by Hughes, by Plath, by Moore, and others. I reject this idea that the poem must be autobiographical. That's what he seems to be saying in the quote above. Why must every poem be autobiographical? Why must a poem by a poet be tied to other poems by the same poet? Can he/she not have works totally independent of each other?

Muldoon moves on the Robert Frost's "The Mountain", a poem I discovered three years ago and fell in love with. Muldoon, however, butchers it in his evaluation. The name of the mountain is Hor. This, he says, is a lot like hoar and hoary, which connote white and cold things—frost. Thus Frost is cluing us in to his name through naming the mountain Hor.

Give me a break. Is this what literary critics do? No wonder I never liked it. Could frost never mention ice or frost or cold or white or hoary without some over-reaching critic say it has to be about his own name, and hence autobiographical? This whole the poem must be autobiographical and must be tied to the rest of the poet's body of work and must be tied to poems that poet might have read and must have borrowed from disgusts me.

Give me critique any old day. Literary criticism and me have parted company, and I suspect we will never rejoin, unless those guys who met to define it meet and change the definition.

More on "The Savage Nation"

2011-08-14T14:27:00.000-05:00

Since I savaged Michael Savage's The Savage Nation in my last post, without giving much in the way of specifics, I thought I should come back for another post and explain a bit more and give some examples. I also should say that the way I read this book probably wasn't the most conducive to reading for comprehension.

My commute home, the way I normally go, takes me through 15 stop lights (or, if you prefer, go lights). The first nine of those are in Bentonville, the last six in Bella Vista. To slightly engage my brain during the drive home, to further multitask in addition to the driving and the radio, I keep track of how many stop lights I have to stop at. That gets old, however. Eight one day, nine the next, six the next (a good commute), ten the next (a lousy commute). I needed a different multitasking activity. Some of those lights are long ones, and the wait is long due to Bentonville traffic, and counting is at best intermittent.

So I put The Savage Nation in the pick-up and read it during time sitting at stop lights. I found this was a way to make the commute go faster. If I picked the book up as soon as I stopped after the light turned read, it would turn green quickly. If I forgot to pick it up, distracted by something, the light would stay red forever. Then I'd think, oh, I'm missing an opportunity to read, pick up the book, and immediately the light would change. So I picked up the book often.

Admittedly, this is not the best way to read for comprehension, nor for enjoyment. I was disliking the book so much I decided I needed to give it a better chance, so I took it into my office and read it in longer chunks on noon hours or breaks. Unfortunately, it was any better reading in bigger chunks. Here's a sample from it.

Listen to what this lunatic is saying. She and her human-hating buddies clucked over how we process chickens, but they show little concern for the flight attendants who had their throats cut by Arab and Middle Eastern hijackers. No such sanctimony came from the mouths of those psycho nutcases with green hair and nipple rings. No. They're only concerned about a chicken having its throat cut.

Even without the full context of what Savage is talking about, I think you can see that this is not a passage designed to inform. It is designed to inflame. But it's not well enough written even to inflame. This is poor stuff from a man with a PhD. Let's try one more example.
Women are afraid of angry men. Particularly in this homosexualized, feminized America. An angry man frightens a woman. If a boyfriend can't be like a girlfriend (with the exception of a male appendage), she doesn't want him. If a boyfriend can't be like a sister putting on nails with her, she's offended by him. If a boyfriend doesn't look like an emaciated model on heroin, she's afraid of him.

Just as Savage, on his radio show, runs between very good and ridiculous statements, this book of his sprints between the reasonable and the absurd. I have a feeling much of the book if probably pretty good, but getting through the junk is impossible for me. So, as I said in the previous post, I'm not going to finish it, nor will it take up 5/8 inch on my valuable bookshelf space. No, it's going in the garage sale pile. I'll give it two sales. If I can't recoup half my investment, it's going to recycling.
Generalization. Sensationalization. Ranting. It's like that through the book.

Book Review: The Savage Nation

2011-08-09T21:39:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure where I picked this one up, but it cost me 50 cents. Probably at a thrift store, based on the label. On occasion I pick up Michael Savage's talk show on the radio while driving home. He is an enigma among talk show hosts. Sometimes he says the most reasonable things, or gets off on "soft" subjects such as restaurants or bike rides, yet at other times he goes off the deep end worse than any other talk show host. But I say this in this favor: He always makes you think, is always provocative.

So when I had a chance to pick up his The Savage Nation [2002, Plume Books, ISBN 0-7852-6353-5] at a bargain I thought it would be worthwhile.

I wasted my four bits.

It is an awful book. Statements out of context. Premises made and not backed up. Rants that are close to incoherent. Poor flow of thoughts. Silly breakdown of chapters.

This is all based on my reading 37 pages of the 220 in the book. I'm not reading any more. I'll chalk it up to spendthrift ways. Don't buy it, even for 50 cents. Don't waste your time.

Book Review - "The Search For The Twelve Apostles"

2011-08-07T16:21:00.001-05:00

I bought this book, The Search for the Twelve Apostles by William Steuart McBirnie, Ph.D. [Tyndale House, 1973 paperback 9th printing 1977] at least in part because of who the publisher was, and the title. I picked it up at some used book location—either a thrift store, used book store, or yard sale—for the grand investment of not more than 50 cents. The subject matter sounded good, especially this that was also on the cover: "The thrilling account of how a Bible scholar discovered what finally became of the original disciples of Jesus."

The book, in in 293 pages (not including a list of apostles, a bibliography, and an index, actually covers more than the Twelve. He includes other New Testament figures: Paul, Matthias (who replaced Judas Iscariot in the Twelve), John Mark, Barnabas, Luke, and a few others.

I was disappointed, to say the least, and feel that I wasted my investment. McBirnie has done nothing more than recount the various legends and traditions about where the twelve apostles went after Jesus' ascension. I don't mean to discount his research. What he describes in the book is impressive: so many trips to the Middle East, or to this country or that country; so many documents reviewed, including some he says were never before reviewed by any researcher into the twelve. Much of the book is quotes from the ancient documents he reviewed, or from a few more modern books (say 15th and 16th centuries). It's clear he did much research, and believes what he has is scholarly. The fact that the book went to at least nine printings indicates there was a demand for it in the 1970s.

But what he does is divide the information he found into the category of traditions and legends. Traditions can be relied upon to be truth, he says, while legends should be taken circumspectly. How he separates legends and tradition is not as clear. But, apostle by apostle, he gives us the traditions, he gives us the legends, and he writes a short "biography" of each.

A good example is Bartholomew, one of the Twelve about which little is said in the Bible, in fact nothing more than his name in the list of the Twelve. He was the son of Tolmai.

"His ministry belongs more to the tradition of the eastern churches than to the western churches. It is, however, evident that he went to Asia Minor, in the company of St. Philip, where he labored in Hierapolis...." page 139

Bartholomew escaped martyrdom and went to Armenia, carrying with him a copy of Matthew's gospel. He labored in the area around the south end of the Caspian Sea, where eventually martyrdom caught up with him. One ancient document says he was skinned alive before being beheaded. But then legend has it he preached in India as well. His body (or at least part of it) allegedly is in St. Bartholomew Church, where it was moved after original internment in Armenia.

Give me a break. I don't see the scholarship in this. How does one differentiate between tradition and legend? It would seem by weight of evidence is what McBirnie did. If a whole lot of ancient statements said this is what happened to an apostle, while a few give conflicting information or travels and labors incompatible with the majority report, then the former must be traditions and therefore should be believed, while the others are obviously legends and should be discounted. And throughout the book he seems obsessed to know where these men were buried, laying credence to where their relics are venerated. The was a colossal waste of what are obviously superior researching skills.

I'm discounting the whole thing. I didn't finish it and won't. In fact, I'm not going to waste the 5/8 inch of shelf space this would take. It's going out in the next garage sale, unless I decide to recycle it so that some other schmuck won't take time reading it.

Tell me what you think, please

2011-08-02T21:13:00.000-05:00

Hey readers:

I just made a post over at my blog at davidatodd.com, concerning a new, more concentrated effort I'm thinking of making in my writing. I don't want to paste that in here. Would you mind following the link, reading it, titled "Citizen and Patriot", and letting me know what your thoughts are?

Thanks.

Excuses and Factors Revisited

2011-08-01T12:32:00.000-05:00

Let's see, my last two posts to this blog—actually my last four posts—were excuses of why my writing production has not been higher, and tacitly why I haven't been making more posts here. One was my tick-borne disease, ehlichiosis. This did indeed slow me down. It's still slowing me down, as I'm not moving as fast as I used to, still have stiffness and pain in my neck. It's improving, but I'm not there yet.

Then there was the Ephraim Factor. I'm sorry, guys, but time with grandson #1 was more important than writing or keeping up with this blog, or any blog. We had a great time, watching Veggie Tails and Winnie the Pooh, reading books, playing Runaway Pillow and T-Rex this or Unintelligible that. But he's gone now, along with the wife, safely in Oklahoma City, giving me a quite house with nothing to do but vacuum up some spilled food, wash and put away a few dirty dishes, wipe down the spills of a 3-year old from the kitchen table, and get back to writing.

Then there's the "what the heck do I do with two blogs" factor. At friend Gary's suggestion, I added an RSS feed of each blog to the other. So the posts I make on one blog are linked to the other automatically. That means readers of An Arrow Through The Air can, if they look at the RSS feed, get to my writer's blog by the links, or at least see that I'm active there.

That doesn't fully solve the dilemma of whether to keep the two blogs or, if I keep them both, what kinds of posts to make to each. But I suppose I don't have to solve that problem yet. I posted a political piece earlier today to The Senescent Man blog. I've posted here. Time to hop on over to my writer's blog and post about my writing routines. And where these three paths in the woods will lead, whether they diverge or converge converge, still remains to be seen.

The Ephraim Factor

2011-07-27T12:36:00.000-05:00

On Sunday Lynda and I drove to Tulsa, met Sara and Richard, ate a meal, and brought 3 year old Ephraim back to Bella Vista to spend a week with us. Lynda's cousin Trish Jackson was with us too.

He is a joy to have around. Lots of energy, lots of chatter, lots of questions. He sings often, normally unintelligible gibberish, known only to the mind of a small boy. He doesn't eat very well, though that will change naturally, I think, as he gets older. He loves when we read books together. We've read books the last two nights that require us to push buttons for a song to play. He loves those.

So, I don't think I'll get much writing done this week. I arrived home late last night due to BNC Writers meeting. Ephraim went to be late, about 10 PM. I went to The Dungeon, with him still making noise in his room. He got up a few times while I was downstairs. But I did not have the brainpower required to really tackle any writing projects. Nor did I have the brainpower required to work on family finances. Hopefully getting home on time tonight, and getting him to bed earlier, will result in more computer time and more brainpower to get some things done.

So how does that explain my lack of production last week? On Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday we attended the Country Gospel Music Association central division convention in nearby Springdale, Arkansas. Several of Lynda's relatives are in the CGMA: Trish Jackson, Leonard & Marina Pohl, and Faye Pohl. We saw them perform several times, as well as many others perform. On the nights we attended we generally did not get home till midnight.

The CGMA was started fifteen years ago as a ministry to those who themselves were in full time gospel music ministry, those who tour the land and sing itinerantly at churches, camp meetings, revivals. Eventually it attracted more than just the full timers. They started having conventions that were competitions. The categories seem endless: best band, best vocal group, best a Capella group, best new group, best male vocalist, best male full time vocalist, best lyricist, best whistler, best reciter, etc. etc. This provides for a wide variety of performances, and lots of opportunities to win something.

County music is not my preferred style, so many of the songs I listened to and found enjoyment in the performer's spirit if not in the actual music. Some of it wasn't really country, though very little would be considered contemporary.

I tried to draw parallels for the writing profession. Except for readings of our work, we are not really performers. Our work is not in front of people in a way that involves the combination of written art and joining of vocal or instrumental art. I guess I drew a parallel between those who didn't win the award they wanted and the writer's accumulation of rejections. I can think of two older teen girls in one family, who sang contemporary, not country music. One song wasn't even Christian; it would be considered secular. She was an excellent performer who has lots of talent and lots of "stage savvy". She didn't win in her categories, however, nor did her sister. They are new to CGMA, and were perhaps enough off the core of the "genre" that winning was unlikely. Possibly another group would be better suited to what they want to do: reach the non-Christian world with secular music that is underpinned by a Christian worldview.

I applaud them for that. That's basically what I want to do with my writing. Writing overtly Christian books is preaching to the choir. Now, the choir needs to be spiritually fed, so preaching to them is necessary and valuable. That preaching might keep some of the choir from falling away. But it ignores a much bigger need, the vast unreached majority of the world, including in the USA. That's where I want the majority of my writing ministry to go, and I'll stick mostly to that until led elsewhere.

Ehrlichiosis Chaffeensis

2011-07-21T14:25:00.000-05:00

As I said on a Facebook status update, the good news is I don't have Lyme disease (see the immediately previous post for discussion of this). The bad news is I have a different tick-spread disease, ehrlichiosis Chaffeensis, or e. Chaffeensis. This is something first identified at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas; hence the name. Lyme disease is not common in Arkansas. My doctor said in 33 years of practice he's only had one case of it. But e. Chaffeensis is quite common. He treats it many times a year.

The blood tests they do for these tick diseases includes two tests that tell whether the disease came on the previous six weeks or longer than that. My tests proved it was more than six weeks ago. So when I had similar symptoms a year or so ago, that must be when I got the durn thing.

The further good news is that the antibiotic he put me on ten days ago seems to be working. My symptoms have drastically improved. My neck is still a little stiff, my joints still hurt a little, my brain fog is just a little bit there. But for the most part, I'm feeling tons better.

So my self-diagnosis, aided by my friend Gary, was pretty much correct, just substituting one tick disease for another. The doc wants me to take antibiotics for a month instead of two weeks, and continue to stay out of the sun as much as possible. So no noon hour walks for a while. With the temperature over a hundred today that's fine with me.

I suspect I'll be back to normal in a week or so. It will be most welcome.

A Few Days of Sickness

2011-07-18T16:25:00.000-05:00

Last Monday I felt awful. Over the weekend I had had little energy, and felt myself going downhill. My neck was stiff, my joints ached, my right shoulder and left knee especially hurt, and my energy level was down. I remembered having this some time ago, and my friend and commenter on this blog, Gary, suggested I might have Lyme disease. I did have three scabs on my back, in a place that I couldn't see them. I had Lynda look at them, and she said they looked more like pimples than bite marks—no concentric rings such as you get with a bad tick bite.

When I went to bed last Monday, my rib cage was hurting, or, to be more specific, it had gone from hurting to having a specific place that hurt, a pin point that felt awful almost no matter how I moved. Before then, every night when I got into bed and my body adjusted from being vertical to being horizontal, my rib cage hurt like the dickens for about thirty seconds. Once the adjustment was over, I was fine. But on Monday night, that small place superseded everything. The minute it hit the mattress the pain was much worse than the dickens. I'm not sure what two pain levels above "the dickens" is, but that's where I was. It felt like a broken bone sticking through my back. I simply could not lay on it.

With some work, I figured out how to get in bed and onto my side without having that spot touch anything. Needless to say sleep wasn't the greatest last Monday. Pain killers and herbal muscle relaxers had no effect. At work on Tuesday I did some investigation, and found that a stiff neck is one of the key symptoms of lyme disease. So I called the doc, he saw me late in the day, said lyme disease was very rare in Arkansas but that three other tick-borne diseases (each with an unpronounceable name that sounded much worse than lyme) were somewhat common. He didn't think I had this, but decided to draw large amounts of blood to test for it and to treat me for it with a tetracycline based antibiotic.

The next day the doctor's office called to say the first tests on my blood showed a high rate of something or other, and he wanted to see me for a follow-up in ten days. Meanwhile, either through natural body healing or the antibiotics I began to feel better—until Friday night. Something hit me then, and lasted all through Saturday and into early Sunday. This was a total loss of energy, an attitude of not wanting to do anything but sit in my reading chair and watch television.

That fog lifted sometime during the day on Sunday, and right now I feel pretty good. My neck is still somewhat stiff, my knee and should still hurt (thought not nearly as much), and my energy level has mostly returned. So hopefully I'll be back posting here at a more regular schedule. And at my writer's blog as well.

Two Blogs?

2011-07-14T13:17:00.000-05:00

When I created my writers page, with my son's help, we created a blog thereon. Using the snazzy software from WordPress, copying all the posts from this blog to that new one was almost instantaneous. I haven't checked each post, but I've spot checked them, and found them to be correct, even to labels, even to the few images I use. Even the comments came over well, though I seem to have more comments on the copied blog than on the original. One of them must have a bad counter.

Since that blog went up on June 6, I've been posting almost identical content there and here. If I post here first I copy it there, and vice verse. I think I've had one post here that I didn't copy there, but I think everything I posted there I've copied here.

I don't know, however, if that's a good long term strategy. That blog is supposed to be for my writing career, not any personal stuff, not political info, not family or health stuff, not religious studies and Christian growth. All of those I've had on this blog, and have been copied over there. I don't have any posts I'm ashamed of, or ever unhappy with, but a reader of my writer's blog might wonder why I have Bible study type stuff posted, or information about great-uncles So-and-So who died. I may be deleting extraneous posts there.

I need to have a blog on my writing site, and it needs to reflect my writng activities. But, I don't want to lose "An Arrow Through the Air". First, I love the title, drawn from John Wesley's metaphor. I don't think I can fully maintain two blogs at the same pace I've been doing with this one. A thought I had was to make this blog the "complete" one, and the other blog the "writing only" one. That kind of makes sense, and the copying isn't difficult or time consuming. I suspect my few readers here want to see posts about my writing career, and probably don't want to be checking out another blog. Yet people who learn of me as a writer and search for me are more likely to find the other, and not also check out this one.

It's a dilemma—not an earth-shattering one, but still something to ponder.

And to seek input on. What about it, loyal readers? Shall I have two separate blogs? Shall I make An Arrow Through the Air a complete blog, and the other a writing posts only? Give me some feedback, please.

A Blast From the Past

2011-07-11T12:22:00.000-05:00

Yesterday we went to church with the temperature on the minivan thermometer showing 85 degrees at 9 AM. I hadn't caught a weather forecast for a few days, but my recollection was that it was to be in the upper 90s on Sunday. We stopped to pick up Lynda's mom, Esther, then parked in one of the shady spaces at the rear of the parking lot. It was out day to provide breakfast for our adult Life Group, so we carried that in. The plans were to go out to eat afterward to celebrate Esther's birthday.

At 11:45 AM, the service being over, after some limited talk in the foyer and elsewhere, I decided I should pull the van up to the church entrance so that Esther wouldn't have to walk as far. I exited the south doors from the foyer, and was hit in the face by a south wind that felt like a blast furnace. It was hot.

My mind flashed back to June 16, 1981, a Tuesday, when I first stepped off the airplane at Dhahran Airport, in the eastern provide of Saudi Arabia. I blast furnace hit me in the face then, too, about 105 degrees at six in the evening. Dhahran Airport did not have jetways. The plane was way out on the apron somewhere. We all piled into a transfer bus that was not air conditioned, and made the two minute drive to the terminal. I'm sure it was 120 or higher in the bus.

The terminal was air conditioned, but not overly so. In fact, I think the units were barely keeping up with the radiant heat pelting the roof, the heat island effect from the paving, and the latent heat from thousands of bodies standing in immigration lines, then looking through the luggage dumped on the floor, then standing through the laborious customs inspections. Finally I made it out, after probably an hour, to find a man holding a sign with my name. We walked to a far space in a crowded parking lot, loaded the luggage, and got in a car that had been sitting in that heat for an hour. Five minutes later I could feel good, cool air from a well-functioning car air conditioner, making most of the twenty minute drive to nearby Al Khobar a relative pleasure to what I had just gone through.

Such was my introduction to Saudi Arabia, at the beginning of an assignment we expected to last two years. The family—Lynda with 2 1/2 year old Charles and 2 month old Sara planned to spend a few weeks with her mom, then a few weeks with my dad, then follow me to the most severe of Middle Eastern countries. I would join the ranks of the "married bachelors", a group of about eight men who had come to Saudi and were waiting on family visas to come through. That was supposed to be a six week process.

The heat was just getting started. July is the hottest month in the Gulf countries. The average high temperature exceeded 120 F (official temperature; obviously more in the sun). Night time lows were generally around 90. "But it's a dry heat" you say. That depends on where you are. In Dhahran, about 10 miles inland, it's a dry heat, with some wind most of the time. But in Al Khobar, right on the coast, it's a humid heat. In the heat of the day it was those 120-odd degrees with 50 percent humidity. By 8 PM the temperature had dropped to 110 F, but the humidity had gone up to 70 percent. Apartment semi-enclosed stairway walls sweated, dripping moisture condensing from the air. Those who wore glasses or sunglasses had them instantaneously fog up from the humidity, although they would dry within a minute as radiant energy dried them.

You would think August would be better, right? Not so. Although high temperatures might be 5 degrees less, the humidity went up, to about 60 percent in the day time and 90 percent in the evening. This is not an exaggeration. The walls sweat more, the discomfort that kind of climate brings was even worse. Thus August became our month, during five years of living in the Gulf region, in which to go on vacation.

As I say, these memories came back yesterday. I started the van: 96 degrees in the shade, the thermometer said. We went to our lunch, then to a Goodwill store to look for some bargains, then to the church to pick up our leftover food, then to drop Esther at her apartment, then to drop our recyclables off at the center on the way home. The van thermometer showed between 106 and 110 F the entire time, though the weather people said the official high was 102 F. Obviously more in the sun, out on the pavement in the Bentonville heat island we were walking in.

The years in Gulf region were good years. Oh, some bad things happened, such as the time 1 1/2 year old Sara got away from Lynda, went to the pool, and was just about to climb down the ladder (not knowing it was floaties that let her play in the pool) when Lynda found her. Such as the time 9 year old Charles ran off from our apartment, walked a half mile, got on a city bus, and then got off at the beach club. Those could have both been disasters, but weren't.

Sometimes it all seems like a dream. Did we really live in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait all those years ago? Did we really almost lose Sara in the pool, and Charles to the city? Reason says yes, though thirty years of other life experiences almost say no. The wind blast yesterday was good for me, helping me remember the "ancient" times, and the goodness of God during it all.

Thoughts Behind Rejection

2011-07-08T15:17:00.000-05:00

our son, Charles, will next Monday begin his professional career. Doctorate in hand, he begins his position as an associate administrator over admissions for the Pritzker Medical School of the University of Chicago. On a phone call this week we talked, not for the first time, about the job and what it entails. Some of it will involve recruiting trips, to various universities, to encourage potential medical students to apply to their school.

In the course of that conversation, he said that Pritzker accepts maybe 10 percent (I think that's about right; don't hold me to that number) of those who apply. For the U of C as a whole, there's also many more applicants than positions. That caused me to ask what to me seemed to be an obvious question: "If you have more than enough applicants, why are you going out and recruiting?"

He explained that recruiting was for the purpose of getting more and more qualified candidates to apply—so that they can reject them. Actually, he didn't say that. He said that universities, and professional schools such as the Pritzker, thrive in part on "exclusivity". The more candidates they reject relative to the number of positions available, the more exclusive the school will appear, and the more better candidates will apply. They will always had a difficult time competing against the good medical schools such as Harvard's, but exclusivity helps. If they can say, "Only 5 percent of those who apply to Pritzker are accepted," that will look better than saying, "Only 25 percent of those who apply...."

I suppose that's true. A med school candidate, planning on applying to Harvard and similar exclusive schools and thinking they can be one of the 1 or 2% who are accepted, might not apply to a Pritzker that accepts 25% of all applicants, but might apply to a Pritzker who accepts only 5%. So off the school goes to recruit. Get the better candidates to apply, accept the best among those, and hope that with each class you'll have a better and better student body. Then, maybe at a point in the future, some of those applicants who are accepted to both Harvard and Pritzker will go to Pritzker

I wonder if writing is a little bit like that, or at least traditional publishing is. The rejection rate is sky-high for most things that a person would want to publish. An agent that is actively recruiting new clients might see 100 query letters and want to see a partial manuscript for only 5 or 10 of those. Of those 5 or 10, the agent might want to see 1 or 2 full manuscripts. Of those 2, an offer of representation might come to only one. At most one. The agent will most likely need many more than 100 queries to find that one writer he/she would want to represent. Yet, the agents invite queries to be sent, and attend conferences and workshops with the intent of recruiting new writers, hoping to find that one writer who can produce a mega-best-seller.

This isn't really the same as the medical school analogy. In writing, it's a buyers market. Too many writers chasing after too few publishing positions. In medical school, it's a seller's market where the best candidates and the best schools are concerned. I'm not quite sure how the bottom 95% of the candidates fit in, and I think my analogy breaks down.

Today I submitted three poems for possible publication. I submitted them to a small-ish periodical, one that I've read from time to time but don't subscribe to. It's a publication for writers and speakers. The have mostly prose, but publish some writing-related poetry. I met the poetry editor of this mag at the Write-T0-Publish Conference, and she suggested I submit some. This might be a better than 1 or 2% chance for garnering a publishing credit. Maybe it's around 10 to 20%. A week or two ago I submitted a haiku to a group that's putting an anthology together to help school libraries that were destroyed in the Joplin tornado. I think that one may have as much as a 25% chance of acceptance.

Clearly I'm not exclusively applying to the Pritzkers and Harvards of the writing world. I've been doing that for about eight years, and getting no where. I may be close with my baseball novel, but I may also be farther away than I thought. We'll see.

File Lost and Found

2011-07-05T09:49:00.000-05:00

The writing life is like a man who didn't back up his files every day to a consistent, safe place. Then one day his hard drive on his ancient computer began acting up. A repair shop was able to clone the drive, but the file, with 5,000 new words not contained on a manuscript, was not to be found. So the man asked the computer to do an heroic thing: Despite the slowness of the ancient processor and the drive clone, the computer was asked to search for all documents with a certain four letter string. Not knowing whether the computer had the umph needed for the task, the man started the search, went to his newer computer, and began again on those missing chapters from the older back-up file. Later, with a thousand words of dubious quality added, the man checked the old computer, and found it had identified six files with that string. One of the six files turned out to be the missing one, saved with the wrong date. Does not that man, when he has found the file, contact his friends and associates who read his blog and say, "Rejoice with me, for my file that was lost is now found. The work is there, and the first writing is better than the second."

Yes, my lost file is found. This was my In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People file. About a week before we left for Chicago I took some pages I had written in manuscript and entered then in the computer. As will normally happen, I changed things as I typed along, and I went beyond where the manuscript had ended. I recalled that I had added two or three thousand words, but wasn't sure how many. At the end of the session I saved the file, with a vague recollection I saved it to a wrong folder, but knew I'd remember that so didn't re-save it to the right folder. Also, I didn't do a poor man's back-up by e-mailing it to my office. I think I was in a hurry that evening.

Back from the Write-To-Publish Conference, with an editor wanting the manuscript and a publisher also interested, I went to look for the file. Nothing. All the files with that name in the right folder were older. I though, Oh wait, I saved that to a wrong folder, but which one? I went through all the folders I might have been working in the day I typed that chapter. Nothing. Oh, I found a FTSP file in one of them, but it was also an older file.

Now, I typed this on our 2001 Dell, which has been my computer for at least the last six years. It has been slowly losing performance, and I knew I would have limited use of it. I was planning to move all my stuff to our 2009 Dell, since Lynda doesn't use it any more. With no home network set up, I was going to do that through e-mails. But, two days before leaving for Chicago, the 2001 Dell gave me a blue-screen error, followed by a black-screen reboot, without rebooting. I dropped it at Computer Medic and went on the trip, telling them there was no hurry with it.

The medics took their time with it, and finally said the hard drive was dying, but that they thought they could clone it. Other projects pushed mine back, but they finally got to it, and I finally re-hooked-up the computer. It's amazingly slow, much slower than it was with the original hard drive. So I was actually searching on the clone hard drive.

I searched and searched for that file, to no avail. It seemed to be gone. I began to wonder whether I had dreamed about typing that chapter rather than actually typing it. Finally, I decided to use the Windows Explorer search feature. I wasn't sure if that old Dell could do the job. I searched for "FTSP" in file names only. It took literally twenty minutes for that poor computer to do the search, but came up with results as described in the first paragraph.

When I checked the original version against what I had typed that day, the original was much, much better. I've noticed this before on those few occasions when I started over due to something lost and later found. The original is always better. The found file actually had closer to three thousand words, in two chapters. Yesterday I added more than two thousand words to it, and the book stands a hair under 15,000.

Can 85,000 be more than two months away?

Working Through Adversity

2011-07-01T09:25:00.001-05:00

So I arrive at home last night, knowing I would have to fix supper, but I decided to sit a few minutes before starting it. I sat in my reading chair, leaned back, put my arms behind my head, and realized the air blowing on my arms from the AC duct was not as cold as it ought to be. I checked the thermostat/thermometer—it was 82 degrees with the thermostat set on 77. Some was amiss.

The inside air handling unit was working, but the outside compressor wasn't. I checked everything I knew to check, and couldn't find the problem. So I shut it off, we turned on some fans, I cooked supper, we ate, I went out and looked for ripe blackberries (finding none, the bushes nearest the house being either past prime or still red), and I headed to The Dungeon, with its coolness and Internet.

The coolness was nice, but the Internet was down. A call to Cox resulted in the message, "I see there's a service outage in your area; technicians have been dispatched." So, we went to The Dungeon, but watched an episode of Battlestar Gallactica instead. With an interruption for a long phone call, that brought us to 10:30 PM. By then the Internet was back, but that left too few hours to do much except check e-mail. No real time to do the writing tasks I had planned for the evening.

Which was too bad. I had a lengthy writing to-do list. I was going to go to the old computer, just back from the shop, and back-up recent work by e-mailing them to myself. Then I was going to go to the new computer and download those items (I've never been able to set up our home network) so I'd have them in three places, or five if you include the mail server and my hard drive at work. I was also going to begin the process of uploading my two e-books to SmashWords, which includes some exacting formatting. Couldn't do the things I wanted to do, so didn't do the others.

Today is looking better. The AC dude will be there sometime today, maybe before noon. The Internet was restored. Tonight looks to be an evening of accoplishment. As I've written before, however, it seems that whenever I begin to ratchet up my writing activities, adversity pays a visit. I went to the writing conference, and a two week dry time followed. I pull through that, and can't do what I planned to do on the computer. I have a ton of personal items to attend to.

Last night I probably should have done some kind of writing on the computer or in manuscript. I could have worked on the next chapter of In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, and have merged the files later. I could have worked on part of a subject that came to me over the last few days for inclusion in The Candy Store Generation, and merged the files later. I could have worked on the proposals for the John Wesley writing series and the genealogy article series, both of which have finally started to come together in my mind and are about ready for making tangible. But that wasn't what I'd planned to do last night, and I just didn't feel like changing my plans. Oh stubborn me.

Somehow I've got to find a way through adversity to productivity. To embrace flexibility a little more. To have some back-up tasks planned for those times when it just doesn't work out to work on the urgent or the necessary. Hopefully I'll get there.

I am my own Chief Marketing Officer

2011-06-29T15:47:00.003-05:00

In the old world…Authors created the product and relied on their publishing company to market it. But that world is dead.
–Michael Hyatt

Michael Hyatt, chairman of Thomas Nelson Publishers, recently posted to his blog: Four Reasons Why You Must Take Responsibility for Your Own Marketing. The post has generated over 200 comments, including mine.

I want everyone to know that I embrace the concept that an author must participate, even lead, in their own marketing effort. That doesn’t mean I like it, or want to do it. But do it I will.

It’s difficult to lose the training of my upbringing. We were taught that blowing your own horn was a bad thing. “Don’t brag” was one way it was put. “He that exalts himself will be humbled” was how a Higher Power put it, and one of the few biblical things repeated in the family. Heck, in Miss Dudley’s class in 4th grade I was nominated for room president. I voted against myself, and Susan Ehrens won by one vote. Granted, 4th grade class president is not a position of immense importance, but hopefully you get the idea.

So how’s a body trained to be humble, to stay in the background, to let others call attention to you ever going to break through the marketing wall? Darned if I know. They say to start a blog. I did that in December 2007, and have achieved 14 followers and an average of 400 non-unique page views per month. Those are pretty poor numbers. Obviously I’m doing something wrong there.

They say to join Facebook and other social media. So I joined Facebook, and have a little over 100 friends. I started a Facebook fan page earlier this month. At least, I guess that’s what I started. Actually my son created it for me. I still haven’t figured out the difference between a Facebook account and a Facebook fan page. I have 6 people who “liked” my page—does that mean 6 fans? And, there’s a button for me to like it. Is it against my training to like my own page? What will that look like to others who check to see who the 6 7 are who like my page?

They say join Twitter and gain a following. Haven’t done this yet. Twitter is blocked at the office (where I’m typing this). At home on week nights I have two hours of writing time, unless I totally ignore my wife and limit myself to less than 6 hours of sleep, in which case I can squeeze in four a week night. Saturdays require lots of home maintenance stuff and leaves little quality time of brain and body function for writing. Sundays might give me six hours, again with some loss of interaction with the wife. How in the world could I find time for meaningful Twitter work?

They say start a personal e-newsletter, describing your writing work and the items you are working on or have available. Give something away to everyone who subscribes to it. You get their e-mail address, send out a newsletter with some regularity, and hope some of them buy your new works when you announce them. See the time factor in the previous paragraph.

This probably sounds like a rant, and I suppose it is. How does a working, commuting author find time to both write and market? I haven’t found the balance yet. Maybe if I dug ditches all day I might find brainpower available in the evenings, but I work with my brain, and often those two hours are difficult to make productive.

What do you think? Any suggestions for how an author with a full-time job and home and family responsibilities can be his own Chief Marketing Officer?

Stewardship of my Writing Time

2011-06-28T13:06:00.000-05:00

I posted recently that I was going through a dry time, not writing much. I also mentioned that the main creative things I wrote during this time was a haiku. The inspiration for this was the blizzard we had last winter. Early the morning after went out in the sub-zero temperature to shovel 16 inches of snow. I wasn’t going to work that day, and my truck was parked up the hill, not in the driveway. But I woke up that day to a glorious sun. Past observation has proved that the sun’s radiant energy will melt the residual sheen left on the driveway after shoveling, even in very cold temperatures. An amazing thing, radiant energy.

So I shoveled, taking frequent breaks due to the depth of snow. As the sun rose high enough, I noticed that ice or snow crystals were fluttering in front of it. The air was so cold (somewhere around -12F) that the little moisture in the air was condensing. Enough to have a few crystals or flakes, not enough to be called precipitation. The line “ice crystals flutter” stuck in my mind, and I realized it would make a good line in a haiku. As I shoveled I worked on it, but the full thing didn’t gel.

Over the last four months I kept coming back to it, convinced a short poem was begging to be released. Finally last weekend it gelled. The impetus for that is an anthology being put together by some Missouri writers groups to help replenish school libraries damaged in the Joplin tornado. They want short stories or poems concerning storms, any type of storms. That was a good motivator to get quiet for a while and finish my haiku.

What about my writing time in general? Yesterday evening went well. I began work on the next chapter of In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. I think I had less than five hundred words of text added, but at least I sent some words from brain to keyboard to hard drive. I figured out how I want to approach the chapter. I also brainstormed the next chapter, running scene and dialog through my mind.

I guess because the haiku captured my mind for a while, I went to Absolute Write and critiqued three poems. None of them took very long to do, maybe ten minutes each, a little more for the villanelle. Here are the links to those crits (password is “citrus”):
“Uke’s Lament” (ninth post)
“Malicious Intent” (second and eight posts)
“My Fingers Softly Upon Your Cheek” (second post)
These are not earth-shattering creativity, but they keep my mind engaged.

Of course, since a writer is supposed to be their own best marketer. And a self-published writer is their own publisher. So part of my time must be dedicated to these. Today has included some marketing brainstorming. Tonight, after our BNC Writers meeting, might involve some more research for publishing with SmashWords. I’m close to completing my review of their Style Guide, after which I can begin to upload my two e-books to that sales platform.

So all in all, not bad with my stewardship of time. Still have a ways to go before I can claim to have my act together, however.

A Dry Time

2011-06-27T13:19:00.000-05:00

That's what it's been in my writing life lately, a dry time. I've been on my own at home lately, with Lynda in Oklahoma City, helping our daughter while her husband was away. He came back late Saturday night, and Lynda will return home today or tomorrow. While she's been gone, I've not done a lot of writing.

One excuse I had was the computer I normally work at was in the shop, to determine what the blue screen error followed by the black screen re-boot error was all about, and hoping it was salvageable. It has all my writing works on there. I have most of them backed up, but the latest things added to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People and my Harmony of the Gospels I had not backed up. Also, my financial spreadsheets were on that computer. It wouldn't be the worst thing to lose those, but I'd rather not lose them.

I wanted most to work on In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, as of all the things I pitched at the Write-To-Publish Conference, that seemed to me to have the most potential. I could work on a scene or two somewhere late in the book, but I mostly wanted to add one more chapter consecutive to what I've done so far before sending it to agents and editors. Alas, I'm missing a chapter and a half in what I have backed up. I was supposed to get the computer back last Friday, then last Saturday, now today. The delays are not making me hopeful about recovery of my files.

Meanwhile, I have Lynda's computer available, the one she never uses (instead using the laptop upstairs and avoiding The Dungeon entirely). I've used that to check e-mails and Facebook and blogs. On that I sent all my thank yous to the faculty and staff of the WTP conference. On it I did a lot of fine tuning to my writer's web site. On it I made a number of posts to my Facebook author fan page. So the lack of a computer was not a true hindrance to writing.

So what did I accomplish these last twelve days while I was alone at the house, besides the things mentioned above? Here's a list.

Organized my thoughts about how to restructure the John Wesley book into a series of study guides, as suggested by the editor for Wesleyan Publishing House. This included an outline of the series, as well as some work on which of John Wesley's writings would be in some of the small group study books.
Researched SmallGroups.com, and downloaded and printed a study to use as a guide for how I might organize mine. I completed review of that one study last night; time to download another one.
Read a fair amount in John Wesley's Letters, volume 4. From this I identified some things that are suitable for the Wesley books.
Completed a private critique of a short story for someone in BNC Writers, and began a second similar critique (almost complete).
Read a book self-published by a member of BNC Writers.
Did some research for The Candy Store Generation. Not a lot of research, but I developed a system for the subject I'm researching. It should go somewhat fast from this point on. At least I hope so.
Did a small amount of research for a future volume of Documenting America.
Completed a haiku that has been on my mind since February, and submitted it for inclusion in an anthology.
Registered for SmashWords, which publishes e-books to just about every e-reader platform, and markets to each of them. Downloaded and printed their style guide and have reviewed a little over half of its 87 pages. That sounds like a lot, but I should have been able to finish all of it in this time.

When I list it that way, it doesn't sound so bad. But I know what I could have accomplished in a quiet house with no one to interact with except myself. I could have completed two or three chapters of FTSP. I could have typed actual outlines of the Wesley project. I could have written a couple of chapters of the next volume of Documenting America.

Well, I have no way of reclaiming the last twelve days, and find no reason to bemoan the progress I didn't make. Better to be thankful for the progress I did make, and do better the next twelve days. Writers group is tomorrow evening, so at least I have a focus for the next couple of days. And maybe I'll get the computer back this evening, with its new hard drive cloned from the failing one.

Computer Woes

2011-06-23T22:06:00.000-05:00

Before heading to Chicago and the several activities there, my 2001 Dell decided it would not restart. This was after I took our 2005 Dell to the Computer Medic. That machine hadn't worked for several years, the operating system having been damaged by malware and the on-off button deciding not to work. I knew this older Dell was heading toward failure, and I suspected a memory card (chip, simm, whatever it's called) was failing or had already failed.

So, with the 2005 Dell at the shop waiting for evaluation, I took the 2001 Dell in to keep it company. Meanwhile Lynda went to OKC with the 2004 Dell laptop, and I moved to the other side of the perpendicular table in The Dungeon, and used the 2009 Dell that is supposed to be Lynda's computer, and kept on going. Almost all my writing was backed up through the Internet. I think on the 2001 Dell I have a slightly newer version of Father Daughter Day than the backed-up one, and a somewhat older version of the Harmony of the gospels. Well, any ideas would not be backed up, nor are my financial records. Those could be recreated, or rather restarted, without too much trouble.

So today I talked to the computer shop. They said the 2001 hard drive has failed, but not so badly that they can't recover. They have a replacement drive, and are cloning the old one. With luck I should have it back tomorrow evening. The 2005 Dell is done for. Its hard drive has also failed. Since we have already backed up all data on it to a CD, there's no point in fixing it.

When we were in Chicago and our son, Charles, was helping me with my writers web site, I found the new platform so difficult to use that I told him that I was a technophobe. He said, "You're not a technophobe; you don't fear technology. Maybe a Luddite." I'm not sure, though. I think I am a technophobe. If I were to start a magazine, it would be named Technophobia, and be for all those who fear punching the keys.

My problem is not really fear so much, it's rather not wanting to do something unless I understand what I'm doing it. This whole html thing troubles me. It's a programming language that I don't understand, and those guides I find to it are not really that much help. I'm learning it a little, but mostly I'm cutting and pasting what seems to be working, trusting I won't screw something up in the cutting and pasting.

Today I took a big new step on my website: I created three subpages and wrote a little text for them. Compared to where I was two weeks ago, that's a huge step. I also did my first posts today to my own Facebook author fan page. So this is a little progress.

I still have much to do with this computer stuff, however. I'll get there, I'll get there. Partly kicking and screaming. Partly rejoicing, for I love to make things work.

Ethics and Writers

2011-06-22T14:09:00.002-05:00

At the Suite101 forums, a writer posted that she is threatened with a lawsuit by a photographer whose photo this writer used, without permission, to illustrate a Suite101 article. The writer says she didn't check for the reuse licensing when she grabbed the photo off Flickr. It was on her article for some number of months before the photographer found it and demanded she remove it and pay her $125 for the use. Since then this writer took the photo down and begged forgiveness, pleading carelessness at not checking the licensing, but the photographer stills says the money is owed, and if it isn't paid she'll sue.

Aside from the fact that $125 sounds a little steep, I'm pretty much in sympathy with the photographer on this one. The posts on the forum have generally concluded that it was an honest mistake, and since it would cost the photographer to sue, the writer shouldn't pay anything. Here's my take on it:

There's the law, there's what you can get away with based on practicalities, and then there's the higher standard of ethics.

By the law, you used a copyrighted photo without permission. You did it inadvertently, but ignorance is never a valid excuse. By law the copyright holder is due compensation for the several months her photo illustrated your article.

But the practical matter is for her to sue you and obtain a judgment against you and then collect that judgment is cost prohibitive. So you can probably get away with it if you will just endure the shouting.

But by ethics, once you were made aware of the situation, don't you need to compensate her? The law defines the lowest acceptable standard of human behavior. Ethics defines something higher, something better, what's really right and wrong. Paying something will be a tough lesson to learn, but it's the ethical thing to do.

I agree with those who suggest making an offer. How many months was the photo illegally used? Offer her so much per month, maybe $5 or $10, in full compensation for the use and for her statement thereto. Print and file all e-mails. The payment will be a tax deductible business expense in the USA, probably in most countries. That should help offset any writing income you may have.

A costly lesson for that writer. Right after I posted a man, who might be a lawyer as well as a writer, posted to say that the photographer couldn't prove damages either through loss of income or beneficial income to the writer as a result of illegal use of the photo, so the writer shouldn't pay. He demonstrated exactly what I said in my post. He recommends the writer fall back on the lowest acceptable behavior, rather than hold to an ethical stand.

I'd be interested in what my readers think about this.

Conference Assimilation: The Appointments

2011-06-22T12:05:00.000-05:00

One reason writers go to conferences is appointments with editors, agents, successful authors, and other faculty. WTP is no exception. The conference did not begin with an introduction of the faculty and staff. You had to have done some homework and figured out from their websites what each faculty member was there for, and which ones were editors or agents.

Based on this homework, I decided to try to schedule 15 minute appointments with two editors. Full-conference registrants were allowed two appointments. More could be scheduled at certain times on succeeding days provided the time slots were not filled. At 8:00 AM on Wednesday morning was a conference ritual I call “crashing the boards”, as we gathered where schedules were posted on the wall, and reached and stretched to write our names on the preferred agent, editor, or writer schedule. I got appointments with my two targets, for Friday afternoon.

Why did I chose to meet with agents when I’ve decided to self-publish? I guess I still hold out some hope that I can get a contract with a legacy publisher, and so am willing to give it another couple of tries. But, as for other appointments, if I could get them, who to try for?

The panels helped. On Wednesday a panel of magazine editors discussed what they wanted to publish, why they were there. I had not planned on pitching to magazine editors, but three on the panel had things I could pitch to them. When the time came on Thursday when we could sign up for extra appointments, I signed up for two. Then the book editor panel on Friday showed me I should try to get one more appointment, with a certain editor. Again I pounced on the boards, and got the fifth appointment.

As I mentioned in a previous post, on Friday I hung out in the appointments auditorium rather than attend electives. By doing this I was able to have an unscheduled appointment with an agent who had a hole in his schedule—not to pitch to him, but to get his advice on what to do with Father Daughter Day. That made six appointments in all.

Here’s who I met with.
- Rowena Kuo, publisher of a relatively new publisher of magazines and books. I pitched a short story and a series of magazine articles to her.
- Craig Bubeck, of Wesleyan Publishing House. I pitched my Wesley writings project to him.
- Sarah McClellan, literary agent. I pitched Doctor Luke’s Assistant and Father Daughter Day to her.
- Mary Keeley, literary agent. I pitched Doctor Luke’s Assistant and Fifty Thousand Screaming People to her.
- Ramona Tucker, of OakTara Publishers. I pitched Doctor Luke’s Assistant and Fifty Thousand Screaming People, to her, along with Documenting America.
- Terry Burns, literary agent. I spoke with him for only five or ten minutes, and only about Father Daughter Day.

So, that is my stewardship record of appointments at the WTP Conference. I believe I did well, in timing when I crashed the board and in those I was able to meet. I’ll have more specifics in a future post.

What to do About Two Blogs?

2011-06-21T00:47:00.018-05:00

As I mentioned previously, I now have a writer's website. My son Charles helped me, actually did most of the work. He suggested a site for hosting and domain name registration. We looked together at some Wordpress templates, and had a difficult time agreeing on one. He found a couple that were okay to me, but neither stood out as what I wanted. Finally I said okay to the one that's up now. I didn't want something gaudy, with all kinds of movement and sound and flashy-flashy stuff. Yet I wanted something that looked professionally done. What we chose fits, I think.

Technophobe as I am, I wasn't sure I could hack the new software. It took me a long time to feel comfortable with blogger, and I wasn't anxious to learn a new one. But it has turned out to be easier than expected. Charles established the pages, and ported everything from An Arrow Through The Air to the blog portion of the new site. Since then, I've been tinkering. I added some works-in-progress. I corrected bad usage on the bio. I added Kindle links for my available books. And I wrote a little bit (twice) on the poetry page. And I've made four blog posts over there, each of which I copied here.

So, what shall I do about An Arrow Through The Air? I don't really need two blogs. Yet how to get my few followers to migrate to the new site? Yet, I sometimes make posts here that are probably not appropriate for a professional writer's site. This leads me to think I will keep both blogs. At davidatodd.com I will post about writing, maybe some on engineering (as it pertains to writing). I'll copy all those here, and then make some other posts here, as the spirit moves me.

How long will I keep this up? Don't know. That is to be determined.

Conference Assimilation: The Electives

2011-06-20T07:41:00.001-05:00

When continuing classes were not in session, electives were being held. These were a series of unconnected, one hour classes, about virtually anything related to writing or the publishing industry. Having attended five conferences before this, I’ve sat in on quite a few electives. This year I did so on three.

The first, Wednesday afternoon, was “Building A Winning Marketing Plan” taught by Carla Williams. Carla is with a self-publishing company, Winepress, that does a quality job with the books it publishes. However, Carla threw me for a loop with her statements about how much we should expect to have to spend to market our book. She said if you have 40 hours a week to put into marketing your book, you should only have to spend $5,000 or so on marketing. It spiraled up from there: the less time you had to spend, the more money you should expect to spend on marketing.

I thought, I should just quit right now. Unless God drops thousands of dollars in my lap, I’m never going to have that type of money to spend. I think I didn’t concentrate as well after that. I was probably in the wrong class. What I needed was “Ten no-cost or low-cost things you can do to market your book,” or something like that.

The next elective I attended, Thursday afternoon, was “Writing Great Discussion Guides.” As I’ve been doing a lot of this over the last two years, I thought this would be a good class to attend. It was taught by Sam O’Neal, an editor with SmallGroups.com, an arm of Christianity Today. Sam gave some excellent tips on how to frame questions, and what type of questions to avoid. He did not, however, include anything on what makes a good small group study. What types of lessons? How long should they be? What about separate class book and leader book? I suppose these will be in a class titled, “Building a small group study from scratch,” of some such title.

Later on Thursday I attended “Meeting the Media,” taught by Mary Byers. She is a magazine editor, and has been in the writing business for a while. This was a worthwhile class, but I felt it was a little off topic per the title. It was more about how to get the media’s attention—that is, how to choose what to write about so that the media will take notice of you. I’m not complaining, for Mary gave us some good information. But I was a bit disappointed.

I did not attend any elective classes on Friday. I had two appointments with agents in the afternoon, my two main appointments, and then I was able to schedule a third, with an editor. I was also wanting to speak with another agent about one of my projects—not that he would represent me for it, but I was advised that he would be able to advise me about submitting it. I could have squeezed in attendance at one or two electives, though I would have had to pop in and out due to my appointments, but I chose to just hang out in Barrows Auditorium and do some journal writing between appointments, as well as discuss things with fellow writers.

So, herein I present my stewardship of my time, as far as electives are concerned. Hopefully I used the hours well, and took something away from them.

Conference Assimilation: Rusty Wright on Reaching Non-Christian Audiences

2011-06-17T13:37:00.000-05:00

The Write-To-Publish Conference schedule included, as have all major Christian writers conferences I’ve been to, a continuing class—that is, a class that is taught over several days. The WTP ones covered all four days of the conference, amounting to five hours of class time.

The one I chose to attend was “Effectively Communicating Christ to non-Christian Audiences”, taught by Rusty Wright. I hadn’t heard of Rusty before, which speaks more about my lack of knowledge than his notoriety. He’s been on the lecture circuit, speaking at conferences, and writing articles for a long time. I just haven’t happened to cross paths with him. A big concern of his is that Christian writers need to branch out from writing only for people who are already Christian to people who are not. It takes a different approach.

The first day he talked about figuring out about who your audience is. What motivates them? How do they want to be entertained? What are their goals, hopes, fears, desires? This really isn’t much different from what we should be doing for any audience, but we don’t often do it. Or, when deciding to write something to reach non-Christians, we don’t adjust our writing style to really reach them.

An example of an adjustment we have to make to change our vocabulary. When writing for a Christian audience we use what he calls “Christianese”, the vocabulary of the church. Just how much we use this can be hidden from us. When writing pieces in which we want to reach those who want nothing to do with the church or their Jesus, we need to carefully consider every word used, and strip away all language that will even not be easily understood or will be off-putting.

On the third day Rusty told us about using humor. It’s a universal technique. Almost everyone likes to laugh, regardless of their spiritual beliefs. Why not use humor in writing and speaking, and sprinkle in the Christian message through that humor. He gave many examples he has accumulated over the years. As I am not a naturally humorous person, this will likely be difficult for me. Still, it’s a good technique and I need to expand my writing abilities to include it.
Rusty gave examples from his writings of pieces he wrote that went into secular magazines, yet included a small pro-Christian message of some type. usually these were subtle and short, though at times longer and more overt. He gave us links to his website where he had examples shown. In some cases, an article he wrote for some newspaper was picked up and republished, with or without permission, in a dozen other publications. His message went out.

I found this class to be useful, and a good use of my time at the conference. I’ve passed up these type of classes before, not because I didn’t want to take them, but because I had many things I needed to know and lots of choices. Finally the right time and mix of classes came along. I have some good notes and handouts to review. Hopefully I will be able to put some of this into practice soon.

Writers Conference Aftermath: Accumulation

2011-06-15T22:13:00.000-05:00

Last week, from Tuesday evening through Friday evening, I attended the Write To Publish Writers Conference, held on the campus of Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago. This is the second time I’ve been to this particular conference, the previous time in 2004. I would not have been able to attend except for receiving a Cec Murphey scholarship, one of eight members of The Writers View 2 e-mail group to receive one. We stayed in a college dorm, ate at the college cafeteria, and had our meetings in the Billy Graham Center, also part of the college.

On Tuesday evening the scholarship recipients met in the dorm lobby, then ate supper together. One of the eight was due to come in late and we didn’t expect her; another arrived in time but didn’t find us. Some combination of us then ate together most meals together, though also took time to network with other people.

Years ago I read a health book Fit For Life by Harvey Diamond. In it he talked about our bodies going through three phases in the typical diurnal cycle: accumulation, assimilation, and elimination. All three processes are at work simultaneously, but each of the three also has its dominant part of the diurnal cycle, overpowering the other two during that time.

This conference was the assimilation phase for this writer, and I suspect for others as well. For three days the hours were full of editorial panels, keynote addresses, continuing classes, electives, critique groups, fellowship, meetings with editors and agents, impromptu meetings with all parts of the writing business, and commiserating at the difficulty of becoming published by a traditional publisher—at least as far as books are concerned. And each day included a time of worship, for this was a Christian writers conference.

I took the continuing class on sharing Christ with non-Christian audiences. This was somewhat by process of elimination, as I’d taken some of the other continuing classes before. However, since I intend for most of my writing to be for the general market, not the Christian market, I also felt this class would be important to me. The instructor was Rusty Wright, whom I had not met before. An excellent teacher, he suggested several things I hadn’t thought of before. On Friday he covered how to use humor. About half of that day was concerning writing, half speaking. It was all good.

The accumulation phase of this conference is over. I brought back a ton of stuff (an exaggeration; at most 15 pound) which I have to go through, find out what’s good for me, what’s not, and begin implementing it. Meanwhile, I am working up a post-conference to-do list. That’s all part of the assimilation phase.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll blog about the assimilation phase of this particular conference, mentioning what I picked up during the accumulation phase, and maybe even something about what I’m eliminating. Stay tuned.

Congratulations Doctor Charles Norman Todd

2011-06-12T10:27:00.000-05:00

Yesterday our son Charles received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. I'm still waiting on him to e-mail a couple of photos so I can add them here.

It has been a long, ten year haul for him. After his bachelor's degree, he spent two years at Tufts University in the Boston area, and received his MA in Philosophy. Then on to U of Chicago, which was one of his main choices and certainly one of the top five universities to study philosophy in the USA. Eight years it took him here. He worked three of those years as prefect in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities. No doubt that slowed him down. However, at the lunch I was talking with some folks at a nearby table, told them what he received his doctorate in, and they asked, "Did it take him twelve years?" When I said eight, they said that was much shorter than normal.

The day began with us leaving his apartment at 7:45 AM, walking the eight blocks to the main quadrangle and rushing to grab the five best seat we could get among the 20,000 set up. As soon as we left the building it began raining. The university provided cheap plastic ponchos for all attendees, since it rained on convocation last year. The convocation was good. The rain stopped except for occasional sprinkles. All degrees were conferred. The main address was short, the president's remarks were short, and we were off to the luncheon.

"Luncheon" is too strong of a word. Set up on one of the smaller quadrangles some blocks away from the main quad, the Humanities masters and doctoral candidates and their guests were fed sack lunches. It was good, even though cold and simple. Then we walked eight blocks to a coffee shop. Then back to a hall near the luncheon quad for the hooding ceremony. We took pictures there, then back to the apartment. I figure we walked at least two miles, maybe closer to three, in the nine hours we were gone. A few hours later and it was time for the party, not as wild as I feared. Just a bunch of Charles' and Bis' friends. Of course, it didn't end till after midnight.

So my boy is now a doctor. Congratulations, Charles. May this degree, representing knowledge gained, serve you and society well for your lifetime and beyond.
(pictures will be added soon)

Improving as a Writer

2011-06-08T08:38:00.001-05:00

On The Writer's View 2 e-mail loop, and on a couple of agent/editor blogs I follow, the discussion lately turned towards how writers improve. That writers need to improve, and do improve, was not the subject of the discussion. What they do to result in that improvement was.

I posted to TWV2, saying that my improvement came from a combination of reading books on the art and craft of writing, and from reading the works of other writers and picking them apart. That aspect of being a writer has actually made reading a little less enjoyable. Another item I mentioned was simply the practice of writing led to growth.

But really I can think of other ways I improve as a writer.

Critique groups. I've been a member of four different real life critique groups, and five (I think) on-line critique groups. Most of the on-line ones were for poetry. I estimate that I've critiqued at least a thousand poems. I printed many of those critiques and have them in notebooks, waiting to be gone through and perhaps culled and consolidated. I learned so much from critiquing poetry. When I started that, I knew little about poetry, but knew I had to learn and learn fast. So I studied up, was a fast learner, and feel much more confident in my poetic knowledge and abilities.
Classes. Most of the ones I've taken have been during writers conferences. I went to one locally that turned out to be something I wasn't expecting. I still have many more to take.
Old textbooks. I pick these up at thrift stores for 50 cents or a dollar. I'm slowly working through them as reading time allows (which it hasn't for over a year now). I have gleaned much from these, even the older ones.
Writer Networking. This is both on-line in various discussion forums, as well as the few real life writer contacts I maintain. Those contacts include editors and agents as well.

So these are the things I do grow as a writer. I find it interesting that writing is a trade/art/profession at which growth and development is available. Don't know how to write well in English? Study grammar. Don't know how to make it interesting? Study plot and structure. Not grabbing the reader? Study story telling. It's different than for many other artistic professions. The arts that involve the body as well as the mind (the dance, acting, and actually sports) require certain bodily ability. Since we are all limited to the body God gave us—with limited chance to improve—the opportunity to move up to a higher artistic level is limited. I could never have become a major league baseball player or a pro football player or an Olympic track star. I could have done better than I did, but I was not given a body that would allow me to move up in those pursuits.

Certainly improvement in the writing arts, which involve the mind only, will be beyond the reach of some, who were not given complete mental faculties. But for the large majority of people, significant improvement is possible. Whether a large number of people can improve enough to result in becoming published I don't know. Most people won't go to the trouble to try to improve enough for that.

My website

2011-06-07T10:35:00.000-05:00

My son is helping me put together a writer's website. I say helping. He's doing the work, as I consult on what it is I want. I purchased the domain Sunday night; we picked a theme last night and began building it; it now has a few items there. Check it out: davidatodd.com.

We copied all the posts on An Arrow Through The Air to the blog section of the website. Not all the comments copied--at least they hadn't as of last night. I don't know what that means for me, for keeping this blog. I've enjoyed having it with its title, and with the Wesley quote. If I decide to make the other site my blog, we'll figure out a way to get those over there.

The Incestuous Poetry Relationship

2011-06-06T07:42:00.001-05:00

I had a one-year subscription to Poet & Writer magazine, six issues at a deep discount of $10. I've always enjoyed this magazine, since it pulls together a broader variety of writers and writing topics than do many other magazines for writers. Often on my travels I will enter a Barnes & Noble, take one from the rack, buy a vente house blend and sit and read it. Usually I find such good things it it that I'll buy the issue and read it in the hotel. So eventually I took the subscription. P&W is heavy on features: the writing life, debut novelists; debut poets. It is short on the writing craft, moderate on industry news, and what news it presents is usually done through features. A little short on regular columns, too, compared to other writing mags.

I read these issues slowly, only on Sunday afternoon, in our sun room, falling asleep and reading in several sequences. I'm currently working through the January/February 2011 issue, the last one of my subscription (which I did not renew). The covers says it is "The Inspiration Issue." Under the heading of "The Literary Life" are many interviews of writers, but a series of short interviews of debut poets especially caught my eye. These are poets who had their first collection published in 2010. What I found instructive was the university attended/degree earned and employment of these poets. Let's see how the columens will format, as I know the spaces will look right on my screen but probably not once published.

Age         University        Degree        Employment
41           Iowa                 MFA         theatre writer/critic
30           Warren Wilson MFA         creative writing teacher
39           Columbia          MFA         mother
27           Wisconsin         MA           library worker
34           Iowa                 MFA         PhD candidate
29           New Mexico     MFA        teacher
30           Oregon             MFA        job hunting teacher
32           George Mason MFA        PhD candidate
39            New York U    MFA       assistant professor
39           Utah                  MFA       associate professor
35           New School (NYC) MFA PhD candidate

All degrees save one are masters of fine arts, and almost all now work at teaching others. Is this the way poetry publishing is going? If so, it's incestuous. Others have said this before me, that the MFA-based system results in inbreeding of poetic technique, begetting the same poetic technique, as those who are taught by MFA profs become MFA profs.

C.S. Lewis had a word to say about this, as I discussed a couple of months ago:

Great authors are innovators, pioneers, explorers; bad authors bunch in schools and follow models. Or again, great authors are always 'breaking fetters' and 'bursting bonds'. They have personality, they 'are themselves'.

We certainly have poetry "schools", in the broadest sense of the word. And we've had 'em in the past, too.

Of course, I admit it's quite possible that this magazine is not all that representative of the full range of modern poetry. It might be only a small part of it. Still, I wonder if this isn't at least in part explanatory of why poetry is so unpopular these days. P&W is a magazine filled with adds for MFA schools and workshops. Every university and college in the country that has a creative writing program has an ad in each issue of the magazine. The ads almost always feature a rustic cottage surrounded by trees and meadows. A photo of some poet who's supposed to be famous but who most likely I never heard of is inset, and the ad includes a list of faculty and visiting professors, almost all of whom I never heard of. Low residency requirements are typically trumpeted.

The ads that are not for MFA programs are for writing retreats or workshops. The ads that aren't for any of those are for contests. The ads are so similar from issue to issue that I pretty much stopped reading them.

So P&W is of some limited use, but I really like it. I'm keeping these issues, and may refer back to them from time to time. But watch out for the problem of the incestuous poetry community I will.

Book Review: The Templar Revelation

2011-06-04T12:44:00.001-05:00

It was at my nearest thrift store, I think, that I paid 50 cents for The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ, by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince [1997, Touchstone, ISBN 0-684-84891-0]. On the cover of this paperback it says "As featured in The DaVinci Code". I figured it was worth the modest investment to see how The DaVinci Code was related to it.

As far as is possible, I feel I wasted my 50 cents. The book is awful. It is divided into two part: 1) The Threads of Heresy, and 2) The Web of Truth. I read about half of part 1 and spot read 20 to 30 pages of part 2 (150 out of 373 total pages). The most common phrase used in the book is "as will be short later," or various derivatives of that. John the Baptist was more prominent than Jesus, as will be shown later. Mary Magdalene was Jesus' wife or concubine, as will be shown later. The Knights Templar were adherents to the cult of Mary Magdalene, as will be shown later. The Cathars understood the true importance of the Baptist and the Magdalene, as will be shown later. How tiring, with never a forward reference included, such as "as will be discussed in Chapter 17." How much later? What chapter should I go to? Why don't you just explain it now.

The second most common phrase is "according to modern scholarship." The authors seemed enamored with any study/publication in the last hundred years that in any way contradicts the traditional Christian message and belief. Nineteen hundred years of scholarship is tossed aside simply because it isn't the latest. This, too, was tiring.

The book does indeed follow The DaVince Code. Or, rather, based on publication dates, The DaVinci Code follows The Templar Revelation, and is its fictional counterpart. DaVinci's Last Supper, the true purpose of the Knights Templar, the mysterious old or new Priory of Sion with its train of grand masters—all are here. Even some names of Dan Brown's fictional characters came from historical figures mentioned by Picknett and Prince. Dan Brown must have read this 1997 book before writing his and publishing it in 2003. Although, that blurb on the cover references TDC whereas the latest date on the title page if TTR is 1998. What gives? I thought publishers put the date of the latest printing on the copyright page. Apparently not any more.

The Templar Revelation is poorly written, not from the standpoint of writing craft, but from its lousy scholarship. Despite many footnotes it is poorly referenced, I came away with a sense of the authors wanting to believe anything that would poke holes in Christian orthodoxy. Every hack professor is believed; hundreds of theologians are not. Clearly the authors were trying to strike a balance between a popular book and a scholarly work, and achieved neither. At one point it reads, "As we have seen, most modern Christians are surprisingly badly informed about developments in biblical scholarship." [page 362]

Hey, Picknett and Prince, that's because we have settled the question. We have no need to delve into the questionable works you cite to see what Satan has inspired. We believe the gospel message about Jesus' life and teaching as told by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. We believe Christian doctrine as first outlined by Paul and later confirmed by thousand of works by a hundred early Christian authors. We believe that other gospels you seem enthralled with disappeared not because the church tried to destroy them but because they carried no authority, being obviously contradictory and bogus, thus rejected by scholars of a formative age. We don't need to revisit the question. We are not badly informed; we know whom we have believed in, and why.

If you see The Templar Revelation in a used book sale, leave it there and use your pocket change to buy a sno cone or some other nutritionally void stomach killer. The stomach will recover faster than the mind, should it be infected with this garbage. I'm not going to finish this. I'll put it in the garage sale pile, and hope to recover half my investment.

The Candy Store Generation

2011-06-02T09:26:00.004-05:00

To have a successful self-published e-book ("successful" meaning good sales), what you need, according to Joe Konrath, are:

a great book,
a catchy title
a dynamite cover,
good promotion, and
a body of work that builds on itself.

Even while I cling to the dream of having something published through a traditional publisher, and do some things to go down that road, I'm looking for the next thing to self-publish. What that next thing should be finally came to me on Memorial Day.

Why not write The Candy Store Generation? I first thought of this during the 2000 election, watching the first presidential debate between Bush and Gore. They argued about how to spend a budget surplus expected to be 1 trillion dollars over the next ten years, a result of five years of Republican-led Congresses. It struck me that they sounded like children in a candy store who were given an unexpected windfall from daddy.

But it also struck me that these political animals, children of political families and of privilege, were simply reflecting what America had become. By 2000 the majority of Congress had flipped from what Brokaw called The Greatest Generation to the Baby Boomers. The Boomers were now calling the shots. The Boomers made up a huge voting block. I'm one of them, and I see things in the majority of my generation that bode poorly for our nation.

I let the idea gestate for some time, and in 2009 I wrote four blogs on friend Chuck's blog, "The Senescent Man'. I won't say I wrote them to rave reviews, because they generated no comments. I also rushed them a bit, and didn't develop them for the blog as much as I should have.

Last Monday I decided that I should try to expand them into what I wanted to do. I don't have a complete vision for the book yet, but I don't see it as a long book. Maybe 10,000 to 20,000 words. It will mainly explain what I see are the bad results of Boomer leadership in virtually all areas of American life. I'll also discuss some of the why—from my perspective—the Boomers became what we became. It will be a book mainly of my opinions, with some research, but not a whole lot.

On Tuesday night I went to the old blog posts and dumped them into a MS Word document. It begins as a little over 2,000 words. So I'm already 1/8 to 1/4 done. The smaller word count isn't much of a book, so I'll probably go for the longer one. I have to get the full vision first, and an outline, and maybe couple of chapters done before I decide.

The good news is that I don't start with a blank sheet of paper. I start with a concept that has been fermenting in my gray cells for a decade, and which saw the light of Internet day in small part. The blank sheet of paper is the hardest part of writing anything, it seems. Once that is overcome, it's all downhill. I remember the comic strip "Shoe". The editor asked the writer, "Is the article done yet?" to which the writer replied, "90 percent." He then trudged back to his littered desk, rolled a blank sheet of paper into his typewriter, and said, "The white part." I'm past that. May The Candy Store Generation come to fruition.

Truncating the Library

2011-06-01T13:41:00.000-05:00

File this under "sad things that are sometimes necessary". CEI is growing; we have taken on some new rental space. When we moved into this building in November 2009, renting out our much larger corporate headquarters, we occupied six modules of the seven in this building. The seventh module, near the center of the building, was occupied. That company had had the parking lot to themselves for years, and were not happy when we inundated the lot with our corporate pick-ups and engineers and surveyors. So they moved to new quarters across the street.

We got first dibs on their vacated space, but haven't needed it till now. Next week we do whatever modifications are needed to make this space work. The best solution the space layout people came up with was to move the library to the new space and install cubicles where the library is. It's a more efficient use of space.

But, the library must shrink. Since I took responsibility for the library during the last move, I was tasked with it now. First thing to go are old State and City standards. Most of our copies are out of date, and most states and cities have them on-line now, so out they go. If it's a 3-ring binder I open it, salvage any clean divider sheets or tabs, put the paper in an OOP recycling bin, discard glossies and the like, and put the empty notebook in a pile for our off-site supplies storage. For comb binding, about the same thing, including salvaging the comb. My old college buddies would expect no less from the HEEDonist.

Next will be the manufacturers catalogues, most of which are for materials we don't use, are out of date, and are on-line. So out they go. Next will be the Federal standards. Same out of date/on-line situation. Then will be a few shelves of old CEI project notebooks. I won't discard these, since I can't be sure they are duplicates. So I'll box them for off-site archiving. We have 132 shelf segments, and I anticipate I'll reduce the remnant to a little less than sixty shelves. I'll report back when done.

This is sad to me. Perhaps these are not real books, but they are books nonetheless. I hate to discard them. The world won't be a worse place for their being gone. In fact, it might be a better place. We will not have to purchase 3-ring binders for a few years probably (reduce). Less building space will be needed for the same size business (reduce). What can be re-used will be re-used (reuse). And the old office paper will become new paper products (recycle). Maybe the folks who many years ago formed Humans to End Environmental Deterioration would be proud. I won't shed a tear, but neither will I rejoice.

Well, I'd better get back at it.

Gleanings from John 14:15-21

2011-05-31T16:39:00.001-05:00

This was my week to teach our adult Life Group (a.k.a. Sunday school). We were at week twelve in our fourteen week all-church/denomination-wide "Ashes to Fire" study, combining the Lent and Easter seasons and ending on Pentecost, June 12. Marion and I have been trading off. I teach the weeks he is on call for his veterinarian practice and he teaches the other.

The scripture lesson was John 14:15-21

"If you love me, you will obey what I command. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him."

I told the class this was "dense scripture", by which I meant chock full of things to study. Jesus has just told the apostles He is leaving them (13:33, 14:7), they can't follow (13:33) but that they knew the way to the place He was going (14:4). He has told them to love each other (13:34-35) as a new command, and that this will be how people will know they are Jesus' disciples. He has told them he is the way, the truth, and the life, and the only way to the Father. Now he says:

If you love me you will obey what I command
He [Jesus] will ask the Father to send the Spirit
The Spirit [Counselor, Advocate] will be with them forever
The world cannot accept the Spirit
The Spirit already lives with the apostles
Jesus will come to them, in such a way that the world does not see
They will live because Jesus lives
"On that day" the apostles will come to a new realization
Whoever obeys Jesus' commands loves Him
That person will be loved by God and by Jesus and Jesus will reveal Himself to that person.

Wow—how packed can scripture be? Stuffed with meaning. I could have chose to take the lesson in any of several directions, but chose to study the Holy Spirit and His work. This is something most evangelical Christians study early in their walk and need to review from time to time, so this was, in my mind, somewhat of a refresher lesson. I tied it to John 14:26, 15:26, and 16:7-15. Class discussion went well. We kept on leaving the work of the Holy Spirit to try and grasp again the Trinity. All three Persons of the Godhead are present in these verses.

We came to see the meaning of Jesus' words in John 16:12—"I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear." No kidding. We felt that we understood how the apostles felt. They were in the early stages of separation anxiety. We have the hindsight of 1,980 years (give or take a decade) of theological development, with witness and scholarship. That may or may not be a help to us.

I want to explore these words some more. They are familiar from years of reading the gospel of Jesus according to the apostle John, but I still have much more to digest from this. Children's pastor Jessica Springer, in her sermon on Sunday, took this same scripture in a very different direction. Using the idea behind the Klondike bar commercials, she asked "What would you do for Jesus?" An excellent sermon it was, showing how dense this scripture is.

On Royalties, Accounts Receivable, and Holiday Weekends

2011-05-27T12:42:00.001-05:00

This morning I decided to finally create a spreadsheet that will track my e-book sales royalties. Now, one of the benefits of e-self publishing (eSP), at least the Kindle variety, is that you know exact sales figures in real time. Payout is only when you accumulate $10.00 in royalties, and there's about a 30 day wait after that.

Compare that with traditional publishing, however. There, I'm told, the sales figures are more or less hidden, the royalty statements are advanced math, and the delay in payment is six to nine months. So the e-book royalty situation is much, much better than for traditional publication.

So far I've sold 3 e-copies of Documenting America and 4 of "Mom's Letter." My accumulated royalties are $2.70, rounded off and including any fractional cents for each sale. I guess I don't know what Kindle does with those fractional cents, but I assume they accumulate. So I'm way far away from reaching payout. Obviously too I haven't generated any buzz yet through limited promotional efforts.

At Suite101.com, I have accumulated $5.47 of ad-share royalties. We are experiencing hard times at Suite, due primarily to changes in the Google search algorithm that has de-rated the site, resulting in drastically lower page views with resulting drops in ad revenue. Except for two big days this month, I typically earn less than 10 cents per day. Of course, I haven't added any articles there since February. I expect that to change this weekend, as I have a couple planned.

A positive thing is my accounts receivable. Buildipedia.com published my latest article yesterday: Asphalt Pavement solar Collectors: The Future is Now. That earns me $250. Also yesterday I submitted my next article for Buildipedia, a feature article on erosion control from construction sites. Once that is accepted and published, I'll have another $250 earned. It's possible they won't accept the article (unlikely; they haven't rejected any yet), in which case I'll earn just a kill fee. So all together my accounts receivable for writing work stands at $508.17. Not bad.

Which leads me to Memorial Day weekend. I'm looking forward to the three days. We have nothing planned. Our children are together in Oklahoma City right now, son having driven there from Chicago to see his newest nephew for the first time. We'll be in Bella Vista, chilling, maybe grilling, doing yard work, reading, writing—at least I'll be writing, cleaning, de-cluttering. Normally my writing desires always exceed my productivity for these weekends, but it's good to dream and plan big. This weekend I hope to:

- Upload corrections to Documenting America, and upload the professional cover my son created for me.

- Get started with SmashWords and upload both Documenting America and "Mom's Letter" there.

- Get started with CreateSpace and upload Documenting America there.

- At least look into Pubbit, and maybe upload both e-books there.

- Possibly register a writer's web site and begin work on it.

- Work some on the passage notes to A Harmony of the Gospels

- Type edits to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, including one chapter written in manuscript, and maybe add one more chapter.

- Write/submit two articles to Suite101.com.

As I say, that might be more ambitious than practical. I'll report back after the weekend on what I actually accomplished. Oh, and maybe I'll be able to write a few blog posts and schedule them to post at future dates.

What One E-book Sale Can Do

2011-05-26T06:45:00.006-05:00

Actually, it was an e-short story sale. Yes, yesterday I sold another copy of "Mom's Letter" on Amazon Kindle. That puts it up to 4 sales since I published it in mid-February. I did a little promotion on it today, both on Absolute Write and at the Suite101 forums. I don't know where the sale came from, and no new review has yet shown up. I'm happy for it, and for the 34.65 cent royalty I'll earn--if I ever make payout, that is. I'll make payout, I have no doubt about that. It's mainly a question of whether it will be on this side or the other side of the next New Year's Day.

What are the impacts of this sale? The book ranking of "Mom's Letter" skyrocketed from something below 300,000 (hadn't checked for a while) to 45,632. At least a 260,000 place jump from one sale! That tells me that 260,000 other e-books haven't had a sale recently. I don't know how the Kindle rankings work. Are they cumulative since publication? Are they based on the last 30 days? Last 7 days? I haven't figured that out yet, though I haven't tried very hard to figure it out. I suspect it's based on sales in a recent time period. That means 45,632 e-books have had at least 1 sale during that time period. Since the Kindle Store has some million or millions of books available, that means many, many, many had no sales in that period. Welcome to the world of self-publishing.

Another impact is promotion. This demonstrates how important promotion is. A simple link posted to a forum can generate a sale. It might be a sympathy sale, given that I mentioned how sales were lagging, but a sale is a sale. Actually, I don't know if the sale came from my post. One gal responded to my post saying she would tweet it for me. But since that tweet (if she did it; I don't tweet to check on it) came as a result of my forum post, that forum post should at least earn an assist. So I guess I should bet busy and promote some more.

What about the impact on my psyche? It's not as great as the third sale was, nor the first two way back in February. Self-sustaining sales, not directly attributed to promotional efforts, might give me a bigger morale boost. But if I have to make two Internet posts to generate one sale...well, seems like a lot of effort for 35 cents.

But I am a little more encouraged to go ahead and complete the editing round currently in progress on Documenting America. I have four more chapters to read, and then fifteen chapters of edits to type. I'm not really finding much. I had a few embarrassing typos, a few not so embarrassing, and a couple of places where my wording could have been clearer. Nothing much, really. I hope to have the improved, artistically-designed cover available in a day or two, and it would be nice to have the text edits available at the same time, do the re-up-load in one shot instead of two.

Any encouragement is good. May the sales continue.

Things I Don't Understand

2011-05-25T11:24:00.001-05:00

How my blood sugar can be 122 before a late supper, 127 at bedtime (3 hours after supper), take a higher Lantus dose as recommended by the doctor, do nothing for the next 5.75 hours but sleep and pee (not at the same time), and have my morning blood sugar 165. What's going on? Do I have a very slowly acting metabolism? Did I have a stressful dream I don't remember?

Why the note I just posted to Facebook shows up on my profile but not in my news feed.

Why Google chose to de-rate Suite101.com in their last algorithm update, so much so that I make almost nothing there now.

Why I procrastinated getting abstracts in for the Feb 2012 erosion control conference so that now I have only two days to get 'em done.

Why this company I work for (actually just the chairman) thinks I can write a bio paragraph for some project they are going after without knowing anything about the project or the form of the proposal.

Why my e-short story and e-book have each sold only three copies. Actually, I know the why to this one: the lack of promotion to make them stand out from the Kindle clutter.

Why I still have that desire to be published by a traditional publisher, knowing the odds of that ever happening.

Why almost no one in my family give a rat's whisker about anything I write.

Why my rheumatoid arthritis seems to be getting worse as I lose weight.

Why my beta readers totally failed to do what they said they would do on Documenting America. I had zero beta reader response before I went to e-publish.

Why I can't concentrate on engineering today.

A Challenge to Traditional Publishers

2011-05-24T15:41:00.000-05:00

I offer this challenge to traditional publishers (the NY Big 6 plus the major CBA houses): If you want to serve your readers, you need to be giving them more choices, not less. I know you are rejecting a lot of good books, books of high writing quality and excellent story-telling, all because you don't think they will sell. I have heard this multiple times from agents and editors: "Your writing is great! I can't sell it."

Okay, then, open a new imprint—call it Breakout Books, or something similar. Use it to e-publish that next tier of books that you really want to paper publish but don't think you can make money on. Figure out how to do it on the cheap. Produce good covers, but don't agonize over them in committee. Mini-edit the book, rather than apply sequential story, line, copy, proof-reading; make it just good enough. Ditch all publicity except catalogue listing. Heck, that's pretty much how it is anyhow, right? Get the book to the market in 4 months instead of 24. Price them competitively with indie books.

Do this for about double the number of books you publish in the traditional way, or maybe for any book the acquisitions editor brings to the pub committee (indicating the book has obvious merit), but which doesn't pass the committee. Try this for a couple of years. These books will have the backing of a major house, the vetting by an agent and acquisitions editor, a little attention by the ones readers consider gatekeepers, and thus might attract the traditional audiences of your house. Do it for books you really like but aren't sure will sell.
You might be surprised at the results. You might find a few books that will self-fund their subsequent paper production. The ones that won't sell will have minimal overhead expense, no warehousing expense, no distribution costs, and almost no returns.

You would be serving your readers, I believe. I don't see how you can go wrong, and it might just save your rapidly shrinking businesses.

Insert Witty Storm Metaphor Here

2011-05-23T13:42:00.001-05:00

This weekend I wrote what I wanted to write, not what I thought would lead to publication. As I had time, I worked on the passage notes to A Harmony of the Gospels, and completed several of them. Unfortunately I looked ahead and saw just how many of these are left to be written. It might be fifty pages of writing materials.

It's pouring outside right now. I'm searching for a witty storm metaphor to insert here, but haven't one. It poured last night. People may have seen news reports about tornadoes in our area. Some were spotted in our county, but I'm not sure they have been confirmed. Joplin was devastated, as you might have read. That's just 45 or 50 miles north of us.

I've been reading a book I picked up at the thrift store, titled The Templar Revelation, and it's turning out to be awful. From 1996, I think this is one of the books from which Dan Brown drew material to write The DaVinci Code. It is not well written, it is not documented. I've invested several days of my reading life into this, after 50 cents of my budget, hoping it would get better, or would become more substantive as I got past the introductory chapters. Not so.

My next article for Buildipedia is due Thursday. I think this will be an easy one, on erosion and sediment control.

I'm currently fighting with my home owner's insurance company, Nationwide, over how they jacked up the rates on me because I turned in claims last year, and then billed me 12 percent more after the renewal was complete. Just got off the phone with Kelly of Nationwide, a nice man who bore my wrath with dignity. But I will not stay with his company nor with my agent who made a mistake on the renewal. Goodbye, Nationwide. It was a nice 15 year relationship up until last August.

My quarterly doctor's appointment is tomorrow. Hopefully he'll give me three more months. I'm not apprehensive about it at all. Now that I'm checking my blood sugar I know exactly where I'll be at this appointment. I'm hoping he'll take me off my blood pressure medication. It was marginal that I should be on it in the first place. About a month ago I checked it at the blood pressure check station at Wal-Mart (I'm sure not the most accurate machine). It was 87/59, so I began breaking my pills in half. Last Saturday it was 81/69. Let's hope it's low like that tomorrow.

I'm back to this after a ninety minute hiatus. Had a couple of phone calls, ate lunch at my desk, read some writing blogs. I called Friday's post "miscellaneous", but this one is more so. Maybe that reflects my state of mind. I need to latch onto a project and run with it. With the Wesley study aside, I suppose it will either be improvements to Documenting America and expanding it's published locations or completing A Harmony of the Gospels or getting back on In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People and seeing if I can finish that.

Meanwhile it seems the worst of the storm has passed, and no witty metaphor has come to mind. Will post now.

Miscellaneous Friday

2011-05-20T14:00:00.001-05:00

This has been a killer week, emotionally and physically, but more so emotionally. Where shall I start?

The knowledge that my John Wesley small group study won't be needed by my church for the foreseeable future was a gut-wrenching blow. I probably over-reacted, since I can still write it and see what else I can do with it. Still, it was an emotional setback.

Yesterday I was hoping to get my Bentonville flood study back out to FEMA, Revision 5. But the remapping after the remodeling after the remapping after the remodeling after the corrupt informal submission to FEMA was rejected after the formal Revision 4 submittal came back from FEMA with yet more comments showed that some additional remodeling was needed. Both I and the CADD tech lost time yesterday due to meetings and computer problems, so I didn't get the latest map till 4:00 PM, which showed ten cross-sections still needing work to get the map and the model to match. I worked on that till 6:30 PM, thinking I had them all done except for one, which I was convinced was a map problem. This morning the CADD tech convince me it was a model problem. I had that corrected and she had the map corrected and the annotated flood map produced by 11:00 AM. The entire report is now ready to go; I only have to stuff the maps and CD in pockets bound in the report. So it goes out by FedEx this afternoon, making the Monday deadline. Just barely.

Not getting the re-mapping until 4 PM yesterday, with it showing still much work to do, about caused me to lose it. I did throw a notebook across my office, and pounded the desk a few times, so I guess I did lose it in a sense. But I pushed on through. Another deadline met. Now back onto the third floodplain project, thence to the fourth and fifth. Someday I hope to get back to my training tasks.

Actually, this afternoon I think I will. I like to use Friday afternoons for miscellaneous stuff, such as: getting caught up on daily timesheets; getting caught up on daily activity logs; cleaning the week's accumulation of stuff off my desk; seeing what correspondence needs to be done. In some ways Friday afternoon is the most productive time of the week. This afternoon, I think I'll write a new construction specification section. There's a certain product for permanent erosion control that we use some, but for which we don't have a decent construction spec. Yesterday I saw a competing product advertised in Erosion Control magazine. I think I can produce a pretty good spec section in that time. That would be writing. I like that.

Tonight I may just read. I should write, I know. I should decide what to do next. Documenting America needs some editing, and it would be nice to have that ready to go about the same time as the permanent cover comes in. That could be any day now. In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People needs to be finished. Lots of work there, and I've been thinking about it lately. Also of late I've had a desire to get back into my Harmony of the Gospels and finish the passage notes and the appendixes, as well as correct a few typos. That's a non-commercial project, and so hard to justify from a career standpoint, but it's enjoyable, so I may go in that direction for a while.

Also among miscellaneous tasks is the article I have under contract for Buildipedia. I'd like to get that mostly written this weekend, well ahead of the next Thursday deadline. And, abstracts for next year's Environmental Connections conference in Vegas are due next Friday. I have three that need work.

So my writing and work lives are really both in miscellaneous states right now. At least it's raining today. Glorious rain, that shuts down construction sites and prevents noon walks, that fills ditches and detention ponds and creates floodplains. How it always lifts my spirits. Now if it will just rain tomorrow and allow me to do something other than clean the gutter helmets.

The Roller Coaster Continues

2011-05-18T10:52:00.000-05:00

So yesterday I stood down, from writing my John Wesley study. Because our church is going a different direction with adult Life Group curriculum, and it won't be needed any time soon. I estimate at least a year, maybe two. I've been working on this off and on since January, and close to full time since mid-April. Actually, I began planning it close to a year ago. And remember, full time for me and my writing means all of the very few hours that are spare after work and church and household, etc.

I know, I know. If the study is a good one, it should have a market other than my Life Group class, so I should continue writing the book. And not having a September deadline means I can spend more time with it and make a better book. All true. And yet...

...that's not what I was working toward. I laid other projects aside to work on that one, planning to begin teaching it around September. Rather than feeling a reprieve from a deadline I feel as if I wasted a month.

On the other hand, as I sit in my office, writing this blog post when I should be doing umpteen things for my employer, having no windows at eye level to see what's happening in the world beyond, I can hear water draining through a downspout just outside. It's raining! I love the rain, so that's a bit of a boost to my disposition. It also means I won't be able to take my walk on the noon hour, so I can use the time to work on the Wesley book.

Oh, wait....

Stand Down

2011-05-17T07:49:00.000-05:00

That’s a military term. “Stand down” means to back off, to decrease your level of preparedness, to go from a war footing to something below a war footing. I understand that NORAD was on a war footing from early in the Cold War until a day in 1993, after the Soviet Union had disintegrated, at which time the order came, “Stand down.” Thirty or forty years of war condition went away in a two word command.

That’s what I’ve sort of did yesterday. I received an e-mail from our associate pastor who heads up the educational activities of the church, including Sunday school (life groups). He said we would have a meeting of adult class teachers on a certain Saturday in June, at which time they would be unveiling the curriculum for the coming months. He didn’t reveal when that curriculum would start, or how long it would run.

Our class was in the midst of a study, a video series by Rick Warren and Chuck Colson called “Wide Angle: Framing Your Worldview”. It is six video lessons, but each lesson had three parts. We were taking our time with it, doing one part a week. Only five weeks into it, that made thirteen weeks to complete the series.

We interrupted that, however, to do our all-church study, “Ashes to Fire”, running from Ash Wednesday to Pentecost. That will finish in June. We figured thirteen weeks was covered after that, through Labor Day. I was working on my study, Essential John Wesley, for that time, and having to rush to have it ready—if I could even have it ready. But now, we will have other all church curriculum. How long will that run? I don’t really know, and in an exchange of e-mails the associate pastor didn’t give me any hints. I think it’s safe to say it will run at least through the summer, maybe longer. The need for the Wesley study is thus pushed back till at least December, and maybe much farther.

So yesterday I stood down. I laid the Wesley study aside, and won’t pick it up again (except to finish the one chapter I was on) until after the teacher’s meeting. That doesn’t mean I have nothing to write about. I’ll hop back on Documenting America, correct the few typos I’ve found, decide on a proper cover, and upload it to Smashwords. I’ll also figure out the CreateSpace platform and create a physical book out of it.

In a way it’s good to lay aside the Wesley study. While I feel that is an important work, it has turned into a more time consuming project then I expected. No doubt that’s of my own doing. A little space between me and it will be a good thing. In a month I can look at it again and make some decisions, unpressured by having to have it for teaching on a certain date.

A Million Words

2011-05-13T18:17:00.002-05:00

Among the reams of advice available to writers is something like, “You need to write a million words before you can make it as a writer.” Now that seems rather arbitrary. A million is a nice round number, but why would a round number such as that be the number that designates a certain level of expertise? Why isn’t it 955,000 words, or 1,243,000 words?

I’ve also seen it stated this way: It takes 10,000 hours working at something to become an expert in it. Again the round number, but this isn’t exclusively for writing, but about any endeavor. Want to be an expert chef? Prepare to devote 10,000 hours to the trade. Want to be a floodplain engineering expert? Spend 10,000 hours dealing with all aspects of floodplains.

While 10,000 is still a round number, it seems less arbitrary than 1,000,000 words. In terms of a normal work week of forty hours, and a normal work year of fifty weeks, 10,000 hours works out to five years. I’m sure some things take more. Surgery comes to mind, and maybe rocket science. But still, the 10,000 number looks good. Doing the math, 10,000 hours and a million words works out to a hundred words an hour. As a net figure, considering re-writes, edits, craft study, art study, industry study, etc., that seems a valid number.

Of course, the type of writing and the ability of the person writing those million words will have an impact. Write a million words of garbage and you won’t be any more of an expert at writing than you would if you spend five years engineering floodplains the wrong way. So the words in the writer’s apprentice period must have increasing quality. The writer needs to be improving both craft and art with those many words, not just shoving out the same drivel as at the start.
A while ago I realized that I was probably at those million words, maybe a bit over. This would not even include the many words I’ve poured into business letters, technical reports, construction specifications, and marketing materials. Here’s what I calculate.

155,000 – Doctor Luke’s Assistant
15,000 – In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People
40,000 – Documenting America
101,000 – articles at Suite101.com
15,000 – articles at Buildipedia.com
70,000 – miscellaneous articles and essays, most not published
15,000 – poetry (economy of words results in few of ’em)
300,000 – poetry critiques
340,000 – An Arrow Through the Air posts

That should add up to 1,036,000 words. I don’t think I’ve really counted everything. I think I’m 150,000 or so higher if I could think of everything else. Of course, a lot of that wasn’t intended and doesn’t really count as creative writing. And, does the time spent on prose count for fiction, and the time spent on fiction count for prose?

All of which could probably be chalked up to idle chatter, filling out a blog post at the end of a Friday workday, preparing for the weekend and return of my wife tomorrow. It’s an indication, though, that I’ve stuck with my writing over a number of years. Hopefully it’s beginning to pay off.

Oh, just remembered! 10,000 words for Seth Boynton Cheney: Mystery Man of the West.

Planning and Scheming

2011-05-12T07:48:00.000-05:00

In early June two events take place in the Chicago area that are a lure for us to make the 10.5 hour drive there. Of course, with our son living there, attending grad school at the University of Chicago, we didn't need too many excuses. Still, the pull to make the 3.5 hour drive to Oklahoma City to see grandbabies is just as big of a lure, and the less cost and time means we make that trip much more.

The two events are the Publishers Row Book Fair and the Write To Publish Writers Conference. The book fair is in downtown Chicago, on June 4-5. We went to it a couple of years ago (or was it three?), and had a great time despite intermittent rain. Numerous publishers and booksellers set up shop on city streets and hock their wares, mostly used books, but some new as well. Some writer organizations were there, such as the Romance Writers of America. I know Lynda got to meet one of her favorite romance authors and get her purchases signed. Some readings were included. I got to talk to a couple of publishers, both of which turned out to be dead ends.

That year, on the same weekend, was a large art fair in the Hyde Park area of the city. We went to the book fair on Saturday and the art fair on Sunday. We bought on Sat. and looked on Sun. Both were interesting.

I attended that writers conference back in 2004, the first national conference I attended. I haven't been back since, partly because it's on the expensive side. It's held in Wheaton on the Wheaton College campus. I think it's a beautiful campus, though in 2004 a lot of construction meant we were dodging and weaving on odd paths and not exploring the campus. I learned a lot at that event, and have been wanting to get back to it, though our trip to the book fair a couple of years ago did not include conference attendance. This year it's June 8-11.

This year is different. We actually have three events to attend. On June 11 Charles will receive his doctorate, a PhD in Philosophy. Last week he successfully defended his dissertation, so the degree will be conferred and he'll be "hooded" on the 11th. It's been a long haul for him. He earned his masters at Tufts University in 2003, and might have finished his doctorate a couple of years ago had he not had to work to make ends meet. We're happy for him. In a future post I'll say what his disertation title is and maybe describe it. I read one of his papers derived from the same subject matter. Actually, how about I just link to his website and let you look it up.

So that's the main reason for the trip. Knowing we were going, I applied for a scholarship to the writers conference, and was one of eight to receive one. I doubt I would have applied had we not been going to Chicago anyway, but I figured why not. So I will be attending that with all expenses paid (except transportation). I have an evening event on the 7th with the other scholarship winners. So we'll go up early and attend the book fair as well, make a long trip of it. If the art fair is also on, perhaps we'll drive up on the 3rd, attend the book fair on the 4th, the art fair on the 5th, the writers conference the evening of the 7th through the morning of the 11th, and graduation on the 11th. Lynda will stay with Charles, not with me at the conference.

Planning and scheming are in progress. It would be nice to have a print copy of Documenting America in my hands to show everyone. Maybe I could even lure a publisher into picking up future volumes in the series. Although I've decided to self-publish, I haven't completely given up the dream of being judged worthy of acceptance by a legacy publisher.

The Sacred Calls of Country

2011-05-11T10:27:00.001-05:00

As I write in my Documenting America series, I read much in historical American documents that does not ring a bell as having been covered in my history classes. Why is that? Is it simply a matter of time—too many decades passes since freshman year at URI? Maybe they were covered and I just can't remember. Is it that my interests have changed? Rather than merely wanting to pass a class, I want to know the history of this great nation. History was a favorite topic for me, but the needs to pass the class often precluded the joy of mere study. That pendulum has swung, never to return.

Is it the experience of years? Maybe I now know that a history book covering one semester can't possibly hold everything that's important. The historian, or the history book writer, must sift through mountains of material to result in a manageable amount for the purpose at hand. Or is it perhaps the perspective of hindsight? Forty years of watching the USA in action, observing politics and all that politics affects, and five years of living in the Middle East gives a man a perspective markedly different than a student.

For any or all of these reasons, or perhaps for reasons unstated, I find myself drawn to these original documents out of America's history. My entry point was James Otis' court argument concerning the Writs of Assistance. This took place in 1761, a full fourteen years before the Revolutionary War broke out, fifteen before we declared the thirteen colonies to be independent, twenty-two before the treaty that established the USA in the roll call of nations, and twenty-eight before we had a working, sustainable government in place. This was, in my judgment, the opening step in our march to independence. While only a part of the argument is extant, what we have is a great example of legal and political rhetoric, and inspiring to this American, and should be to many others. I give this short quote to illustrate:

The only principles of public conduct that are worthy of a…man are to sacrifice estate, ease, health, and applause, and even life, to the sacred calls of his country.

Magnificent.

So how come this wasn't covered in my history classes? Why have I not, for forty if not fifty years, put James Otis on the pedestal next to Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin? Is the fault that of the student, the teachers, or the history textbook writers? Who knows?

The bigger question for me, having found this among a treasure trove of documents now available in the Information Age, is will my book(s) make a difference? That only time and sales will tell.

The Last Five Days

2011-05-10T11:51:00.000-05:00

Yesterday afternoon when Ephraim got up from his nap he asked for "Grandpa Todd" to play with him. And last night he wanted Grandpa Todd to read him stories and put him to bed. Unfortunately, Grandpa Todd had left Oklahoma City as soon as Ephraim was put down for his nap. The four day weekend was over.

It was chock-full of activities. On Friday I took a day of vacation and drove there with my mother-in-law, Lynda already being there. Once in OKC we stopped first at the library of Oklahoma City University, where I accessed a certain periodical needed for my Wesley research, which I had electronically looked for in other places but found there. That was a half hour. Then it was on to Richard and Sara's house for the family activities. On Saturday we celebrated Ephraim's third birthday, with a family and church folks party. It was a madhouse, but fun. All the Oklahoma people had their ears glued to the radio for the Thunder vs. Grizzlies game.

On Sunday Ezra David Schneberger was dedicated, not by his pastor-father, but by the District Superintendent. I knew this DS and his wife from my brief single days in Kansas City, back in 1974-75, but we hadn't seen each other since. It was nice to be reacquainted. Then after church we celebrated Mother's Day by going out for Indian food. We figured most restaurants would be jambed, but this ethnic one would have seats available. It did, and the food was good as always.

Monday I took another day of vacation and we hung around until 2:15 PM, then drove back. In the morning Ephraim and I went for a walk, about 30 minutes, during which time he found many treasures to take home. Then I gave Ezra a bottle (pumped breast milk), and held him a long time outside, constantly moving him to help him work on his balance and exercise his arms and legs. He finally fell sound asleep and we didn't hear from him for a couple of hours. I'd have held him longer if I wasn't called in for lunch.

In still moments I read some in a technical paper for work, and about 30 pages in the first volume of John Wesley's Journal. This was all introductory material, not the journal itself. Talked with Richard, talked with Sara. Simply enjoyed the time.

So I know all of you wondered why I let five days go by without a post. I should have prepared a post or two ahead of time and scheduled them, and will try to do better the next time I'm to be gone. I didn't totally forget about writing those last five days, just subjugated it to family needs.

Of course, I told Ephraim when he went down for his Monday nap that I wouldn't be there when he got up, and that I wanted to read him a story and see him to his bed. "NO! Daddy do it" was his reply. That's okay. A three-year old has to learn lessons of opportunity. And he'll learn them, and I'll have lots of other times to read him stories.

All-Consuming Activities

2011-05-05T12:00:00.007-05:00

The problem with dieting is how all-consuming it is. Or maybe it's not dieting as much as it is weight loss. I'm on a losing streak right now. That's good. I was at a weight set point for the better part of a year and a half. It seemed that no matter what I did I couldn't get below 254 pounds. I inched a pound or two below it, then bounced back to 258; back to 254 then to 260; to 254 then to 263. I've read about these weight set points, that somehow the body gets comfortable at that weight and breaking through it is difficult.

I finally did that in March, however, even before I began a healthier diet on April 1. Whatever I was doing in February-March—probably just eating less and exercising a bit more—was working, for I slowly dropped below 254, ending March about 251-252. On April 1 I began a rigorous eating program to control my Type 2 diabetes, and the weight had dropped almost as fast as my blood sugar. I'm down to the 241-242 range right now, with no lower set point in sight. I was last at 240 in 2001, losing 30 pounds for my daughter's wedding. Can I break through that this time? I believe I can. I suspect the next set point is somewhere around 230.

But the problem is, this concentration on weight loss and blood sugar control is all consuming. It seems that every waking thought, and probably the dreams I don't remember, is on this. I talk about it, think about it, write about it, obsess about it. Even yard work isn't yard work: it's multi-tasking exercise. It's the same as with genealogy, same as with writing. I have had to put genealogy aside for a while, for my writing life is consuming whatever part of me is not being consumed by weight loss and establishing healthy eating habits.

The new writers critique group is consuming me. I'm thinking about it all the time, trying to figure out what I can do to put it on a footing that will be sustainable and valuable to all who attend and for our church that is sponsoring it. How to increase sales of my e-books is consuming me. The John Wesley small group study is consuming me.

Hopefully you get the picture. I need to just turn off for a while, think about civil engineering. No, that tends to consume me as well, whenever writing and critique group and health and genealogy aren't consuming me. I don't feel like I'm at an equilibrium. It's kind of like a short, light verse poem I wrote a few years ago.

The Desperate Prayer of a Man Without Enough Hours in the Day

Again
I offer You
this simple fix:
increase
the daily hours
to twenty-six.

Of course, that wouldn't really work, for then I'd be wanting twenty-eight or thirty. So I really need to reach an equilibrium. I'll put that on my to-do list.

"Documenting America" Kindle e-book for Sale

2011-05-03T21:12:00.000-05:00

So Sunday I uploaded it. Twenty-four hours later they said it was accepted for publication. Another twenty-four hours and it went live, for sale at a bargain price of $1.25. Do I sound like a shameless self-promoter?

Here's the link:
Documenting America, Volume 1

So far I have two sales! One coming from my Facebook announcement, and one from my announcement on the Suite101 forums. I'll probably do more promotion for this than I did with "Mom's Letter", and see if that results in better sales. A 40,000 word book for $1.25 will seem like a better deal than a 1850 word short story for $0.99. That might help sales. I wonder, too, if the recent taking out of Osama bin Laden will result in a surge of American nationalism, which in turn might help sales. I don't say that I'm hoping his death feeds my sales, just thinking out loud at what the possible reaction of the American buying public might be.

I still have so much work to do. I have to figure out how to get a properly formatted Table of Contents for the book. I have to get it—and "Mom's Letter"—formatted for and uploaded to the SmashWords distribution platform. And I have to get DA formatted though CreateSpace to have a print-on-demand book for sale.

But I'll take an evening to enjoy the moment, and dream a little.

So Little Progress on a Weekend

2011-05-02T13:05:00.001-05:00

Saturday just past dawned clear, but went cloudy quite fast. Then the sun broke through. I was up around 8:30 AM, as usual for a Saturday. Read my devotions, then went outside for my normal yard work. The sun was out, then behind clouds, then out again. The wind blew in gusts, then it was dead calm, then it blew again. I did such minor things as clean a little in the garage, then pick up sticks from the front yard (a rock yard), then pull weeds from the front yard. Then I was ready for my weekly sawing on the downed tree on the wood lot next to us.

Prior to my current health kick, improving both weight and blood sugar, I was lucky to be able to saw one section from this tree. The diameter is only 8 inches or so where I'm sawing. Then, two weeks ago, I was able to saw two sections, and felt good at the end. Saturday I decided to shoot for three sections, which would finish the tree. And I was able to do it, feeling at the end that I could have done another if I wasn't down to the stump. That was such a good feeling: to finish the tree, and to see my arm strength and stamina built up from even a month ago.

So then it was inside to see what else I had to do and to write. I pulled up my latest Documenting America file, and decided to have one more go at the Introduction. I knew I needed to add something about how I came to select the documents included in the book. So I did that, then went on to some work on Essential John Wesley. Two hours later I found it was time to head to Wal-Mart for the weekly acquisition of groceries.

Saturday evening was devoted to my Wesley studies, as well as preparing to teach Life Group on Sunday. The Wesley reference book I have out on inter-library loan was due Monday, and I was determined to get my $2.00 ILL fee's worth. So I read through the slim book again, taking some different notes. This continued into Sunday. To make sure I "got my money's worth," I wrote a review of that book for this blog, and posted it Saturday. I may have spent too much time on the slavery writings of Wesley, but I consider the research not only for EJW but also for future articles or essays.

Sunday afternoon I went through the work of formatting and uploading Documenting America for and to the Kindle Store. It's there, not live yet (as of this writing), but in the review queue. Should go live Monday evening or sometime on Tuesday. I still don't have a decent cover, so I'm just using the one I developed with my limited graphics skills. But I can change the cover at any time, so I decided to upload. Upon review I realized the spacing in the Table of Contents was messed up, but I decided to run with it. The Kindle uploading software allows for a separate TOC upload. Somehow I sensed that wouldn't be easy, so I decided to put it off.

Sunday evening was devoted to Wesley studies, in an old article I found about him as a literary man, and in his journals. That meant I did not do any writing in the Wesley book. That gave me a feeling of lack of accomplishment. All together, this weekend I wrote less than 1,000 words, including the blog post. I need to get in 3,000 on the weekends to have a prayer of ever finishing anything. Other things I wanted to do was to look into Amazon's CreateSpace, to have a physical book for Documenting America. I have a feeling it's not too difficult. I also wanted to look into the Barnes & Noble e-book tool, and SmashWords, so as to have my stuff available on multiple e-reader platforms. Alas, I didn't get to any of that.

Why is it so difficult to make writing progress on the weekends? With Saturday evening and Sunday all day being rainy, I couldn't walk, so I had plenty of time to write. Yet production was minimal. All I can do is try harder in the future.

Oh, and I was right about creating a TOC for Kindle. Just did some research into it, and it involves HTML code—simple stuff I think, if any HTML can be considered simple. Well, I'll let the book get up, then see what I can do.

Review of "John Wesley and Slavery"

2011-04-30T14:57:00.003-05:00

As part of the research for my John Wesley small group study book, I have spent time looking at his position on slavery. This is best stated in his long tract/short book Thoughts Upon Slavery, printed in 1774. My research led me to an article a 2008 issue of the Wesleyan Theological Journal, which in turn led me to other references. One of those is the book John Wesley and Slavery by Warren Thomas Smith, Abingdon Press, 1986 [ISBN 0-687-20433-X, Library of Congress No. 85-15796].

An older book, you say, and not worth the time to take up band width in reviewing. I think not, however. This thin volume (160 pages including index and a copy of Wesley's 1774 work) is a treasure trove of information. Smith starts with the story of the ending of slavery in the British Empire, in 1838, and a little bit on how they got there and what it meant to millions of manumitted slaves. He asks,

"How did all this come to pass? Who was responsible for the eradication of this intolerable institution of slavery? Indeed, many! One name, however, must be mentioned. He contributed much more than most people have ever recognized—more than he himself ever knew. It is long past time that he received his due recognition. His name is John Wesley!"

A bit of hyperbole, perhaps, but Smith makes the case that Wesley's contribution to the eventual end of the slave trade and the abolition of slavery is huge, perhaps even essential. Smith traces first the establishing of the trade and the institution of slavery, then Wesley's part in bringing it down. The importance of the writings of Anthony Benezet, a Philadelphia Quaker, are shown. Thoughts Upon Slavery is analyzed (see my review of Thoughts Upon Slavery here).

Smith documents some contacts that John Wesley had with African, both during his stay in Georgia and in the years in England after his evangelical experience. I believe Smith is trying to say that these encounters were important to Wesley's coming to an understanding that slavery was wrong. In journal entries and letters, in the few times he mentions blacks, he always presents them in a good light. It was clear to Wesley that this racist garbage that people were writing—that Africans were lazy, unreliable, untruthful, without feelings, and somehow less than human—was wrong. Blacks were as human as whites. And actually, when he speaks of slave traders and owners, he doubts the full humanity of those. For Wesley humanity was defined by mercy and justice, not by skin color. I would have liked for Smith to be more forceful in developing this strain of his research. It's in the book, but the reader has to come to conclusions about it, rather than seeing a forceful statement by Wesley.

Also included is Wesley's efforts against slavery after the publication of Thoughts Upon Slavery. In other tracts, letters, and published journals, Wesley does not seem to miss an opportunity to speak out against slavery. By this time in his life, Wesley was well known and somewhat popular. His publishing platform was huge, and he had a distribution network though Methodist preachers that writers of today dream about. Smith develops this well.

I could pick at the book a little. Smith included a chapter on Wesley's ancestry. It's short, a mere four pages, but it wasn't necessary. He has a few typos, such as claiming something written by Wesley in 1755 was written in 1743, and one time placing Thoughts Upon Slavery as published in 1744 instead of 1774. These aside, another bone I have to pick with Smith are some statements made without references that really need references. Without those references, they are assumptions presented as facts. A couple of examples:

p. 42 "Charles [Wesley] had written it, and doubtless discussed it with his brother." This concerned an entry in Charles' journal about barbaric treatment he had seen of slaves. Can we assume that each brother shared everything with the other? While this is an assumption, it's probably correct.

p. 38 "The Wesleys vigorously applauded the original ban on slavery [in Georgia]." This might be, but I'd like to know what writing shows this.

p. 41 "Of course they had read much on the subject [or slavery], and they would have seen Africans in England, but now it came home to them." Where is the evidence that the Wesley brothers had "read much on" slavery? I find no documentation on that, and Smith presents none.

I could go on, but those should show the nit-picking I could do, but I will end there. The book is worth reading. The last twenty-five pages is a facsimile reproduction of Thoughts Upon Slavery, and not a particularly good copy. In 1986 that might have been the only way for a reader to easily find it. Today it is in many places on the Internet.

Well, I took up the bandwidth. This book is of interest to Wesley scholars, and dabblers such as me. I obtained it through inter-library loan; it goes back on Monday. If you ever come across it at a used book sale, it is worth having. For someone whose interest is piqued, it's probably worth buying through Amazon or ABE Book Exchange.

Status of Two Works-in-Progress

2011-04-29T14:20:00.000-05:00

So these are my two current (that is, I'm actively working on them) works-in-progress:

Documenting America, hopefully volume 1 of several, an historical/political non-fiction books

Essential John Wesley, a small group study, such as for an adult Sunday school class, of Wesley's writings. The title is a place-holder, and not necessarily final.

I am finished with Documenting America. I could upload it to the Kindle store tonight, with its imperfect, self-created cover. I was hoping to get some critique on it from the new writers group, but, alas, we ran out of time Tuesday. I don't really want to wait two weeks to get the critique and then upload it. This weekend is supposed to be rainy. Not much chance of getting significant outside work done. I think I will do the formatting and uploading Saturday.

The John Wesley study is in its infancy. The outline is done, including the addition I made today. One chapter is done, except for tweaks I might do. That chapter is Wesley's stand on slavery. Today I found two scholarly papers on the topic, read them, and will likely make a few changes to the chapter. A second chapter is well along, the chapter on Wesley's other political writings. I have the excerpting fully done, and have much marginalia in my copies to form the basis of the rest of the chapter. I anticipate I'll have it done by Sunday, and will be ready to think about which chapter to work on next.

I can already see that this will be a larger book than I at first anticipated, probably 100,000 words: half of them Wesley's, half of them mine. But it can't be helped. The project is too important to me not to do it in a way I think is right. I also think I will have a separate volume, much smaller, to serve as a leader's guide. I'm just beginning to think of some things for that now.

One thing not yet clear to me is if I will be able to work on this Wesley study continuously, or if I will have to take breaks from it. As I said a few days ago, the pressure to have it done for teaching around September 1st is off. I've probably got till the first of the year, possibly longer. But that still means I need to do two chapters very three weeks, or a minimum of 3,000 words a week. I'm not sure I can keep up that intensity that long. Plus, my novel beckons, as does volume two of Documenting America and a sequel to "Mom's Letter". Cursed day job!

So why am I writing this post? I've talked about these books several times, perhaps ad nauseum for some readers. I don't really know. Maybe it's to "clear my head", do a self-appraisal of where I am with my writing career, or at least to be putting this in writing as a sort of accountability. If so, I guess that's a good reason for writing.

A Two Year Assessment of Freelancing

2011-04-28T09:09:00.004-05:00

Tuesday I conducted an interview for an article I'm writing for Buildipedia.com. A professor at my alma mater, the University of Rhode Island, is conducting research into using asphalt pavement for collecting solar engery. He's also looking into research for related things, but the solar energy from pavement interests me the most. I wrote an article on this subject last November for Buildipedia, and recently pitched a follow-up article to them, which they accepted. Only after the first article was published I learned that my school was also conducting this research.

So I conducted the interview, want to conduct another one with the professor at Worcester Polytech, the one I've had such a difficult time reaching, but the article just isn't coming to me. I'm now two days behind my deadline, and I should be writing the article (pending additions from the second interview), but it's just not coming. Why?

I don't think I'm a journalist, nor really an article writer. I started pursuing freelance work back around February 2009 as a means of building a platform to improve my chances of having a book accepted by a traditional publisher. That's the advice given by Cec Murphey and other pro writers: write articles, lots of them, then try your hand at books. I started my writing career backwards, I guess.

In these two years my articles have appeared in three print publications, and two on-line publications. Including all the ones I wrote for and posted at Suite101.com, it's somewhere around 150 articles in those two years. What have I benefited from that? It's a resume, I suppose, showing a potential book editor some stick-to-it-ness on my part. Maybe it shows some flexibility, writing on engineering, history, poetry, stock trading, genealogy, and environment. None of that could hurt.

But I don't enjoy it a whole lot. I'm not good at cold calling, so contacting by phone or e-mail people I don't know to ask them about some fact I need in the article is not a fun thing. Even talking with an engineering professor was not pleasing. It wasn't unpleasing—just kind of neutral, kind of blah. The article writing itself has been okay. I don't get the thrill of word crafting an article that I do from a poem, or from a scene in a novel. I don't feel the enjoyment that developing a complex fiction plot gives me.

So why do it? When I have two active book projects, two or three more immediately on heels of that, and things to learn and do related to the books, why keep writing articles? One reason is, while the writing itself leaves me somewhat flat, I get a feeling of accomplishment at the completion. I can look back at those 150 articles and have some satisfaction at a body of work. Another is the original reason: to build a body of work that may some day be considered a platform that will impress a book acquisitions editor. I'm pursuing self-publishing now, but could always make a reverse decision at some point and pursue traditional publishing. This all might come in handy then. And I'm making some money at it, enough to fill the tank and pay a bill every month (though recently it's trailed off a bit).

I guess I'll keep freelancing, but it's unlikely I'll seek to expand the markets beyond those I'm currently for. A few articles a month, mixed in with novels and non-fiction books, should give me variety of research and writing, and portfolio. But I'll revisit this decision often over the next six to nine months.

A Calm Place in the Whirlwind

2011-04-27T15:51:00.001-05:00

Life is busy. At my engineering day job, it seems like no task gets closed, yet many more get open. I can't quite get my current floodplain project to work. The lateral structure I entered, as a way to simulate an overflow pipe, needs to be revised, and I haven't yet figured out how to revise it to make it correct. Or rather, I believe I know what needs to be done and how to do it, but time to do it hasn't materialized. I figured it out at the end of the day yesterday, but today so far has been fully consumed in...

...teaching a class at my company, and preparing for it. I haven't done a class in at least three months, due to busy-ness, and several people have been saying they needed professional development hours. So I decided to teach a class titled "Five Important Construction Items Often Overlooked During Design". Creating the PowerPoint presentation to go with it took all morning—or all least all of the morning that I didn't let myself get distracted with a couple of personal things. Even half my lunch hour went to that. I didn't actually prepare what remarks I was going to say. I just talked an hour from the PowerPoint, using my many years of construction engineering experience. From the comments of attendees, I did pretty good. Add this to my list of classes for listing on a resume or on a website, if I ever get one built.

Back at my desk after teaching, I talked with my wife. It seems I am to go to the next town over after work and purchase a used jungle gym to give to our grandson Ephraim on is third birthday in two weeks. That's if the one called ahead of her doesn't take it. We are second in line. Hopefully we'll get it. Sounds like a good bargain. But, it does take away time I could have used on something else.

My writing efforts right now are fully consumed with the John Wesley small group study. One chapter done, another half done, the outline finished—except today I realized I had left out a major part of his writings, the many hymns he wrote, and the many of his brother's he published. How can I leave those out? I can't, so I will have to insert another chapter (I think I'm up to 22 now), figuring out the best place for it to go. The pressure to have the study ready around September 1 is off, as I believe the church is going to do another all-church series. I might not need it finished until December or January. That would be nice. I might be able to work on volume 2 of Documenting America. I'm still inching toward e-self-publishing volume 1, maybe in less than a week. It looks as if I'll have to do that without any beta reader comments, as no one has gotten back with me. I think I ran four or five of the chapters through my previous writing groups, though they were shorter at the time.

So where, you ask, is this calm place in the midst of life's whirlwind? It was last night, from 6:00 to 7:30 PM at the Bentonville Public Library, as we held the second meeting of the BNC Writers group. The previous meeting was to organize; last night was for critique. The same four of us met. Four others who want to attend couldn't because of illness or other unspecified reasons. About the time some would be traveling here the sky opened up with another round of rain, which probably contributed some to keeping people home.

But the four of us who met had a great time. Last meeting I had given them copies of my short story, "Mom's Letter", not for critique, but just as a sample of my writing. But they came back with some critique, and I will consider it. It's already for sale on Kindle, but I can easily make changes and re-upload it if necessary. As group leader, I chose the order of presentation. The three ladies went first. Brenda shared a short story based on a dream she had. Joyce shared the first chapter of a novel she has just begun. Bessie shared a non-fiction story from her years on the mission field in Papua New Guinea. I know that was her first formal writing, and first time sharing writing in a critique group. I think it was also Joyce's first time. She had been involved in the writing process before, helping writers through critique and editing, but I think she is just beginning her writing efforts.

We had a great time with the critiques. Our procedure is for each person to have copies enough to pass around, then for the author to read their work while the others follow along and make notes. We then discuss the work, making suggestions, asking questions. In the end we give the author the copy we have marked on. The author can respond to comments, sometimes indicating what their intent was, but always accepting critique with graciousness and thick skin.

Alas, we ran out of time, and I wasn't able to present the Introduction and first chapter of Documenting America. Maybe next time. I did receive the crit on "Mom's Letter", so it's not as if I was left out. We will meet again in two weeks, probably at the church this time, which will allow us a full two hours, not limited to the library's allowed schedule for conference room use.

I left the group and went home, to evening storms (outside and inside), a checkbook that wouldn't balance, a pile of mail to go through, and no time to write, very little to read. But that was okay. A momentary respite out of the whirlwind was sufficient for the day.

A Few Words on Health

2011-04-24T16:26:00.001-05:00

I'm in The Dungeon on a very rainy Sunday afternoon. Easter Sunday. He is risen! This is our fourth day of rain, with two more expected. Mostly it's been moderate rain. It was heavy on Thursday evening, but since then just wave after wave of light to moderate rain. The creeks are all full, with some out of their banks. Just taking a minute to write about my health before I get to my main writing.

On March 1 I went to the doctor for my quarterly appointment. The results were not good. My fasting blood sugar was up, as was my A1C (the long-term measure of blood sugar). He had told be to begin testing myself for blood sugar three months before that, but I had never done so. So on March 1, with very bad lab results, he put me on Lantus, a slow acting insulin given with a shot. That would be along with the two pills I already take for Type 2 diabetes.

This did not make me particularly happy. I went home with the Lantus samples he gave me, but didn't go right out and fill the prescription for the works. Lynda was in OKC with the kids, helping with Ezra's birth that morning. I wanted her around before I started shooting up, just in case I had an adverse reaction to it. Plus, I had no idea if I could really give myself a shot. I finally got the stuff for testing my blood sugar, but had a lot of trouble getting blood out of my fingers. It turned out I was missing the small apparatus that one uses to launch the lancet that pricks the finger that gives the blood that goes on the test strip that feeds the meter that measures the blood sugar and makes a display. Finally, on March 31, I had the contraption and all I needed to measure blood sugar and take my shots. The evening I had my first reading: 399.

Ouch. That was high. That week I was still at the very busy point, working late, not taking proper lunch hours or getting any exercise. My weight was beginning to go down some more, my body having finally passed through a weight set point. That was about the only good news for my health. But that high reading was like a light going off. That and the fact that, by measuring blood sugar several times a day, I was going to have knowledge of what my eating was doing to my body. April 1 I began a new regimen. Chips—gone, and not just for lent. Diet soda, which I think somehow feeds the carb beast—gone. Bread—gone. Other carbs, not just sugary things but any type of carb I could think of—gone. Exercise—increased.

This I have done. The next evening my sugar was still high at 379. I began taking Lantus, just two units at first, intending to step it up until I got down to the 100-140 range. To my surprise, the shot was easy and painless. That needle is so thin that I didn't feel it at all. I assume it's working, and some of the good stuff is getting through the needle and into my flabby tummy. The next evening it was down to 279, and I upped the dose to four units.

[Lost a bunch of this; not really wanting to have to re-create it.]
I'll give the short version. By the beginning of last week my Lantus dose, my blood sugar, and my weight had all "converged" at better numbers. Almost all my blood sugar readings are now between 100 and 140, with many of them 100-120. I had one reading below 100, prompting me to lower my Lantus dose from 10 to 9. My weight is down to 245, the lowest it's been in 10 years. My blood pressure, as measured at those stations at Wal-Mart, was 87/59 a week ago. I began cutting my blood pressure pills in half, and yesterday it was 110/61. I'm hoping to be off that completely in a month.

Meanwhile my energy level is up. On Saturdays I normally take an old saw and work on cutting up a tree that fell. Normally I can get one piece cut (7 to 8 inch diameter oak) before my arms give out. Last Saturday I was able to cut two pieces with no problem, and could have done more I think. I'm walking 20 minutes at lunch after eating, and almost that much evenings after supper. I think walking after eating is doing more for me than walking before.

Today my mother-in-law took us out to eat after church. This is the first time I've eaten out since my March 31 awakening. Chinese buffet. I ate too much, but the selections I ate were better than I normally do. No potatoes or heavily breaded items. Lots of vegetables, not much fried rice. It will be interesting to see where my blood sugar is before supper.

All of which is of little interest to my loyal blog readers, but I'm writing it anyway. My next doctor appointment is on May 24th. I'm actually looking forward to it. I'll probably post something here, saying what his expression was like to see a reformed, transformed patient.

More on Self-Publishing: Upfront Costs

2011-04-22T08:13:00.000-05:00

So, the commenters on Rachelle Gardner's blog indicated "affirmation" was their number one reason for seeking publication through a traditional publisher and avoiding self-publishing. Another reason mentioned was cost—it costs too much to self-publish. Here's a sampling of the comments.

Because as a self-published author, either you are limited to e-books...or you have to pay a lot of money up front - on editing and professional-quality cover art - to produce an attractive print version....

One, because I lack the ability to do two things at once (ie: write a novel AND market it). If I self-pubbed, I'd need the resources to hire someone to do that part for me, and I am too broke to do that currently.

...I chose to persue the traditional route for a couple reasons. I don't possess the resources required up front for a first class publication....

It seems, however, that these and other commenters who mentioned cost are using old information. Or they haven't conducted complete research and discovered the full range of self-publishing options available. Not so long ago self-publishing involved paying a hefty set-up fee, then having to purchase a large number of books you would sell yourself. Stories of boxes of books in writers' garages are legendary. The initial investment could easily be two to three thousand dollars.

Today, however, while that arrangement is still available, two other options to self-publish are very reasonable. Electronic self-publishing (eSP) involves zero upfront cost, unless the author needs to hire out formatting and covers. Well, a freelance editor may also be needed to make the text book perfect. Still, the cost of covers and formatting are very reasonable for a full length book. Freelance editing could be expensive, I suppose, though I haven't looked into the cost of that. Options such as critique group and exchange of beta reader time and effort are ways to offset those costs. But for the writer who can format and edit sufficiently, and if you accept just a slightly lower quality of cover cost (presuming you can't do it yourself), the upfront cost to eSP is quite minimal. And there's no initial inventory of books.

eSP, of course does not put a physical book in anyones hand; thus this may not be fully satisfying. For physical books, the inexpensive alternative is POD—print on demand. This relatively new technology has improved by leaps and bounds the last few years. Cost of the equipment has come down, and the quality of the bound book has improved. People who have bought these (I haven't yet; haven't been any place that had one of the machines, nor ordered any books that came that way) say you can't tell the difference between an offset print book and a POD book. Offset printing costs more for a small print run than does a single POD book, but a POD book costs more than an offset print book in a large print run.

So the negatives about the cost for the author to self-publish as compared to the traditional publishing route have pretty much vanished. Part of the reason for this is the cost to the author to traditionally publish. Yes, there are costs involved, and I don't mean lower royalties. I mean up-front costs. First, the best way to break in to trad-pub is to attend conferences, meet agents and editors, attend classes, network with anyone and everyone you can, and pitch your book at each opportunity. Those conferences cost money. With travel and tuition it could be $1,000 per conference, and you might have to do that for years before you attend the right conference with the right agent or editor having the right product to pitch. Thousands of dollars.

Of course, you could say that you need to attend conferences for the classes and networking, even if you don't pitch a book, just to grow as a writer. I won't argue that point, other than to say conference attendance would be a whole lot less if you eliminated the chance to meet editors and agents. I don't think that many people would go simply for the classes and the networking.

Then there's the cost of a freelance editor. Yes, read carefully all the advice given by publishing professionals (agents, editors, publishers, already published authors), and you will see they all recommend that you hire an editor to edit the manuscript you intend to submit to a traditional publisher. When signing a first time author, publishers want a manuscript that doesn't need a lot of editing. That's what all the experts say. So really, there's not cost savings there. If you need an editor to self-publish, you need an editor to pre-edit your work before submitting for traditional publishing. The cost is the same.

Then there's the cost of time and emotions. Once the quality of your writing is where it needs to be for acceptance by a traditional publisher, that doesn't mean you will be successful at getting it placed. Publishers are the buyers in a buyers' market. They turn down excellent books all the time, making a judgment of what might sell by the time they can get the book to market. Or they may have just contracted for another book the same as yours, and don't want to have two competing books. Or any of another hundred reasons why they may have to pass on your book that is just as good as others being published, and maybe better.

And finally there's the emotional cost of dealing with rejection after rejection, of waiting, and of wondering if you'll ever break in. That will be more of a concern for some than for others. Rejections strike different people in different ways. We all know it's part of publishing, and so we become philosophical about it. Still, there's an emotional cost for everyone as they process the rejections and the wait times. Those costs can be beneficial, but they are still costs.

So, all in all, it seems to me the cost to traditionally publish is not less than the cost to self-publish, and may in fact be more.

A Cover for "Documenting America"

2011-04-19T14:48:00.000-05:00

Okay, loyal blog followers. Today I finished those few things I needed to do to call Documenting America, Vol. 1 done. Completed the Introduction, added a few lines to the quote in one chapter, and typed all the quote revisions--or maybe I finished them last night. Printed a copy for my final review and reading by my wife.

That gave me time to think about a cover. My thoughts were to have the title, subtitle, and my name superimposed over one of those documents in the book. I chose the 1816 letter of Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, which I downloaded from the Library of Congress (a public domain document. Try as I could, I couldn't get done in Paint what I wanted to get done. So I pulled the picture file into MS Word and did what I wanted with a text box and a footer, screening out the document picture using the Word picture editor. You can see the result.

Obviously, I am not a graphics designer. I'm just trying out the concept. If this is a valid concept for a book such as this, then I'll see about getting a proper cover made according to the concept. I wanted to make something that I could, in a pinch, upload to the Kindle publishing platform and make work for a while during the wait for a proper cover.

What say you, loyal readers? Is the concept for this cover valid? I'm not looking to have the background document readable, just there for show. Let me know in the comments, if you would. Try to look past the specifics of these graphics to the concept.

Progress on Documenting America

2011-04-19T04:02:00.003-05:00

My non-fiction book Documenting America continues to inch its way toward publication via Kindle, Smashwords, and hopefully in print via CreateSpace. Last week I did almost nothing with it. I was consumed with meeting date-certain demands of the IRS, and the Arkansas DFA. What time I spent on writing went mainly to the small group study on John Wesley that is my next project. I know, that was probably not the best use of time. DA is a few hours of work away from being ready to upload, whereas the Wesley study is hours of work and months of time away.

But I can’t fully explain why I go off on whichever project seems to command my attention. I wanted to make some progress on Wesley, something beyond just gathering materials. The planning was essentially done, so I mainly had to pick a place to start and start. I did that with Wesley’s views on slavery. This was actually going to be part of a chapter on political and health writings by Wesley, but after reading Thoughts Upon Slavery and some other items, I decided this needed to be a chapter of its own. So I redid the outline/table of contents, and set to work on Wesley on Slavery. I managed to identify the basic excerpt I’ll use, and write a few hundred words of text. I did this in manuscript, with typing to being soon.

So what of Documenting America? Early last week I left it at the proof-reading stage, about 1/3 done. Over the weekend I finished the proof-reading, did a little editing, and typed all that. In the course of this I found a few things in the quotes in most chapters that I want to verify against the original document. Today in my before-work private time I began doing that. I’m through exactly half the chapters, and so should finish that today. These changes are minor, so I should be able to make them tonight, print it tonight or tomorrow, and begin the second review. I’ll ask my wife to read it and see what she thinks, as I value her opinion. It would be nice if my three or four beta readers would get back with me.

Beta readers are a problem. I’m not one to push people. I put out a call for beta readers, and several people said, “Yes, I’d like to read that, and will give you my opinion.” However, so far none of them have come back with comments. I’m just not going to e-mail them another time and push. That’s not in my nature. So I’ll wait a little, then forge ahead. Right now it looks as if I’ll be ready to upload to Kindle next weekend, assuming I can come up with a cover.

So this is kind of exciting. It will be my first book-length eSP work, and later in book form.

More Thoughts on eSP vs Traditional Publication - Validation

2011-04-18T11:53:00.009-05:00

I blogged some days ago about the post and comments on Rachelle Gardner's blog concerning reasons why readers of her blog continue to seek traditional publishing when self-publishing has become an easy and relatively inexpensive option. By far the most common reason was VALIDATION. Here's a couple of examples.

I'm pursuing traditional publishing because I want the affirmation from publishing professionals that my novel is good.

...traditional publishing is an acknowledgment that you have actually crafted something worth reading.

The validation, for lack of a better term, from professionals in the industry. The stamp of approval from people who have given that same stamp to others I respect....

As a fiction writer with sights set on a writing career, I want the legitimacy of acceptance into the traditional publishing industry.

That's enough. Through over two hundred comments this theme was most often repeated. To have your book printed by one of the big six publishers, or even the next dozen publishers, in both the general and Christian markets, you need to pass muster with the gatekeeper. Actually, several gatekeepers, in sequence. Since these large houses are closed to direct submissions, you first need an agent to accept your work. Then you need an acquisitions editor to be willing to present your proposal to a committee; call it the acceptance committee if you like. If the acceptance committee likes it, you are mostly home free. Although, your book can still fall through if: the economy tanks and the publisher decides to cut back; if your story is later judged not up to par; if after editing the book simply isn't good enough for the editing gatekeepers.

I admit it. I would love to have the validation of traditional publishing. However, that must be weighed against the lottery of the acceptance process. The gatekeepers pass up good books all the time. A book is not always rejected because it isn't of the required minimum quality. Books are often reject—perhaps as often rejected—because the gatekeepers don't think it will sell. They are trying to project a point in time two years away (or even three years away at the agent level) and guess what the book-reading public will be buying. That's a long time to look into the future.

So, for various reasons, the mainstream publishers reject good books. Writers feel un-validated, and keep plugging away on the query-go-round, looking for other publishers or other agents, writing new books and looking for agents, all in search of validation. Eventually they begin taking chances with smaller, independent presses, the ones you can submit to without an agent. Still searching for validation.

Self-publishing, however, can provide another type of validation, provided by the last gatekeeper in the sequence: the book-buying public. Everyone says that self-published books are awful; the quality of writing and production are poor. Yet, the public does buy self-published books. It's difficult to get your book noticed, but it does happen. In the era of search engines, it's perhaps easier than ever before. In the era of e-reading devices, the eSP book can be less expensive than the traditinally published book, giving the eSP book an advantage: the book buyer still considers price before they buy.

Sales are a form of validation. The two sales of "Mom's Letter" to people I don't know are validation. When Documenting America appears either later this month of in May, any sales I make will be validation. Will it be equal to the validation that would come from having a book accepted and published by the Big Six or the Medium Twelve? I guess I'll find out.

"Thoughts Upon Slavery" by John Wesley

2011-04-15T23:52:00.001-05:00

As part of the research required for the small group study I'm writing, tentatively titled "Essential John Wesley", I'm reading his works right now. I've done enough to outline the book, and to have an idea of how long the study will last and how long the book will be. I was kind of amazed when I went through a bibliography of his works. I knew the major ones (well, not really all of them), but was surpised just how much he had produced.

I was familiar in general with Wesley's stand on slavery. He was against it. The last letter he wrote, six days before he died, was to William Wiberforce, encouraging him to remain firm to the end in his struggle to end the slave trade. But as I researched Wesley's writings, I found he had written a short book titled "Thoughts Upon Slavery", written in 1774. I found an on-line copy of it, printed it, and finally over the last few nights read it.

It is a great read. Not terribly long by book standards, about 9,000 words, so it could almost be called a tract. Wesley took some of his material from a book by American abolitionist Anthony Benezet. Those who have read both works say that about 30 percent, though Wesley re-did some of that. He begins with a description of slavery as it existed at that time, including how slaves were procured and transported. He claimed it was the English and other Europeans who set the African nations warring against each other, resulting in prisoners of war who were then sold as slaves. Kings were offered bribes and, once corrupted by the Europeans, sold out their villagers for slavery.

This idea that the Africans willingly sold their own people to the slave traders is something I hear a lot lately, as if that made what the Europeans and their New World colonists did somehow better. It wasn't a mitigating factor, and Wesley said as much.

He contrasted the behavior of the Africans in their native environment to that of the slave traders, and found the latter wanting, inferior to the black man. To the slave traders he wrote:

Are you a man? Then you should have an human heart. But have you indeed? What is your heart made of? Is there no such principle as compassion there? Do you never feel another's pain? Have you no sympathy, no sense of human woe, no pity for the miserable? When you saw the flowing eyes, the heaving breasts, or the bleeding sides and tortured limbs of your fellow-creatures, was you a stone, or a brute? Did you look upon them with the eyes of a tiger? When you squeezed the agonizing creatures down in the ship, or when you threw their poor mangled remains into the sea, had you no relenting? Did not one tear drop from your eye, one sigh escape from your breast? Do you feel no relenting now? If you do not, you must go on, till the measure of your iniquities is full. Then will the great God deal with you as you have dealt with them, and require all their blood at your hands. And at "that day it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah than for you!"

We always want our heroes to be on the right side of history, as we currently judge what that right side is. It seems John Wesley was. It took him a few decades from when he first saw slavery up close in Georgia until he began making opposition to it a part of his public pronouncements. I suppose we could fault him for the delay, but he did have a lot on his plate. That he eventually stepped out front, encouraged by the works of Benezet and others, is a good thing. That he inspired Wilberforce and others, even better.

I'm now at the point where I'm excerpting Thoughts Upon Slavery, then will write some analysis to go around that, plus questions for the class, plus a list of references and further reading. I think I'll have all that done by Sunday evening. One exception: I have ordered a reference from interlibrary load, and purchased another one on-line. Until I have these in hand and can digest them, I won't really be "done" with the chapter.The last couple of sections are Wesley's own writing, his statement how a Christian—indeed, a human being with a real heart—could not possibly engage in the slave trade, could not possilby own slaves. They are the best part of the book. He was everything wrong with the world as the result of sin. It's hard to argue with that. Certainly this "execrable villany" was a sin against God and against man. That it took "Christians" so long to recognize that is shameful.