Literary Criticism and Me

I’ve written about literary criticism before, and about I have problems with it. Some years ago I had an exchange at the Absolute Write forums about this. The other person said, “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.”

For many years I critiqued poems at four different Internet poetry sites. I figure I’ve critiqued more than 1,000 poems. A couple of sites have become defunct (one at least lost to hackers), and if I never copied or printed my critiques on those I’ve lost them. So be it. I did a lot of critiquing.

However, literary criticism escapes my understanding. “Interpretive, rather than evaluative” this more knowledgeable person said. I’m not sure what to do with that. Interpret what the author said, but don’t evaluate it. I don’t know how to separate the two. This is probably what got me afoul of so many English classes in my school years.

I’m just about finished reading a small literary criticism about Thomas Carlyle. It’s written by a University of Kansas professor, the cobbled notes of a class he taught. The book is Thomas Carlyle, a Study of His Literary Apprenticeship, 1814-1831, by William Savage Johnson (1911). Johnson shows how the various parts of Carlyle’s philosophy and doctrine began appearing in his early works, though they were not fully articulated until later works. I think this is the second time to read this. I think I began it once before and abandoned it. It’s only 73 pages, and right now I’m on page 64, so less than 10 pages to go.

I imagine I’ll finish it, but I’m not enjoying it. Perhaps Johnson is too deep for me. Or perhaps literary criticism, as practiced by thems that do it, is beyond me.

All of which is causing me to rethink my currently-shelved Carlyle projects, and wonder if instead I need to just trash them. The one I was farthest along with was a study of his short book Chartism. This was to include: background of the conditions in Britain that caused him to write the book; selections from letters before and after writing and publication; the book itself, with my editor’s notes added to help a 21st century American audience to understand it; all the reviews (that I can find) that came out around the time of publication; various reviews and interpretations of the work right up to the present era. Some of these would require release of copyright to include them in my book. I also figured on including an essay or two of mine (yet to be written) of my own literary criticism of the work.

However, based on what I now know of literary criticism, I think this is a dead project. I’m not saying I will never resurrect it, and at this stage I’m not discarding all notes and deleting all files. But I’ll have to get a whole lot of writing, intellectual, and publishing mojo back before I’ll tackle this again.

Searching for a Topic

Once again, this week, ideas for blog posts have passed through my mind without capture. But that doesn't mean I'm without a topic for today. I have at least two in mind as I start this.

One relates to something I'm working on at my day job. Next March I'll present a brown bag class in the office with the title "How to Recession-Proof Your Career". I've already started working on it, and several items from it would seem to make good blog posts. The other relates to our Life Group at church. We finished our "Jesus is Lord" study on October 19th, and we didn't have Life Groups on Oct 26th due to having a special service. We are supposed to start a new series this Sunday, November 2. The problem is neither I nor my co-teacher have a clue as to what to teach next. A request of the class on the 19th as to what they would want to study brought dead air, with the exception of maybe one of the shorter books of the Bible.

So, what to do? I was actually thinking of doing a series on prayer. The book The Circle Maker has been highly recommended, and I was thinking on using that. However, upon looking into it more closely, I'm concerned that it's actually not all that biblically based. Maybe it will work, maybe not. I meant to go to a bookstore and pick up a copy, but haven't yet had the opportunity.

An alternative method of studying prayer came to my mind over the last couple of days. Actually, two alternate series. One would take a fair amount of time to prepare lessons, the other very little time. I wonder which one I'd select if it were up to me. I hope I can convince my co-teacher on going that way. I'll try to contact him today.

Meanwhile, I think I'll write a few posts based on this class I'm preparing for work. I can see several that I could pull out as stand-alone posts. Enough to keep my busy for a while.

Post 900: On Accomplishment

As you'll know if you've read this blog or my other one, I'm in a Time Crunch. I put that in capital letters because it is the daddy of all time crunches. It's so much of a crunch that I can't see my way clear to do any writing. In an odd half hour here and there I do some research for a future project, the type of research that can be done in 30 minutes chunks of time. And to some extent I'm keeping up with my blogs. Beyond that, I don't foresee any writing for the next four months.

Yet, I have to say, I'm not without accomplishments during this time. This is my 900th post on this blog. That's not bad. I started it in late 2007, just under seven years ago, so that's an average of around 115 posts a year. I'm pleased with that accomplishment. Someday I hope someone will be interested in reading them all, seeing what the last seven years of my life have been like, and perhaps be impressed. Or, maybe not.

Another accomplishment of late has been better productivity in my engineering career. Most of the things I do are self-starting type stuff, and I've had trouble starting things. Recently though I've started several things. I have in-house classes planned clear up to December 2015. In the next four months I'll be teaching classes I've never taught before, which means I'll have to prepare notes, study the material, plan a presentation, and build a PowerPoint file for each. Three more things to put into my resume.

The main cause of the Time Crunch has also resulted in accomplishment. Lynda and I are in a stock trading education program. Part of that is having a mentor, having conference calls with him, and doing a bunch of homework. I'm pleased to say I've been keeping up with the homework, even out-pacing my wife with it. It's enjoyable to a degree. Whether or not it will make us more successful trading stocks I don't know, but I think it will. It's a quality program, unlike so many I've evaluated over the years. At least it's keeping me busy, and accomplishing things.

And today, I had a minor accomplishment: I paid the bills. We stayed home from church today. I'm nursing a mild cold, and Lynda was nursing a moderately severe headache. After morning devotions I grabbed accumulated mail from the kitchen table, went through it all, and paid all bills that were due, one not due till Nov 13. I sorted through things and discarded a bunch of junk mail. I have a few more things to go through, but overall I'm pleased with what I got done.

So three cheers for accomplishment. Of course, I'd rather these accomplishments be writing related, but perhaps that will come again in time.

Nothing to Write

Today is my day to post to this blog. Unfortunately I have nothing to write. We've been expecting rain since around noon, but then they changed the forecast to say we wouldn't get any till around 9:00 p.m. this evening. It finally started a few minutes ago, just in time for me to walk out to the car without a jacket. That's okay. Clothes, skin, and hair all dry without being damaged. Hopefully I'll be able to keep my papers from becoming wet.

Today I spoke to the engineering seminar class at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. This is a weekly, 1 hour class that features practicing engineers coming in to talk about a significant project. Back in August the call came in to me to try and set something up to support this professor and his class. I wanted someone else to do this, but got exactly zero responses to my e-mail, so I did it. Actually, I got one response to my e-mail: on Tuesday of this week—just a little late. I talked about the engineering challenges with the Crystal Bridges Museum, focusing more on the flood control issues than anything else.

The class had around 30 people attend. I knew two of them: students who interned with us this past summer. Actually, I knew an older man who attended. He's a practicing civil engineer in Fayetteville, where the U of A is. I recognized him, but couldn't remember his name. He came up after the program and introduced himself, and I recalled where our paths had crossed before, perhaps 8 years ago.

Tonight Lynda and I will participate in another live training webinar for stock and options trading. Following recommendations from this service, I placed a trade this morning that would go up in a down market. It gained close to 20% in the sharp downturn today. Had I not been on a conference call when the market opened, I could have made even more. I got in after 9:15 instead of at 8:30.

Other stock trading training will consume a lot of time over the next week, and even up to six month's time, as we work through this training. I'm hoping the time commitment will taper off some after the first two weeks, but we'll see. People who know about this have asked me when I'll write. I tell them I don't expect to write anything for the next 6 months. Should an hour or two a week present itself for writing, and should I have sufficient brain power left to actually work on something, my order of writing work will be:

- prepare Father Daughter Day for publication and publish it
- research my next Thomas Carlyle book, and begin working on the essay I'll include in it
- get back on my civil war book in the Documenting America series.

I should probably look to short stories, given that I'll have so little time, but that would mean beginning another project rather than working on a present one, and I don't think my head would stay together if I had another project to do.

Well, the rain has stopped; it's time to go home and see about supper and webinars and dream about leisure. Not much of a post, I know, but it's what I got today.

Paper, Paper Everywhere

Last Friday, faced with a weekend, and wondering what to do, I weighed my options. Writing was high on the list. I had just taken five days off from writing. Maybe it was time to get back to it. Or, with the weather forecast to be nice, and with my knee somewhat improved, perhaps I should go outside on Saturday and get back to cutting up the wood from the late spring tree topping. That would be both exercise and productivity. It would depend, of course, on how well my knee felt Saturday morning.

Then I thought about the piles and piles of paper I have seemingly everywhere in the house. Most of it is downstairs, in The Dungeon, or perhaps tucked away in file cabinets—out is sight, but in mind as a drawer full of paper. On the floor of The Dungeon were several piles of unfinished projects. In a tray on the work table were months and months of financial papers to be filed. Elsewhere on the work table were lots of writing papers, crying out for attention.

So Friday I made the decision that the weekend would primarily be one of tending to long-neglected papers. A little wood sawing if possible, but mainly papers. Saturday morning dawned with the temperature at 49, and cloudy, but no rain. Perfect for outside work. Except my knee seemed much worse than the last couple of days. I made the command decision to forego outside work. I went to my reading chair and fell asleep. An hour later I woke up when Lynda got up. Before long I was heading downstairs to The Dungeon.

I decided to tackle the bills filing first. I hadn't done much filing at all in 2014, and what I had done was quite random. Enough bills had piled up that I first took an hour to sort them and put them chronologically. Then I began filing. The utilities were easy, so I started with them. I decided that, since this was a major filing effort, I would take the time to make sure everything was in the right order, and to cull through the files to get rid of some of the older items, say more than three years old. From the utilities I went to the mortgage, then to miscellaneous repairs, then to a few oddball items. I was then ready to tackle medical records.

I've never been satisfied with the filing of medical records. It's becoming more critical now that we're older and have more records to keep track of. So I took a little time to brainstorm and think about how to file them. I decided on a way to change them up a bit, and did so for 2014. Whether I go back and reorganize prior years I'm not sure. The medical records took a long time, especially since my file drawer was over-stuffed, and I needed to move some things to archive storage. I did that, and the medical records were complete and back where they belonged. Somewhere along the way I took a quick break for lunch.

That left our stock trading papers, writing papers, and some tax papers of ours and of my mother-in-law. The stock papers were most important. I took a lot of time with those, as they must be sorted into three accounts, and then filed under three or four different tabs. Keeping them in correct chronological order is important. So that all took some time, but I finished it. Well, except for later when I found a few that were in a place I hadn't seen. They are now resting in the filing tray, waiting on my next time. I shifted to the tax papers. I really only had a few of mine, and took care of them quickly. For my m-i-l's, I decided to do a major culling of older ones to free up file drawer space. So anything older than 2009 I threw a lot of stuff out.

By the end of the day, I felt really good about what I had accomplished. My back hurt, probably more than if I'd spent the time sawing logs. The Dungeon didn't look all that much better, because of the writing papers. That would be a Sunday task, I decided, and called it quits.

Sunday, after church, eating with Lynda's mom, and a short nap (not more than 1/2 hour), I get after the writing papers. It was a major task. Some time ago I was in a writing seminar with David Morrell (author of First Blood, creator of Rambo). He said to save all your drafts of you books, box them up along with research papers, correspondence, whatever, and set them aside for eventual donation to wherever you donate your writing papers in the future. I had done this with Doctor Luke's Assistant, my first novel, and had a file drawer full of them. With later books I had been less careful at saving drafts, because I saw exactly how much space DLA drafts had taken.

I made the decision that most likely no institution is going to want my donated papers, and the drafts would have to go. So I got to work with sorting, bagging for recycling, and filing. Three hours later I was amazed at what I had accomplished. Four plastic grocery bags sat on the stairs, full of old office paper, waiting to be carried up and put in the garage for recycling. Forty of fifty pounds of paper. A stack 18 inches high. And almost all other writing papers were in a file somewhere. Some of those may find themselves part of a future culling, but for now they are out of the way.

I don't know that The Dungeon looks a whole lot better. Maybe a little. I still have a couple of piles of things I didn't get to. These are, I think, mostly printouts of books/articles for reference, or maybe something I critiqued for someone. I think half of it is for discards, and half is for filing in a retrievable manner. I also have a pile of file folders and manila envelopes on the floor of the storage room, freed up for other use now that they no longer hold the DLA drafts. Tonight I'll have to sort them and do the discard/storage thing again.

All in all, this was a good effort. A couple of more hours on the last piles, putting the tax forms back in the drawer, and a little rearranging, and I'll have a more efficient and more usable work space. I don't know when I'll get back to writing, but for now, I think the time spent away from it has been well spent.

Living In The Past

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I spend much of my time in the past. Reading history will do that. Studying genealogy will expand it. Reading Romantic and Victorian Era writers will exacerbate it. When I get home at night my mind is geared towards times no closer than 50 years ago.

Last night I hosted an on-line, back-to-school party for my high school class. This was held at our class Facebook page (which I created). 25 people showed up, with about 15 of those contributing posts. That's out of a group membership of 106 out of a class of 725. So not a great attendance, but I think all who posted had a good time. We came from two different junior high schools to the same high school, so there was lots of cross-town rivalry stuff going on. Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the eve of our starting junior high (not really; we started the Wednesday after Labor Day, which in 1964 was Sept 8; but seeing as how today is the Wednesday after Labor Day, it was an anniversary of sorts).

That took a lot of time last night. As group creator and host, I felt I had to be there and contribute. By the end of the evening we had over 300 posts. Those who didn't contribute will some day stop in the page and see what we all said.

Then, I've been beta-reading/editing the memoir of a cousin of mine—a memoir of childhood. At least the first part is. I've read up to the teen years. I believe the latter half moves into the adult years, but for now it's all about events more than 50 years in the past. I know the people mentioned. I know some of the circumstances which this cousin has shared with me. But the details are new. I'm enjoying my reading; and I enjoy editing. Tonight I can spend enough time on it that I'll either finish it or get close.

My current reading has been of old works. I just finished my second reading of Thomas Carlyle's Chartism, in preparation for a publishing a book on the subject. Lynda and I, in our reading aloud, are reading through the Sherlock Holmes canon. So my reading is of things old. When I'm not reading those, I'm reading my Bible. Talk about old. Next, however, is a couple of magazines I bought last time I was in Barnes & Noble, so I'll be shifting to reading something modern. Plus I have some articles to read in a back-issue of a literary magazine, from several years back. Maybe this reading will tug me into the future.

The other thing that causes me to dwell in the past is my genealogy work. Ever since I've been writing creatively, genealogy has taken a backseat. Every now and then, when a relative contacts me, or I sense an urge, I do a little work on it. That's what's happened recently. Yesterday I took time to prepare two new family group sheets, based on new information, and to edit the one for my family. Two of these three are to present accurate information to a newly found relative; the other information about that relative. This reminded me of how much work I have to do. My genealogy notebooks are a mess. I have unproven information in them that is speculative enough that I need to trash it. I have trial family charts that I later updated, but haven't discarded the older versions. I need to spend hours doing nothing but that.

Then, the last month or so I've spent time with old photographs. I may have mentioned before that my house has become the accumulation point for old photographs from both my and my wife's families. We have them in boxes and bins. Some are labeled, some are not. None are inventoried. These go back to our great-grandparents, in some cases older than that. They are for five or six family branches. Some I know I have, but haven't seen them for years. Add to this are all the photographs Lynda and I have taken over the years. They are scattered throughout the house: in dresser drawers, in boxes, in albums that are incomplete and mostly not labeled.

Oh how I want to inventory our photos! Put them in a database that will: identify the photo and who or what is in it; identify who took it; indicate if a negative is available, and if so where the negative is; indicate the family branch it came from; identify or speculate on the date the photo was taken; state where the photo is in the house, including which album if it's in an album. Unfortunately, that task is so huge I don't think I'll get there this side of retirement, and perhaps not for twenty years into retirement, should I live so long.

So, right now I have my feet firmly planted in the past. Writing tasks await me. Writing is a current activity, though of course my Civil War book is of a past activity. Hopefully I'll come back to the present sometime soon. But for now, I'm enjoying my time machine.

So Far Away

A couple of days ago I heard the Carol King song "So Far Away" on the radio. It had been a while since I'd heard it—not years, but a while. This radio station does a nice mix of old and new. It's not exactly easy listening. They call themselves "variety radio". They play the types of songs that are easy on the ears, not head banger stuff. No Janis Joplin. Limited Jim Croce. Lots of Katie Melua, Colbie Callet (their slow, ballad like stuff). Good listening.

King's song brought back memories, but it also got me to thinking. "So Far Away" is in terms of distance, but I got to thinking about it in terms of time. The past is so far away, yet I live in the past. That's one of the consequences of studying genealogy and history. If' I'm not reading Revolutionary War documents I'm looking at old censuses. If I'm not reading about the great migration I'm looking at old family photos. The present usually gets in the way of the past.

Last night, when I was supposed to be writing, trying to get back to it after a couple of days of distractions, I made the mistake of clicking on a Facebook link for a doo-wop song I didn't know. It was a good song. Then, off to the side on that YouTube page were scores of links to other songs of the era. I clicked and I clicked and I clicked. What great music, what a good time.

Distractions of the last two days were all about the past, digging into unknown things, trying to figure out how they tie to the present. I don't know if they do. Or rather, I should say they do, but I don't know exactly how. It may be tightly tied or a little bit loosely tied, but tied somehow it is. Perhaps I'll be able to write more about it in a few weeks.

I just listened to "He's a Rebel", which caused me to think and dream about being a rebel, something I most definitely never was. I suppose though, if I try hard enough, I can make a claim that I was a rebel in that I wasn't a rebel when all the guys around me were rebels. If I stretch a little.

So what is this post about? Nostalgia, I guess. I long for the past. Hopefully someday I'll find it.

Happy VJ Day everyone.

Getting in a Groove

Today I taught Life Group for the fifth straight week. I realize that, for those who teach an adult class every week, this would be situation normal. However, since our class is designed around me and my co-teacher teaching every-other week, this was a long stretch. Last night as I prepared, I found myself somewhat at a loss as to how to present the lesson, a lesson which I had to make up from scratch.

Following our "lives changed by the resurrection" theme, I went on to the next chapter of acts, Chapter 16. The life changed in this chapter was Lydia, the Greek woman from Thyatira who was in Philippi, dealing in purple cloth, and found by Paul at a Jewish place of prayer. She seems to have been easily convinced by his message. The second life changed was the Philippian jailer, who had a middle of the night conversion after a series of providential events.

As I was teaching, I felt that the lesson ran longer than it should, longer than I had prepared for. We ended a bit early, but we had also started early. While I enjoy teaching, I'll be glad for the break next week, even if it is just for one week.

One thing I didn't make as part of my lesson, which I thought of as I was at my computer on a Sunday afternoon, engaged in book writing, was that Paul seemed to be in a groove, even this early in his second missionary journey. He went to Philippi and, not finding a synagogue, as he would in other cities on that journey, he went to the place of prayer. He was already in his "by all means save some" mode. Lydia he led to Jesus by preaching, the jailer by singing with follow-up preaching. In between he healed the slave girl of the fortune-telling spirit that possessed her. His groove was that he was always at work for God, missing no opportunity to minister for Him.

I have not been in a groove lately. In fact, it's been just the opposite. I have been discombobulated from a schedule standpoint. Babysitting grandchildren for almost a week was good, but not good for establishing/maintaining a groove. My blog posts have been irregular. My writing has been according to the path of least resistance (i.e. whatever seemed at any given time to be the easiest to write). I've made excuses based on activities of others relative to what I need to do. I haven't done research into peripheral activities, such as learning G.I.M.P. or finding a new theme for my writing blog or researching a new computer and camera.

That's about to change. Trips and entertaining company are at an end, I believe. I'm about at a place where I can make good progress on all the things that I must do. This weekend I found a way to spend an odd moment to prepare for research into a future non-fiction book I plan to do. I made major progress on some much needed yard work, on paperwork, on housework. I'm caught up on budgeting, if not on filing. My attitude is good, my health is good, my weight loss is about to enter into another stage. I should soon be in a groove.

In fact, I think I'm already in the groove, based on measured progress this weekend. I need to accomplish another week of this type of progress, at which time I should be able to report back here: I am, indeed, in a groove.

Stay tuned.

Staying Busy - Helped by the To Do List

If you've read this blog for very long, or my other blog about my writing life, you know I stay busy, really busy. Most of it is of my own doing, as I choose how to live my life. Some of it is "have to do stuff," such as maintaining house and vehicles. I'm pretty good at preparing and following to-do lists at work, not so good at home. But I do make them for outside work, and sometimes they help me. Last night was a perfect example.

I left the office around 5:30 p.m., stopping by the bank and grocery store on the way home, needing only a few items. Earlier I had prepared a to-do list for the evening, and knew, without referring to the list, all the things I needed to do. Among those things only one was something I could do that day and only that day: pick blackberries.

Okay, so that's an exaggeration. I can pick blackberries any day. But only today will I find certain blackberries at a perfect stage of ripeness. A day later and they'll be over-ripe; a day early and they'll not be as sweet as they could be. Yes, picking blackberries in the roadside bushes around the neighborhood was on the to-do list, even though I picked a pint at work on my noon hour.

But as I looked at the items on the list, I realized picking blackberries was perhaps the least important of all I had to do. So instead I did the following.

• Continue clean-up of the debris from our recent tree topping. I finished moving one pile to the street side, where on Saturday I'll load it in the pick-up and take it to the stump dump, and I drug another pile off into the woods. Some of the piles are so far down the hill that bringing them up to the street is much too much work. Easier to take them into the woods. Then I cut some of the larger limbs into moveable lengths/weights, and continued to pile them for later cutting into firewood length. I still have much to do on this, but it's looking better, much better.
• Continue to enter our expenses into my budgeting spreadsheet. I allowed myself to get way behind on this, as well as on filing. Night before last I picked up this long neglected task and made some progress. Last night I did the same, with additional progress. At the rate I'm going I'll be caught up on the spreadsheet early next week. Then I'll see about filing.
• Work on Documenting America, Civil War Edition. I completed chapter 1 in this, and worked on proper entries in the writing diary for it. This is early in the process, but I'm pleased with how it is at this time.
• When I finished my work for the night on DA-CWE, it was 9:30 p.m. Lots of time left in the evening to do something else. But what? The written to-do list wasn't in front of me, but I had it in mind. I remembered that I have two books I want to format for print editions. I decided to do this work on In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. It's not hard at all, though it can be tedious. I chose paper size, changed the "Normal" style for font, input headers and footers, and added the front matter. This brought me to around 10:30 p.m. I quickly went through the book to look for oddities, and found and changed some. Then, I noticed that I had mixed up the left hand and right hand page headers. So I switched those around, chapter by chapter. That took me to around 11:15, which was later than I had intended to work on it. But it was done, or mostly done. Tonight I'll look at it and see if anything needs changing. But for sure it's very close.

That was far from everything on the list. And the blackberries didn't get picked. I decided a few can just get over-ripe, and the birds and bugs can have them. I'll try to pick a few tonight.

Family Time

This has been a different holiday weekend, sort of. July 6 is the birthday of my mother-in-law, Esther Moler Cheney Barnes. So we are normally close to home on this weekend, spending time with her. It's no. 89 this year, so next year will be a big one.

This year our weekend included work. Friday Lynda and I worked in the yard. I'm still working on clearing away from the tree trimming, while Lynda is planting flowers and vegetables in pots. She has some nice flower arrangements, as well as two pepper and four tomato plans, all in pots. Next year, possibly, I'll have prepared some ground down in the back yard for a real garden, but this year it's just pots.

I drug a bunch of leafy branches far down into the woods. Cleared off the outer-most row of brush piles. then I hauled some from the upper part of the backyard to the street and loaded the pickup to take to the stump dump. I rested a while, then trimmed some of our front bushes, which were way overdue for trimming. They look good, though I only got about half of them trimmed. Next Saturday, perhaps, I'll get to the rest. Lynda also planted some hosta in the planter under the overhanging windows.

Saturday we did more of the same, though not as much and not as long. All in all, the front yard is looking good, and the backyard doesn't look quite so much like a disaster zone. Two more weekends of similar production, with a few hours of evening work, and the two yards will be in pretty good shape.

We also watched our neighbor's little dog this weekend, which has been enjoyable. He's easy to take care of. In fact, he seems to like being alone in the day time, so we just left him in his house most of the day and kept him here at night.

Lynda's two step sisters and their families came to town, one from Kansas City and one from OKC, for the birthday celebration. They all came over for supper last night. Ten of us gathered around our dining room table for taco salad and fruit salad for dessert. We had expected only eight, but two who weren't coming did. One family of four stayed with us last night. That gave me less time to prepare for Life Group lesson today, but that worked out okay, as we had to cut off the lesson a little early so we could head to the restaurant for the last part of the birthday celebration.

I'm full of Bob Evan's Sunshine Skillet breakfast. Would love to take a nap, but I know that as soon as I lay on the couch the to-do list will pop up in my mind and I'll be too restless to sleep. So, onward now to finish dropped plot lines in Headshots. Then maybe I'll take some time to format In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People for a paperback edition. Then, maybe, I'll work a little on my budgeting spreadsheet. Or maybe I'll leave that for tomorrow night.

So many things to do, most good choices. I guess I just like to keep busy.

Genre Focus Disorder - is it real?

I've said it before: I have Genre Focus Disorder (GFD). I called it by another name before, but GFD seems more appropriate. The experts in the publishing business say you should stick to one genre. Make a name for yourself in it, carve out a niche, become known, build an audience, and you'll do better. If you write in multiple genres, fans from one genre most likely won't follow you into another genre, and you will have to build separate audiences, carve out multiple niches.

On the other hand, some publishing veterans say experimenting with different genres during your pre-published time is acceptable. Once you sell something, however, use all your efforts to concentrate on that. This is said more from a trade publishing perspective than a self-publishing perspective, but it somewhat applies to the latter as well.

For me, however, I've found I have to write whatever I have inspiration for. I have mapped out books and short stories into the future that will probably consume all my writing time till old age claims it. I write sort of how water, when released from a container or hits land during precipitation, runs downhill or seeks its own level. That's good for productivity, but probably not so good for audience building and sales. Since I'm self-publishing, when I complete something, I publish. The 16 items I've self-published so far are in ten different genres. Of course, genre definition is difficult to pin down. Another person reading all my pieces may say they are in only eight genres.

Only eight?

So what has happened this year in my GFD? In March I published Thomas Carlyle's Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles. This was not for sales, though I've sold three copies. It was for practice at editing, formatting, cover creation, all things publishing, and it helped fulfill my fasciation with this Victorian behemoth. It was good practice. But what happened afterwards? Ideas for four different follow-ups to it came to mind, one of them book-length. That one wouldn't let me go. For three weeks I worked feverishly at it: researching the subject, contacting people, obtaining copies of documents old and new, and putting a bunch of stuff in a MS Word document. At the end of the three weeks time I had a book diary with many entries, and a file that is probably 70 percent of the eventual book, though subject to formatting. At that point I said "This is madness" and went back to other projects. But by that time the GFD attack had run its course.

So I completed three other projects. One was my novel, a sequel to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. I had been working on it since October (I think), so it was good to get it out of the way. Then I did the work of formatting The Gutter Chronicles for print and publishing it. That was okay as it was always on the schedule. The next thing on my publishing schedule was to add "It Happened At The Burger Joint" to my items for sale, which I did. My schedule then was a little imprecise. I could pick up the novel sequel, Headshots, and edit it. I could work on the next short story in the Danny Tompkins series, or the next short story in the Sharon Williams series. Those were on the to-do list, and made sense. I knocked out the Tompkins story, and published it this past Monday. Even made my own cover.

But then, GFD reared. Actually it reared even before I had finished the short story, "Saturday Haircuts, Tuesday Funeral". I was in Little Rock last week for a two day conference, and was in the hotel room in the evenings without much to do. I had brought a number of things with me to fill my time, as I always do, not knowing for sure what I'll want to work on. One of them was a volume of the Annals of America series. I used this series to find source material for my book Documenting America. When I published that in 2011 I saw it as the start to a possible series. I thought the next one would be from the civil war era, and the one after that would be from the pre-constitution era, focusing on the development of the constitution. But I had no hurry in doing either. Well, I suppose the civil war one could be considered subject to a deadline, since we are in the period of the civil war sesquicentennial and books about it might do better if released then.

But really, it wasn't necessary to work on this. I had my completed novel manuscript with me, and could begin editing in the quiet of the hotel. But the civil war book wouldn't let me go. I spent the first evening scanning documents in the Annals, and figuring out which ones to use as source material. I know how long I want the book, how long I want each chapter to be, thus how many chapters I need, and, knowing a fair amount of civil war history, know what subjects are needed. In one long evening, including getting to bed much too late (but who can sleep when GFD is at its strongest), I had the whole book planned, all but six or seven of the source documents identified, and even some specific parts of some source documents marked for extraction. I thought, Ah, GFD has now run its course. Back to my publishing schedule.

Not so. Monday and Tuesday of this week I was prohibited from working outside (I have much yard work to do) due to a combination of rain and a fall resulting in minor injuries. So what did I do? Instead of picking up and editing the novel, I worked on finding more source documents for the civil war book! And this morning I created the Word file. It is now officially a writing project. The pull of this book has become very great over the last week. What's going to happen for the rest of the week?

I really need to get back to my novel. I'd like to have that published in July, and need to give it two full rounds of edits before doing so, maybe even three rounds. I'm hoping to begin editing it this weekend, maybe by reading it aloud with my wife. So that gives me only a couple of days to allow GFD to run wild. I can handle that. Perhaps it will burn out. Then, when the civil war book comes up in the publishing schedule, which is maybe in October, I'll have a nice start to it and be able to build on. GFD flare-up concluded.

Except, I may have found a cover illustrator for my poetry book, Father Daughter Day. Which means I'll have work to do on it. Argh! Is there no end to it?

Writing Energizes Me, Publishing Tires Me

I usually write my writing posts at my writing blog and save this blog for various life, liberty, and pursuit of whatever type posts, but possibly this is one that's relevant to both.

Last Saturday I wrote "the end" on my latest novel. Headshots is a sequel to my baseball novel, In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. I thought Headshots would be around 80,000 words; it ended up being around 87,400. So I wasn't too far off. The last 20,000 words came out fairly quickly, at a rate of over 1,000 per hour when I was working on it. Some of those scenes I had played out in my mind many times. It was just a matter of figuring out how to get the right characters at the right place at the right time. That seemed to go well.

Of course, editing is still ahead of me. I've read through it, in its incomplete form, twice. The first time was when I was around 50,000 words in, and struggling with the sagging middle. I was unsure of the timeline, unsure about several subplots, unsure about which character had done which thing. So I read it carefully and made an outline and timeline. The second reading was when I was about 70,000 words in. I wanted to make sure those things added after the first reading made sense, and had plugged the holes I'd found. After completing the text I went through the mark-up from the second reading and typed those edits. I finished that last Sunday.

Now, Headshots is sitting for a week or two, while I'm taking a break from it. While all my writing time went to the novel, various other publishing tasks went by the wayside. Now is the time to pick them up and complete them. For the last three evenings I've been working on the print edition of The Gutter Chronicles, my workplace humor novella. Hmm, it's about 43,000 words. Is it a novel or a novella? Monday night I formatted the interior. That's actually not that hard to do. I do it in words. Since the chapters have titles, I wanted to use the right hand page header as the chapter title, while the left had page header remained the book title, with page numbers at the bottom. Word lets you do this without too much trouble, though making sure blank pages are really blank, without headers and footers, is something to watch for.

Then I created a table of contents with the page numbers supplied by Word. Then I chose the page size (I use 5.5x8.5 for most of my paperbacks), then set the margins. That brought me to a page by page review, making sure the margins looked good, the page breaks looked good, indents were correct, etc. I found one place where I had to change indents. That took all the time I had to spend on Monday evening.

Tuesday I went to work on the cover. I already had an e-book cover. So next was to create a canvas of the right size in G.I.M.P., put the e-book cover in, add a back cover, add a spine, make sure they were all sized correctly and put in the right place. Without going into too much detail, I had much trouble with it on Tuesday night. The front and back covers came together okay, but I couldn't get the text for the spine to work properly. Couldn't rotate it and place it where it needed to be. I had managed to do this when I made the print cover for my Thomas Carlyle book, but that happened almost by accident rather than by design, and I couldn't replicate it. So I went to PowerPoint and created the spine, saved it as a graphic image, and loaded into the G.I.M.P. cover, resized and placed. Easy peasy.

I did that Wednesday, and uploaded the interior and cover to CreateSpace, did all the metadata type stuff, and submitted. Today I learned it meets all CS's technical specifications, and I can order prints. So yea! I've done well learning the technical requirements for a print book.

But what I find is that those publishing type tasks really sap my energy. I come upstairs from The Dungeon and find I have little energy to do anything else. This is different from when I'm writing, or editing. After three hours doing that I'm pumped up, ready to go on to the next task. After three hours of publishing work I'm ready to collapse in a chair and do nothing. I suppose that shows I'm more suited to be a writer than a publisher. Interior formatting I don't mind; that's an exciting challenge. But covers and the whole submittal process is what does me in.

I suppose many endeavors in life are like that. Some are energizing, some sapping. My day job tends to be energizing. In it I do a lot of things I like, and feel energized upon completion. I also have to do some things I don't enjoy so much, and these sap the energy out of me. On the whole there's more that I like than that I don't.

They say if you love your job it's not really work. I love civil engineering in the type of job I have now. I love writing. I do publishing tasks because I don't have money to subcontract them out, so I have to do them myself. Possibly these tasks will become more enjoyable over time, and I'll find them energizing. That's beginning to happen at work, as after teaching training classes I don't feel quite as drained as I used to. I won't say I'm energized, but my response is definitely moving toward the energized end of the spectrum. Will it ever get that way with publishing tasks? I'll have to do it a bunch more times before I'll know.

Scene by Scene

[It's Friday. I should be posting at the blog on my author site, but it's still broken (see yesterday's post). So I'm posting that here. Perhaps some day I'll figure out how to fix the other site and add this to it.]

Yesterday I taught a noon hour class at the office, on construction administration procedures. Nineteen people attended in the room and more by video conference. It was the fourth and last day of an exercise that I call a construction simulation. I created a construction admin situation (based, actually, on a real world problem that came up some years ago), had people register to participate, then bombarded them with e-mails and letters from a contractor, that contractor's consultant, their developer client, and even for one the contractor's attorney. For three days I was fully engaged in sending and responding to the exercise e-mails sent me by the participants. The class went well, but I was exhausted physically and mentally afterwards.

So at home last night, I heated leftover soup for the wife and me to eat, then we walked our 1.3 mile course, then I sat down at the laptop (because my desktop is still not out of the shop yet; hopefully today) and began typing on Headshots. I had my choice of going back in the manuscript and typing the edits I marked on the last read-through, or working on new material. I chose to do new material, starting a new scene in a new chapter, but in sequence from where I left off last time. I started the evening with the manuscript standing at 72,078 words.

Unfortunately I really labored with the scene. It's set in Sublette, Kansas, and at a farm in Haskell County Kansas, where the hero has just come back home to after another successful baseball season. This is the end game in the novel. Bad things will soon be happening. It's time for the young Mr. Thompson to step up and protect all that is dear to him. Does he have it in him? We'll see, but first I need to get the right mix of bad guys and good guys in position for the climax scene, or maybe scenes—let's call it the climax event. How to get them all there?

I had given this some thought, but not a lot. As I sat at the computer and paused for a moment an idea came to me on how to get one of the bad guys to Sublette. I started typing. Fifty words later I paused again. The idea had run its course. I "shelled out," to use an old computer term, to a mindless computer game for a while. I came back to the scene and wrote another hundred words, then shelled out again. Back and forth I went. I think on one cycle I managed to type 200 words before my brain said "Enough" and I had to quit writing.

What was the problem? The TV was on for a while, on a news channel. But I soon turned that off so I had no distractions. The scene wasn't particularly difficult to write. It was from omniscient point of view, whereas most of the book is third-person limited point of view. It was a healthy mix of narrative and dialog, with no new characters.

I concluded that the problem was mental exhaustion. Too much mental activity over the last few days. Better to finish this one scene as best I could and leave it alone. Edit it later. I did so, finishing in about 50 minutes total, and just over 700 words. After the wife and I started our nightly reading aloud, currently in The Sign of the Four, which is the second Sherlock Holmes novel by A. Conan Doyle. I started off reading it and could barely stay awake.

An hour later we had muddled through one long-ish chapter, punctuated by a couple of breaks to stand up, move around, and get some juices flowing. By 11:00 p.m. I was in bed, earlier than normal. Clearly I was tired.

So, I'm in the end game of Headshots. I have maybe 10,000 more words to write, I think. At 700 words a day that will take about two weeks to finish. Hopefully I can do better than that, especially over this three day weekend. I'd love to be able to post next Tuesday: "First draft is complete!"

Living in a Harry Potter World

A Facebook friend, a woman who I know only through the Internet, from the old Poem Kingdom poetry boards, wrote this on her timeline.

Do not let Muggles (or those who do not understand Time Lords) influence you or sway you from your belief in magic. . .do not let Muggles lead you to forget. . .that you are not a Muggle. . .use those sonic screwdrivers and wands. . .

To which I replied:

Salvio hexia. Repellum Muggles.

It's only in the last six or seven months that I learned what she's talking about. For those of you who've read the Harry Potter books, or even just part of them, you know that Muggle is the name for a non-magical person. There are witches and wizards, and Muggles. My friend is using it in a slightly different way, of course. She's using the term to refer to those who don't believe in magic, in witches and witchcraft, wizards and wizardry. Judging by her FB posts, she's into astrology and a number of similar things.

My reply comes from the last of the books, The Deathly Hallows. The three protagonists are on the run from those who have perverted magic for evil purposes. At each new place they must conjure protective charms around their camp. Those are two of their protective enchantments. I'm not quite sure what they mean (well, the second one is kind of obvious), but it's to ward off the forces of evil magic.

Then, just the other day, also on FB, on a writers group, someone made a reply to a thread, "Well said! Five points for Gryffindor!" Again, Harry Potter readers will recognize the word and the context.

All of which leads me to think about what an amazing thing J.K. Rowling has accomplished with these books. She has created a world, making it a fantasy, yet it is within our own world and parallel to it. The worlds intertwine; they struggle against one another. Those who live in one world know little about the other, unless they go out of their way to study it. Harry Potter, the protagonist, knew only the Muggle world before he learned, on the day he turned 11, that he was a wizard, and into that world he plunged. It seems, some of our world has plunged right along with him.

Is there any parallel to this in literature? I realize that we are still only ten to twenty years removed from the publishing of these books. Time hasn't run its course as far as the popularity of these books. Will people still be talking about Muggles, wands, Hogwarts, and horcruxes forty years from now? The closest thing I can think of in my lifetime is the Star Wars movies (May the force be with you), which has entered our culture in a fairly big way. Tolkien's Middle Earth didn't have this effect. And nothing seems to have carried through from prior generations. I don't recall my parents, both of whom were readers, having dwelled on literary worlds.

So Rowling has set the bar very high for all future writers: to make your work become so ubiquitous that it seeps into the culture at large. There will never be another Harry Potter. But there might be another Star Wars. Or a world so completely captivating as the one in the Dune series (although those books don't seem to have enduring qualities such as the Potter books).

Me? I don't have that high of expectations. Well, perhaps in my very wild dreams, which even I won't acknowledge. I'd settle for a few sales.

Once Again, an Idea Lost

"That would make a great blog post."

That's what I said to myself at some point yesterday. Knowing that today was my day to blog here, I was looking about for an idea of what to write about. Something came to me that I knew was a good idea for a post, and I spent a little time trying to lock it into my mind. I don't remember where I was, but I guess I was at a place where I couldn't write it down.

Then, last night at home, while I was fighting through a low blood sugar episode, and the usual stuff an evening brings, I realized the idea was gone. I tried to remember what it was, but nothing. I tried to remember where I was when the idea came to me, but nothing.

This is the second time I've written about this, the other time not so long ago. And to think that, just a little before that, I had been thinking that I was doing a good job of capturing ideas. I really do need to get some kind of notebook that I keep with me, to jot down important items that I want to act on at some point in the future, especially writing ideas.

So what do I write about today? I thought of the weather. I heard the wind in the night, which I thought would be a good first line of a haiku. Today it was cloudy and sprinkling as I left for work. I could write about my health, and the fact that my weight is down to the lowest it's been since 1992. Just another pound or two and I'll be passing through another weight loss milestone. With my blood sugar readings being mostly good, and the doctor putting me on a six-month appointment schedule instead of quarterly, there's much to tell about health. But how boring that would be for you all.

I could talk about writing. But that's what my other blog is for. I finished some song lyrics yesterday. I should say that I don't really write song lyrics. What I do is improve lyrics in songs that I think can be improved; I add verses to songs that need another verse; and I take rock and roll songs and write Christian lyrics for them, typically following the same theme of the original song. Some time ago (meaning perhaps a year or so), I began working on Christian lyrics for Chuck Berry's "My Ding-A-Ling". When I say "working" I mean when I'm walking, especially my noon walks on weekdays. I sing or hum, which is why I walk alone, I suppose.

Yesterday, after singing the usual songs on the first lap, I wanted to "write" on the second lap. That song came to mind, so I started working on it. By the end of the second lap I had recalled what I'd done with it before, and finished the five verses I wanted. All in my head, of course. I would have to write them out when I got to my desk after walking. At that time I first went to the break room and drank a glass of water to re-hydrate, then went back to my desk and...forgot that I had something to write down. Can you believe it? Two minutes and 50 feet to and from the break room, and I forgot what I had to do. Kind of like an idea for a blog post.

By mid-afternoon I remembered that I had forgotten to write the lyrics down, so I took a break and re-created them. As best I could. I'm sure they aren't the same as the brilliant ones I had when I was walking, but they aren't bad. Now that I have them on paper I can continue to refine them into perfect lyrics.

But, how interesting will it be to bore you all with the story of how I came up with some song lyrics? So, I apologize, everyone who reads this blog. I guess I don't have a post for today.

Unfathomable Energy

One summer evening in 1991, we were out walking as a family, on the London Road/Chelsea Road loop where we lived in Bella Vista. Down the hill, cross the ravine that drains a major area into Lake Windsor, then up a steep hill. From that point on it's fairly level, minor up and down hills until you get back on that part of London that led to our rental house. When we got to the flat-ish part, Sara and I decided to run, and did so up to Chelsea. Or maybe we did a little way on Chelsea also. I believe it was almost dark or may have already been dark by then. Two things she said at the end of the run that I still remember. "Wow, you have very quiet footsteps when you run," and "I can't believe how much energy I have."

Remembering that very clearly, even almost twenty-three years later, that got me thinking energy. Last week I came through a period where I had very little energy, and I didn't understand it. My routines were normal. To bed about as normal and up about as normal. All body functions functioning as they should. I little more pain in my right knee than usual, but not by any means excessive. My weight was down a couple of pounds in a week. Yet, at work and at home, I felt that I couldn't do another thing. This actually started around March 23, Sunday. I had gone for my 3.1 mile walk on Saturday, pushing it hard. That was after the usual morning chores. Sunday, however, I felt the lack of energy and didn't do the walk. I worked on writing tasks, but didn't get a whole lot done, if I remember correctly.

This continued in the next week, and even last weekend. I forced myself to be productive at work, and went for noon hour walks (typically 1 mile) most days.  I skipped my walk on Saturday, though on Sunday I again forced myself to do the 3.1 miles, not as hard as the previous Saturday. During the week I mainly worked on publishing activities rather than writing. I was formatting my latest book for e-book and then print book. On Saturday I did the final few tasks and actually uploaded it. I first didn't realize I failed to click the "Publish" box, and four hours later checked to see why it hadn't moved to the next phase. I did that, and almost immediately the Amazon review came back with an error needing correcting. I fixed that, and waited. By the time I arose Sunday morning, the book had published. And Sunday afternoon I found enough energy to go for that walk.

This got me thinking about energy: how we get it in our system and sense that we have it. What takes energy from us, what feeds it to us? We all know a huge meal saps energy as the digestive system parts talk back and forth. The over-full stomach alerts the small intestine that a slug of stuff to digest is coming, etc. But lack of food will also sap energy. Why should a 12 year old girl and a 39 year old man gain energy by expending energy (for I, too, remember that I had a lot of energy that evening, same as Sara) but a 62 year old man loses energy by doing very little? It's a mystery.

Maybe those publishing tasks were looming before me, and dislike of having to do them was what was driving the energy out of them. Then, once completed, I began to get my energy back. And it's not that I don't like the publishing tasks. I actually like formatting books, looking into the minutia of what makes a book look good, learning new tricks of the trade, getting it done. But it's not as much fun as the writing and editing. Now, I have the print book ready to go with the exception of the cover. I did the e-book cover, and will incorporate that into the print book cover. So far I've begged my print covers done, and did some hiring of it done. But I'm determined to learn how to do it. I'll never be artistic, and my covers may never be the best, but I will learn the mechanics of putting them together. Facing this, however, is continuing to pull energy from me. The last two nights I could have been working on it, and yet, I did other things, not even necessary things.

On Saturday I will participate in my first 5k event. I plan to walk it, although I reserve to job some at the end if I feel good. How much energy will I have? On Monday I went by the track and walked a mile at what I felt was a competition pace. I completed it in 15:22, and did another quarter mile at the same pace. That's faster than the 50 minute goal I have for this first 5k. Will I have enough energy to complete it? Maybe, if I find a way to do things that increase my energy over the next couple of days. If I work on that print book cover, I'm not sure what that will do to me.

And no, I'm not going to drink one of those hyper-energy drinks. I see no reason for monkeying with the artificial stimulant cocktail that they are, not give that I take a handful of medications. I need to figure this out by natural means. I'll have to see how I feel after the 5k. If I break 50 minutes, or even as low as 48 minutes, and still have plenty of energy for the tasks that I face over the next days, maybe I'll know something more about personal energy.

Lost an Idea

Occasionally I've mentioned on this blog, and on my other blog, that ideas for writing topics/books run through my head all the time. I'll be driving to work, and the sky will inspire a haiku. I'll be driving home in the evening and something that happened during the day will come to mind, and I'll realize I could make an article out of that, or a short story, or at least a chapter in The Gutter Chronicles. Or any of these types of ideas could come to me while on my noon or evening walks.

I don't own a mobile recording device. My cell phone is definitely not smart. So what I have to do, to capture those ideas for later development, is write them down as soon as I'm at a place to do so. When I'm driving, I don't pull a scrap of paper from my folder and scribble, as that wouldn't be safe, so I have to wait until I reach my destination. If I'm walking, and I suppose when I'm driving too, I'll try to repeat the idea over and over until I hopefully remember it by the time I reach pen and paper.

So I get there, I grab some piece of paper, and write the idea. Hopefully the paper I select isn't a random scrap, but a proper sheet that will go in a proper file and then be retrievable. Hopefully I'll actually take the paper and put it in a file somewhere. Hopefully some day I go back to that file, see the sheet, recognize what is on it, and remember what the idea was conveyed in however many words I used to record the idea for future action.

Alas, it doesn't always work that way. By the time I reach home, office, or other destination I forget that I had something to write down. Or I write down a few words in haste on an envelope that later goes in the recycling bag without a second look. Or the paper sits on a table somewhere, unfiled. Or I find the paper at some point and the words on the page seem like nonsense, and I don't recall why I wrote what I did. Or I typed the idea on the computer, and it's somewhere in some folder on some drive on some computer, never to be brought to mind again. Or maybe, just maybe, it is in a notebook or hanging file, but I never go to look for it again.

I struggle with this blog, and finding things to write. I considered giving it up, but just can't. The problem is a mix of finding time to write and ideas to write about. My other blog, about my writing life and writings, is a little easier. I finally decided that I'll write on this blog twice a week, and twice a week on the other. My schedule is this.

Sunday: this blog, a topic about Christianity
Tuesday: other blog, writing related
Thursday: this blog, a general topic
Friday: other blog, writing related

So far I haven't quite reached that ideal. Yesterday was my day for writing this post, but I didn't make it. I spent my evening reconciling my budget spreadsheet with my health savings account expenses for the last two years, something I didn't realize I'd been missing. When that was done (it only took a half hour), I spent an hour building the table of contents for my soon to be published non-fiction, public domain republishing book, as well as cleaning up the file to eliminate e-book unfriendly items. That's almost done, I'm happy to report. A little time tonight, maybe not more than 30 minutes, and it will be publishing ready. At noon I should have worked on the blog, but we had a training class then that I attended. Yesterday morning before work I should have worked on it, but I paid a bill and did some reading and research. The time left me, and I never wrote the post.

But one reason I didn't write it was because I had lost my idea. Sometime, about a week ago, I wrote out what I'd be writing my blog posts on for the next two weeks, barring new ideas that would pop up. It was a good list, and it including something I would write for yesterday's post. Alas, I can't find the paper. Did I stick it in the folder I carry back and forth from home to work? I can't find it in there. Did I write it on a pad at work, or at home? Was it a pad, or was it a sheet peeled off a pad? Was it on an 8.5x11 sheet, folded over? That's what I think, but I could be wrong.

Wherever I wrote it, it's gone. Oh, someday it will turn up. Maybe the idea I wrote will be useful for a future blog post. But today you get this: Idea Lost. Miscellaneous ramblings about how I had nothing to post on schedule yesterday, so I'm posting nothing a day late today. By next Thursday I'll undoubtedly find the paper, or another idea will have sprung up. In the meantime, the workday beckons. I'll had to do my other blog on the noon hour. Oh, wait, we have an employee appreciation cookout then.

Figuring Out Dropbox

Lately I’ve been experimenting with Drobox. I’ve used this Internet-based tool before, but sparingly. The graphics designer who did the covers for Doctor Luke’s Assistant and the print cover for Documenting America saved them to Dropbox, because of their size. I recovered them from there, did whatever I had to do with them, but didn’t explore Dropbox much. When I needed those covers either completed or tweaked, the next designers I gave them to got the files via Dropbox.

So as I understand it, Dropbox is a service wherein you can store files on someone’s server, somewhere in the world, and access the files at any time from any computer. It also becomes a place to store files you want backed up. A poor man’s backup, if you will. The service is free, up to some number of mb or gb. For a fee I’m sure you can get a whole lot more storage space.

I’m concerned about this thing, this cloud thing, if that’s the right word for it. If I store my files at Dropbox, where are they? They are on a hard drive, only God knows where, with my name on a small piece of it. So long at the Internet is available, I can access them. If the Internet is not available, they are as good as lost, whereas if they are on a hard drive at your location, you can access them so long as you have electricity and a working computer. But, lack of Internet is temporary. They say that in the future the Internet will be so much more ubiquitous than it is even now that lack of Internet will be almost unheard of. Maybe 10 to 15 years down the road.

But I like things to be where I’m at. Paper books and files are nice. A hand-held e-reader is nice. I’m concerned when things are out of my sight. However, I have a current need regarding my writing, and decided to see how Dropbox might help me.

My current work-in-progress is a non-fiction, public domain book titled Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles. For the first time all twenty-one articles will be gathered into one volume. Plus I have a short introduction and some footnotes added. I’m at the point where I’m doing some incredibly picky stuff to the text, to get it closer to perfect, and will soon shift to formatting for print book and e-book. I’m working on it at the office and at home. My normal procedure is to save it to whatever computer I’m working at, with the day’s date attached to the file name, and e-mail it to myself. Then I can access it via e-mail at the other computer. Except sometimes I forget to do the e-mail. I get to the other computer and realize I don’t have the latest tweaks to build on, and I lose whatever time I was going to spend on it.

That would be eliminated if I would just save it to Dropbox, in addition to the computer I’m working on. Then, so long as I have the Internet, I should be able to access it from anywhere. Right? That’s the theory. And so far it worked. Yesterday I worked on it a little at work, saved it to my office computer, saved it to Dropbox (for the first time), and then worked on it at home in the evening. I repeated the saving process. Today I did some additions to the Introduction and proofreading that resulted in a few changes. I saved it to my computer here, changing yesterday’s date to today’s, then saved it to Dropbox with that new file name. I don’t know if circumstances will allow me to work on it at home tonight. But if they do, I will have the latest file there to pull-up and work on. If I remember to save it to Dropbox, tomorrow I’ll have the latest file here at work.

I don’t know. Maybe I’ll come to like this. It should maximize my writing time, but most importantly eliminate downtime. And that’s a good thing. And it will assure that the most recent copy is always backed-up to the Internet. And that’s another good thing. I’ll keep using it for a while, see how I like it. So far, so good.

Calm on a Windy Day

Yesterday I went to church alone, as Lynda had a bad night. We received a call in the night from the police saying that paramedics were en-route to her mom's apartment, having been called by Lynda's brother, who happens to be staying here right now. All is well; it was a low blood sugar attack, and she recovered quickly. I was able to get back to sleep, but Lynda wasn't.

But I prate. As I say I was alone at church. When I left the car at the church parking lot I was amazed at the strong wind. When I know there's not going to be any severe weather I tend not to pay a lot of attention. I listen for the predicted high and low, and the chance of precip, but not a whole lot else. Consequently I wasn't aware we were going to be in a windstorm.

There I go, prating again. When I left church almost three hours later the winds were even stronger. Now it seemed like a normal day on the Kansas prairie. Yes, when we go back to Lynda's hometown, out near Dodge City on the Kansas High Plains, the wind is constant. So different than in Arkansas, at least northwest Arkansas where I live and work. Most of the time we are calm, or at most have light breezes. That's especially true in Bella Vista. We are a community built on hills and valleys, about you would expect in the foothills of the Ozarks region. Bentonville, where I work, about fifteen miles from the house, is in contrast on an "upland" plateau, and can have a little more wind. Still, it's not much more. Most of the time when I walk around the commercial subdivision on noon hours I don't have wind to fight.

I'm prating again. Can't stick to the subject today. So yesterday, Sunday, we had this unusual sunny day wind storm. Yes, by the time I arrived home after church it was a full out windstorm. Maybe 30 mph sustained winds with gusts to forty or more. Lynda was sleeping when I got home, or at least in bed and quiet, so I stayed quiet. Took my tie off, fixed a sandwich, added some Cheetos to the plate, and headed to The Dungeon. My plans were to eat slowly over a half hour or so, and begin writing early. I would listen for Lynda and go upstairs and see her when she got up.

Outside the Dungeon windows, looking into our backyard, the wind blew and blew. A.A. Milne would call it a blustery day, and would have to have Pooh help Piglet from blowing away. My friends in Rhode Island would call it a wicked wind, and expect it to be along the shore. I tried to think of a good adjective to use for the wind that was causing branches to dance outside my window. A howling wind? Perhaps, though I think of that more at night. A fierce wind? It was that, though without the precipitation and with the cloudless sky fierce didn't seem right.

Alas, I had nothing to do but write. The day before, Saturday, I had spent mostly on personal paperwork followed by paperwork for our home business, stock trading. I left myself with around two hours for writing. Still, even though I wasn't sure about what my scenes were to be, I dug in. Re-reading what's I'd written last weekend, my memory came back and realized I had to complete a scene I left hanging. A Chicago Cubs' player had been mugged outside a restaurant in downtown Chicago. The reporter, John Lind, didn't think it was a random mugging and was to confront the player in the hospital to find out what was going on. Lind was already suspicious about this player. I wrote that scene, which gave me an idea for another in the same chapter. When my time was up I had about 1,300 words added.

That's not a bad production for that amount of time. I had set a goal of 3,000 words on Saturday and 3,000 on Sunday, knowing I almost never achieve that kind of production. Also knowing I was to be working on the sagging middle, and not having any clue what was coming next. By sagging middle I mean that part of the novel between the first and second plot points. It's supposed to be rising action, where the hero is going through trials and growing as a result, but with the big trial coming at the second plot point. This is one of the hardest parts to write. How do you keep the action going without topping what's to come? How do you keep the reader's interest. How do you pace it so that you have scenes and sequels, action and reaction?

That was Saturday. Now, on Sunday, I really didn't have a clue of what would come next. I had just had a chapter where everyone was talking; not much was happening in terms of bodies moving, people physically interacting. What do I write next? This has happened to me before. In this book, where I have about eight different points of view with four or five main plot lines, I knew I needed to see what plot line I'd dropped and get back to it with a point of view I hadn't used for a while. To do that I had to read. So, with sandwich in hand, chips at the ready, the wind howling outside, but feeling amazingly calm within, I began reading the last few chapters and reviewing notes I'd taken.

I quickly saw it was time to have a scene in Sarah's point of view, and that whatever was going to happen with Ronny's and Sarah's reconciliation it was time to bring it up. Or to complete it. I'd alluded to it a couple of chapters back. So those two matched, though I needed to make it happen with some conflict. I figured out what I needed to do, and began to write. I heard Lynda moving around upstairs, but waited until I finished the scene to go up and see her and get some coffee, the sandwich and chips long gone.

Coming back to the computer, I noticed the wind still howling, still moving tree branches—big tree branches. Still looking for action, I realized I hadn't yet wrote about a retaliatory murder by one Mafia organization against the other. Or rather, on Saturday I alluded to this murder and introduced the character who would do it. So now I had the murder take place, off camera, and added a scene in the next chapter where the suspect was cornered by S.W.A.T. teams and the FBI. I wrote that, and completed a scene about Ronny and Sarah. I then started a scene from Ronny's point of view where he is going to make an important decision.

I looked out at the wind, and realized the sun had set and it was getting dark. Close to 6:00 p.m. now. Time to close up shop for the day. If Lynda had been gone I'd probably have written another hour and done the scene with Ronny. But as it was I had another 2,500 words written, with a weekend total of just over 3,800. I was happy.

So what does the wind have to do with all of this? Absolutely nothing, except that it was so strong I decided not to go for an afternoon walk, giving me full time to work on the book. It was blustery outside, but calm inside. I'm satisfied with all that I accomplished. On the book, with my paperwork, and being able to be in corporate worship with fellow believers I know and love.

Productivity—Not

The best laid plans of mice and men sometimes go astray.

Mine did over the snowy weekend. I left work on Thursday, the 5th, knowing that the storm that had already started was going to be major and that I would have a couple, or maybe a few, days at home of being shut in. What better things to do but write?

Alas, what I feared was also happening, which I didn't mention in my last post, came true. On Wednesday I felt the early stages of a cold coming on, but I ignored them. I get two colds a year, and I'd already had three in 2013 (including the flu back in January). So although the symptoms were there, I convinced myself it wasn't a cold.

But as the day progressed Thursday, the symptoms increased. By Thursday night I knew it was a cold, not as deep as some I've had, but still deep enough. Friday I did very little. The snow ended at noon, at 7 inches, just as was predicted. I got out and shoveled some of the driveway. Then I took a walk up to the highway, .65 miles away, to see conditions. The exertion may have been stupid, but I always think fresh air helps me to heal, so I did it. In the evening I was able to write a little on Headshots.

Saturday I was well somewhat improved, I thought. I shoveled some more of the drive, and again walked to the highway. Roads were awful, worse after a day of light traffic than they had been before. In the afternoon I was able to knuckle down and work some on my book. For the weekend I added about 2,400 words. That was below my goal, but given my physical status I wasn't unhappy with that. Our Christmas party that night was cancelled—not that we would have or could have gone.

Sunday we didn't try to go to church. I again shoveled on the driveway, finishing one lane up to the street. Then I walked down to the nearest convenience store, about 8/10th of a mile, picking up some things and finding somethings unavailable. I crossed the highway and the competitor didn't have those items either. I could see that roads were still really, really bad, and the decision to stay home was the right one. I called to the house and suggested Lynda walk out to join me on the return leg. She did so, but then decided to go on while I wen home. As she saw the condition of the roads she could see that my decision to not try to go to church was the right one.

By Sunday night the cold had moved into the coughing phase, and I coughed continuously. I knew I shouldn't be at work Monday. The combination of the cold and road conditions caused me to decide not to attempt going to work on Monday. I mostly rested on Monday, taking only a brief walk on the nearby streets to assess if I could get out on Tuesday. I concluded I could. Also my coughing was considerably better by the end of the day, so I knew I'd be going in on Tuesday. Got lots of rest on Monday, Sunday as well.

But I didn't do any new writing either of those days. As I was writing on Saturday I realized my writing has been so sporadic that I didn't remember what scenes I had. So I decided to print an read the whole book where it currently stands, doing light edits as I read, looking for overlap and gaps. I completed that by Monday evening: found a couple of gaps, and one area where there's a little overlap. Not as bad as I feared, but still some edits will be needed to fix it.

Tonight I typed all the edits to date, and closed one gap. I contemplated filling the other gap, but decided against it. That will be work for tomorrow night. Thursday is a Christmas party, so adding to the end of the book will have to wait until the weekend, hopefully Friday night. At last I feel like I'm getting warmed up. The word count stands at 19,108, which puts me well into the middle of the book. I have the next three chapters reasonably well planned out, so they should go quickly. With any luck I'll be over 25,000 words by this time next week.