…have gone astray. I have neglected my two blogs. Well, I suppose a Friday to Monday gap is not actually ignoring, but it’s now what I intended. Life got in the way.
Last week I received a subpoena to give a deposition this Wednesday in a lawsuit. I’ve spent most of my working time since in preparation for that, including two hours today with our attorney. We—that is, my employer, CEI Engineering—are not a party to the lawsuit. It stems from a disagreement between a rival engineering company and their client, who also is our client on certain projects and on this particular project after that client fired that engineer. Complicating this is I functioned as city engineer for the project, and everyone who worked on it for us for the developer has moved on. So I have to give testimony for it all.
I’m not worried about it. I’ve given depositions six or eight times and testified in trials at least five times. But it’s an emotionally draining activity. I was exhausted Tuesday and Wednesday, and was able to add little to my work-in-progress despite having an empty, quiet house.
Wednesday evening I learned that John Grisham’s latest book is a baseball novel, titled Calico Joe. My other work-in-progress is my baseball novel, In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. It was on the shelf, waiting on me to finish my non-fiction work-in-progress and get back to it for the last round of edits before making a decision on self-publishing or submitting it to agents/editors. More on that decision another time.
This caused me to immediately speculate if it wasn’t time to get back on FTSP and get it done. Maybe, just maybe, I could piggyback on Grisham. If people like his baseball novel (which they surely will, and buy it in droves), and if they then go looking around for another baseball novel, perhaps I could pick up some sales if I self publish it as quickly as possible. Or, if I decide to submit it to agents or editors, perhaps they will see that this could piggyback on Grisham and thus be more likely to take it on. Either way, I had to get the edits done ASAP.
It occurred to me that the final edits on FTSP would take less mental energy than adding the final 8,000 words to The Candy Store Generation, so on Thursday I made the switch. I spent that day re-reading some of the book and highlighting places I knew needed to be checked.
My main concern now is that the exploits of the protagonist make sense relative to a true baseball season. So I took the Cubs schedule this year and entered it into a spreadsheet. I then went through the portions of the book that take place during that season (about 130 pages) and entered them in the spreadsheet.
As expected, I discovered I had several events happening too late in the season. I had a lot of stuff bunched up in August and September and almost nothing in June and July. Maybe readers wouldn’t notice that, but maybe some would. I want to have it accurate, and reasonable for what can be done with wins and losses at every point in a season.
On Saturday I went through about 60 percent of the pages, finishing the other 40 percent on Sunday. I entered the critical items on the spreadsheet, found them bunched, and on Sunday moved the events to earlier in the season to spread them out. I also marked the manuscript printout with the areas I need to fix, as well as with a number of other changes that I see as improvements.
Now, tonight, I type the changes already marked and begin the process of fixing the places that need fixing. I suspect this will take three or four days. That then gives me a week before the writers conference in Oklahoma City and the opportunity to pitch it to agents and editors before pulling the self-publishing trigger. As I say, I’ll write more about that in another post.
And, someday I’ll get back to the chapter descriptions of FTSP.