Yes, yesterday I finished The Gutter Chronicles, my novella throwing fun at my own profession, civil engineering, and the land development industry in general. Maybe I should say I finished Volume 1 of TGC. I hope to keep writing these, as the spirit moves me, and as situations come up in the workplace that demand being incorporated into TGC.

So now it’s on to the editing. I wrote the first ten chapters of this back in 2006, I think. It may have been a couple of years earlier, maybe even as early as 2002. My intent was to simply add a little humor to our office environment. I gave them to two or three people, who widely distributed them in the office. Feedback to the first couple of chapters was positive, so I kept going. Along the way I added some poems written by the protagonist, Norman D. Gutter.

By sometime around 2004 to 2006, I had nine chapters written. At that point I took a break. About a year later I wrote chapter 10 and started chapter 11. It was earlier this year that I finished chapter 11. At the same time I began distributing them to some people in the office, as a whole new crop of CEI employees should know about what’s going on at I.C.E. engineering and how the young Norman Gutter gets along during his first year with the firm.

Ideas began to come to me for more chapters: a love interest for Norman, dealing with a construction contractor, being dragged into a frivolous lawsuit, office relocations, rapid expansion followed by corporate downsizing. I could see many more chapters in my mind. In the last month and a half I completed four more, bringing me to fifteen.

I decided that was a good number for a novella. The fifteen I have in hand comprise about 32,000 words, which is novella length. That’s too short for a print book, but a good size for an e-book. So I decided to do that: make it an e-book and go ahead and publish it on Amazon and Smashwords. It may be of no interest to anyone except CEI employees, or it have a slightly wider interest in the civil engineering and land development communities.

One problem I’ll have with the editing is the time gap in the writing. For all I know some of the things I’ve put in this chapter are in earlier chapters. That’s my main challenge right now: to make sure it flows properly and reads as a consistent manuscript from beginning to end.

I’m not starting out by calling this volume 1, though maybe I should. I’m pretty sure there will be at least one more volume, and I probably have enough material to get three or four volumes without trying to hard. I’ll keep the option open to add “Volume 1” before publishing.

This will be interesting.