I was out of town from Sept 27 through Oct 3, attending one day of the WEFTEC 12 conference in New Orleans, where I chaired a panel discussion on erosion and sediment control regulations. Lynda and I drove, and we wrapped a couple of vacation days on either side of the conference day. This was first time to N.O. for both of us. Except for rain every day but the last, and our first hotel reservations were not valid. Except for that, everything was fine. We enjoyed the trip.

I had great plans to read and work on writing in off hours. Due to the rain we had a lot of off hours, but I didn’t do much either. I had with me two books (three including my Bible): one a book of letters from a French immigrant farmer to America in the 1700s; the other The Nature of the Book, which looks at how printed books had an impact on science through the 1600s and 1700s. I read one page in the letters book and laid it aside, deciding this would be for another time. I had started the Book book a couple of months ago, but found it so densely written that I knew I would need maximum powers of concentration to get through it. I managed to read about thirty pages of it during the trip, and feel good about that.

As for writing, I had in mind to work on drafts of my next articles for Decoded Science, but found that required more concentration than a road trip would allow. I also had with me a print out of The Gutter Chronicles. I had previously edited the first five chapters, and thought I could do several more. I didn’t even pull it out until the last night, when we stopped for the night to break up  the drive home.

I managed to get through the next five chapters that evening. These were all written several years ago. I hope I’ve grown as a writer during that time, and that’s the reason I found a number of areas for improvement. One item I added to the book in recent time is Norman Gutter describing the origin of the name Gutter. He says something different every time someone asks him “So what kind of a name is Gutter?” The name stories come from some fun we had with the name Norman D Gutter eight or nine years ago at the now defunct Poem Kingdom. I saved those names stories out to a MS Word file, and they are proving useful now.

Today, during my noon hour, I’ll type those edits. This weekend I’ll read and edit the last five chapters. Actually, I think I’ll print the first ten chapters again, and maybe I’ll read them and see if I have any more edits to do.

I hope to have all edits typed next Monday, and publish it by next Thursday. For the cover I’m just going to take a photograph of some scene in my office. Maybe it will be a close-up of my computer screen with the title page for TGC on it, some of the adjacent areas showing around it. That may not be the world’s greatest cover, but it’s what I’m going to do.

I don’t have any great hopes for TGC. It’s sort of a throwaway. I wrote most of it years ago, intending it only for the enjoyment of the people in our firm. However, it’s easy to bundle it into a fifteen chapter novela and publish it, so why not? If I keep writing these, as some people in the firm want me to, maybe some day I’ll have Volume 2, another fifteen chapters, and even later Volume 3. From 38 years in the business, I’ve got a lot of stories to record.

In Volume 2, if I really do write it, Norman will meet his love interest (I finally decided on her name today) and will have his run-in with lawyers. I’m actually kind of anxious to get started on it.