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.

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.

As I wrote at my other blog, I’ve been marking time in my writing. I’m waiting on tweaks on one cover and making a decision on another. I’m not sure where to go next with book-length works, and even have been uncertain about writing more articles for Decoded Science. So I’ve been marking time.

Monday was the meeting of our BNC Writers. As usual it was just Bessie and me. I shared another chapter in The Gutter Chronicles, and we went over her proposal and two chapters of her missions book. She had the words pretty much down. Now it’s just down to formatting before she could send it to a beta reader. We agreed to meet at the library Wednesday evening after I got off work and before we needed to be at church and do what we could on formatting. We did; I taught her some of the fine points of Word; between us we completed the formatting; and she sent it on to the beta reader.

All of this gave me a case of Sidelines Syndrome. I wanted to be writing. Yet I didn’t know what I should be writing. I went home after church Wednesday determined to work on writing. In my folder was chapter 12 of The Gutter Chronicles. That felt good, going through those five pages, reviewing it as author, content editor, line editor, and proofreader, all in two reads. In less than an hour I was done.

On Thursday I typed the changes. Today, Friday, I sent it out to four beta readers in the office. Feedback from one suggests it’s a hit. So on my noon hour I began work on Chapter 13. Chapter 15, the end of the novella, is already written and edited, so only chapters 13 and 14 remain before the book is done. I anticipate at completion it will be about 30,000 words.

It won’t actually be done then. I have much to do on the early chapters, which were written several years ago. I don’t think I’ve written much about The Gutter Chronicles on this blog, so maybe I’d better now. The full title is The Gutter Chronicles: The Continuing Saga of Norman D Gutter, Engineer. It is a spoof on the civil engineering business. It places a newly engineer, Norman D. Gutter, in his first professional job. He is in a company, I.C.E. Engineering, that is busy, profitable, and quite dysfunctional. His first supervisor is a flake, appropriately named Ned O. Justice. The H.R. lady is Minnie Mize, efficient but aloof. The IT Manager is Data, the man at the next desk is Peter Pan…you get the picture.

Norman begins his professional career hounded the executive administrative assistant, the flirtatious Malinda Mays, who is always coming on to him. In accounting he can never seem to meet J.J. Weast. Working projects in the City of Appleville causes him to interact with the city engineer, Chowdahead. Whenever Norman has to deal with a contractor it’s Klaus E. Nuff Construction; when he deals with a surveyor it’s Proximate Survey, whose project manager is Rod Holder. Nuff’s attorney is Ira Cheatum of the law firm Dewey, Cheatum & Howe. Oh, wait, I don’t introduce them in the first volume.

Every so often Norman has a dream, wherein he is transported to some point in the past as Togerther The Great. He’ll help Agamemnon win the Trojan War, Hafentafenhottenpot build the Pyramid of Khafre, and in future volumes the Chinese emperor to plan the Great Wall, Herod the Great to build the moles at Caesarea, and others of the past build their monuments to history.

The name Norman D Gutter? I’ll have to explain that in a future post.

Today I wrote 1,000 words on Chapter 13. I’ve thought about this chapter for a long time, and so when I finally began to write it the words flowed quickly. It should be close to the same for chapter 14, the second dream. With any luck I’ll have this first volume of The Gutter Chronicles done in a week, edited over the two following that, and published in mid-October. The editing will be complicated and intricate, since I started writing this about six or seven years ago, got through the first eleven chapters, and let it sit. I need to make sure the early chapters and later chapters are in agreement.

I’m going to do the cover myself: just a photograph of my computer screen at work with the book title and credit, with some of my work station showing on all sides.

I’m back in the game.