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.