All posts by David Todd

miscellaneous

Something in the Air?

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Yesterday, driving home on my evening commute, traffic was awful. Not awful in the sense of heavy, but in the sense of drivers doing extremely stupid things. Cutting people off. Crossing a five lane highway with a car length to spare. Running red lights. Failing to take a turn when it was safe. Driving at excessive speed, even more so than normal. Zooming in and out between cars just to be one car ahead when stopping at the next traffic signal.

I wanted to say, “Suppose they learned to drive in Bentonville Arkansas, and suppose they were idiots. But I repeat myself.”

Now, today, the craziness seems to be in the on-line writing sites I look at. A literary agent has made a post, “I Don’t Need No Stinking Agent,” a push-back against various self-publishing, anti-agent gurus. Then, in the Indie Author Group on Facebook a fight has broken out over negative posts. Yesterday, at the agent blog I read most a guest post was a blatant sales pitch for a writer development service costing $37 or $55 per month. About half the comments were negative. This morning that post had been pulled.

What’s going on? Is there something in the air that is causing normally sane people to do crazy things? Are the stars aligned in Vertigo, or whatever crazy scheme people think controls their destiny?

Today is primary election day in Arkansas. That could be the reason for the Bentonville traffic nitwits but not the on-line stressors. I just know I’ll be driving home very carefully tonight.

Doctor Luke's Assistant

First reviews of “Doctor Luke’s Assistant”

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I may have only one sale of Doctor Luke’s Assistant, but it now has two reviews. These are from people at a Facebook page, Christian Author’s Book Marketing Strategies, to whom I gave advance reader copies. Well, I suppose they didn’t get them in advance of the book being published, but that’s the closest term I can think of.

I hope you’ll follow the link and check out the reviews.

Writing

Finish What I Start

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I visited Terry Whalin’s blog today, and saw this post: Stop the Cycle of Unfinished Projects. And I immediately thought that’s what I need.

I have a lot of unfinished projects in the air, mainly for writing, but also for things around the house, mainly financial type things.

I guess for the next couple of weeks I will concentrate on finishing something.

I don’t have any additional commentary; just posting for information.

Writing

How Well Do Publishers Edit?

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Talk to people who are involved with traditional publishing about the role of editors, and you hear mixed messages. Some say publishers no long provide significant editing services. The author submits a “camera ready” manuscript, and it gets published. Any errors are the fault of the author, not the publisher.

Still others insist that the editing provided by the publisher doesn’t change. They content edit. They line edit. They proofread. The put out good books, just as they always have.

Probably a lot of both is going on. The alleged lack of editing by publishers is something I’ve been concerned with, and is one of the factors that pushed me toward self-publishing. I figured if I had to do all the editing, why seek a publisher?

I recently read a review on Amazon of a traditionally published book that included the following comment.

“…the editing/proofreading was terrible. Inexplicable changes in font size. Missing words. Wrong words. Mispelled words. Clearly a hurry-up, shoddy job of publishing.”

This book briefly hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and is by a multipublished bestselling author. It is the only review out of 163 (or at least out of the 50 of those that I read) that mentions this. I haven’t read the book, but will be soon.

So it seems that, to some extent, those who say publishers no longer edit are correct.

 

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, The Candy Store Generation, Writing

My Upcoming Writing Schedule

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Saturday afternoon I finished reading through In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, marking locations to improve the text. Most of the edits were for typos, improving odd sentence structure, and fixing name problems. By that I mean where I used people’s names too much in dialogue. Also, I found one embarrassing error in a name, where I changed it very early on in the writing but somehow missed one place. The MS Word search and replace feature tells me that was the only straggler.

I finished typing the edits yesterday afternoon. I’ll print it today and set it aside for a couple of weeks. Actually, I’m not sure how long that will be. The editor I e-mailed three chapters and a synopsis to said he was sending the chapters to “readers,” and they would “get back to me in a few weeks.” While I’m reconciled that I will probably self-publish this, I’m willing to delay a little to let that run its course.

Meanwhile, I have to be writing. So yesterday I switched back to my non-fiction work-in-progress, The Candy Store Generation”. I added 400 words to it last night, coming close to finishing Chapter 5, Boomer Corporations. I still have research to do on that, to plug a hole reserved for it about 1/4 of the way into the chapter. But the words are almost done.

I haven’t been thinking of TCSG for over a month, and I’ve actually forgotten where I was in it. I know I’m shooting for 40,000 words, and that I’m at 32,800 now, implying another 7,200 to go. But that word count is a target only. I’m thinking the book may fall short of that and be at a logical concluding point.

I’d really like to get this done and published in time to perhaps ride the coattails of the current election cycle. Not that I think it will be a huge seller or have an impact on the election, but while people’s attention is on politics, it probably has a better chance at success.

Depending on how the research goes, I should be able to have it done in a month or less. I can then take up to a month to edit it, and try to have it published by mid-July. That’s later than I hoped, but it’s doable. I would then try to have FTSP out a couple of weeks later, still well within baseball season.

My plans are then to work on two short stories. One will be in my Danny Tompkins series, on teenage grief. It will probably be the last one. The other will be the first of what could become a series, but which might be a singleton. It will be an espionage story set in Cranston, RI (my hometown), with the heroine having the name of a classmate of mine, with her permission. I’ve written the first two paragraphs of this, and have been plotting it in my mind.

I don’t know where this will lead. If I like the way it turns out, I could turn it into a series, having this female CIA operative go to various places I have been overseas. That would be a way to use these experiences in my writing, something I’ve been wondering how to do.

After that, assuming I’m not brain-dead, I have a choice between three or four projects. I had been thinking about working on another novel, an espionage one, tentatively titled China Tour. I also see a possibility of working on more volumes in the Documenting America brand. I started a little research on what could be a Civil War edition of that. Given that we are at the sesquicentennial of that conflict, the timing is good.

However, I may just go ahead and write a sequel to FTSP. My friend Gary, who was a beta reader, said, “The ending says a lot but leaves much unsaid as well.  That’s a perfect setup for a sequel.” As I wrote in the past, I hadn’t really thought about that, and didn’t consciously write the end to launch a sequel. But I’ve looked at it, and he’s right. When I wrote out, in manuscript, all the loose ends, I came up with more than enough to make a similar length novel. The penultimate scene near the end has come to mine—indeed, I’ve had trouble getting it out of my mind. Even a potential title has reared up.

So that’s where I may be going. No shortage of work. And to think, back in 2000, I just wanted to tell a single story. Now it’s a snowball running downhill.

miscellaneous

Busy Writing, Just Not Here

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I haven’t posted anything here for a while. I’ve been writing, just not here.

Last week, May 3-4, I attended the Story Weaver’s conference of the Oklahoma Writers Federation, Inc. This was my first time to go to this conference and my first general market conference. I spent several days preparing material. I figured this was my last big hurrah as far as pitching In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People goes.

Since coming back from Oklahoma City on Sunday, after family activities for several days, I’ve been busy with two projects. One is preparing two submittals requested at the conference. I got the second one in just before 10 p.m., so that is over. The second is proofreading and final editing of FTSP. That’s going fairly well. I’ve read 138 pages of the 321 page manuscript. I had hoped to finish this by Friday, but obviously won’t.

I also completed a column for Buildipedia.com, my twelfth. I’m under contract to do another, which is due May 18. I expect them to keep coming at two per month.

I’m also spending a little time on The Candy Store Generation. That’s what I shared at BNC Writers Monday night, and what I hope to get back to in a big way as soon as FTSP is put to bed. Still 8,000 words to go, but some research needed before going too much farther.

Consequently, I haven’t spent much time with my blogs, especially this one. And I don’t expect to for the next week at least. I’ll try to pop in and let you know what’s going on, but realistically I just don’t have the time to spend on it now.

Buildipedia, Suite 101, Writing

Small Payouts Ahead

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My income from writing remains small, but is coming in slowly but surely. Most of it is produced by my Buildipedia articles. I have a twice per month column on construction administration. Here’s a link to my profile, which includes links to articles. I earn $100 for each of these articles. Payment comes about three weeks after the article appears, by check. I have a contract for one more of these, but the contracts have been coming in like clockwork, and my articles going out. My accounts receivable right now is, I think, $200 for two of them.

My Amazon income is slow. For my four titles on Amazon Kindle, along with the print version of Documenting America, I’ve made just over $56. More than half of that has come from personally selling print books. Amazon pays out once you accumulate $10 in royalties, during the second month after you get there. I had done so in December, and in February I had my first Amazon payout, $10.97 by direct transfer to my bank account. If my current calculations are correct, I’ve since accrued $10.44 in Kindle royalties. That means I can expect another transfer in June. A small account receivable.

Over at Suite101.com, despite the hard times they have experienced due to changes in Google’s search algorithms, and despite the fact I haven’t added any articles there since February 2011, I continue to ear some money. Revenues were really low the second half of 2011 and January 2012. They began to pick up some in February, and have remained up. The payout threshold at Suite is only $5.00. Through April 28 I had earned $5.17 in royalties in April (having made payout in February and March. Payment from Suite comes via PayPal, always before the 15th of the month after you hit payout and usually the first Tuesday of the month. Since the first Tuesday of May is the 1st, I don’t expect payment till the 8th.

All of which I’m sure has some readers laughing, that I would bother to track and worry about these minor income streams. I need to for tax purposes, of course. Someday I hope they will be bigger, much bigger in the case of Amazon. Learning to track them now and properly account for them should help in the future, when [dream alert!] I’ll be raking in the dough from several sources.

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Writing

Tedious Editing Almost Complete

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Since about April 18 I have been editing In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. My time goals for this were: 1) to have the manuscript complete so that I can pitch it to an editor at a writers conference in Oklahoma City on Friday, May 4; and 2) to be ready to self-publish it almost immediately thereafter assuming no one would be interested in the book.

The editing has been tedious. I was trying to improve the timeline. After covering a partial season that the hero spends with the Chicago Cubs, the book traces the events in a complete season. The last time I looked at the book, I felt that I had end-loaded the season—that is, too many event were crowded too late in the season. I also had him not connecting with a girlfriend until some time in late June. I decided that was too late, and many other events were too late, and so I’d better move them earlier in the season.

At the same time, I wanted to be sure that the pitching record of Robo Ronny Thompson made sense relative to where the book was in the season. So if I said, “On June 1, Ronny’s record was 13-1,” I wanted to make sure that was a doable record for a great pitcher.

To accomplish these edits, I first created a Cubs’ season schedule. I took their schedule for this year, 2012, and made a slight adjustment in starting date and in days of the week. I wanted the season to end at a certain date, but the 2012 schedule didn’t end then. So I changed the starting date, and deleted one or two off days to make the schedule work. Then, I created first a spreadsheet table that I later dumped into Word, listing dates and games, including home and away status, and identified when Ronny would pitch.

To this schedule I added all the events in the book, first where I had them, then moving them to the earlier dates to spread things out. I compared the Cubs’ games on the critical days, and discovered sometimes they were playing out of town when they needed to be in Chicago, or vice versa. This required me to either adjust the date or adjust the schedule to make them align. After all these changes, I added the dates from the schedule to the beginning of each scene in the manuscript. This is a temporary thing, and will come out before I either publish or submit the manuscript.

As I said, I found this tedious. Sometimes, when the schedule and events didn’t mesh, I felt that my head was ready to explode, so I shelled out and played mindless computer games when I knew I should be sticking to business. Eventually I came back to the work and figured the schedule out. Now I believe, subject to one more careful reading, that the schedule and the events dovetail perfectly. I cut back on the number of wins Ronny gets during the season, based on my friend Gary’s review (thought not as far back as he suggested). I added quite a bit to the motivation of other characters, hoping they are a little more fleshed-out.

Now I’m down to one slow and careful reading. I plan to do that beginning tonight. I suspect I’ll find a few typos that have escaped my previous readings. I’ll probably find some awkward phrasing that I’ll improve. Possibly I’ll find that the timeline doesn’t work quite as good as I’d like. Possibly I’ll need to change the days of games during the playoffs—oops, spoiler alert. If all goes well, by this time next week I’ll have the final edits on paper and begin typing them. I’ll know whether or not to bother any more with trying to shop it to an editor or agent. And I’ll be a week away from self-publishing it, cover permitting.

Fifty Thousand Screaming People

Calico Joe, Move Over

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I mentioned that John Grisham’s newest book, Calico Joe, is a baseball novel. Some people say it’s so short that it borders between being a novel and a novella. I looked at it at Barnes & Noble last Friday, and it appeared a normal length book. Perhaps it had big font, big margins, and thick paper.

Since I was about to shift back to working on my baseball novel, In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, I’m interested in Grisham’s book. I read the first paragraph, but haven’t bought it yet. I read a bunch of reviews on Amazon.com and Goodreads, including the spoilers, so I have a pretty good idea of the plot. What is uncanny is how similar our two books are. Here are some points of similarity.

  • In CJ, Joe Castle is a rookie who breaks into the Big Leagues with the Chicago Cubs, does great things his rookie year, and leads the Cubs on a quest for elusive greatness. In FTSP, Ronny Thompson is a rookie who breaks into the Big Leagues with the Chicago Cubs, does great things his rookie year, and leads the Cubs on a quest for elusive greatness.
  • Joe Castle is from small-town, rural Arkansas. Ronny Thompson is from small-town, rural Kansas.
  • Another CJ baseball character, Warren Tracy, has a non-baseball son with whom he is estranged. Ronny Thompson is estranged from his non-baseball father.
  • CJ is as much about off-the-field action as it is on-the-field. Same is true for FTSP.
  • In CJ the main team against the Chicago Cubs is the New York Mets. In FTSP the main team against the Cubs is the New York Yankees.
  • Reviewers say there’s enough baseball action in CJ to satisfy baseball fans but not so much as to totally turn non-fans off, although that is far from a universal review. In FTSP I’m hoping I’ve struck the right balance of baseball talk with non-baseball talk to keep both groups happy. So far my beta readers seem to agree.

All of which tells me I’ve got to get this novel finished and get it out there, see if I can piggyback on Grisham. More about that in the next post.

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, The Candy Store Generation

Again, the best laid plans…

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…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.