That’s what it’s been in my writing life lately, a dry time. I’ve been on my own at home lately, with Lynda in Oklahoma City, helping our daughter while her husband was away. He came back late Saturday night, and Lynda will return home today or tomorrow. While she’s been gone, I’ve not done a lot of writing.

One excuse I had was the computer I normally work at was in the shop, to determine what the blue screen error followed by the black screen re-boot error was all about, and hoping it was salvageable. It has all my writing works on there. I have most of them backed up, but the latest things added to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People and my Harmony of the Gospels I had not backed up. Also, my financial spreadsheets were on that computer. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to lose those, but I’d rather not lose them.

I wanted most to work on In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, as of all the things I pitched at the Write-To-Publish Conference, that seemed to me to have the most potential. I could work on a scene or two somewhere late in the book, but I mostly wanted to add one more chapter consecutive to what I’ve done so far before sending it to agents and editors. Alas, I’m missing a chapter and a half in what I have backed up. I was supposed to get the computer back last Friday, then last Saturday, now today. The delays are not making me hopeful about recovery of my files.

Meanwhile, I have Lynda’s computer available, the one she never uses (instead using the laptop upstairs and avoiding The Dungeon entirely). I’ve used that to check e-mails and Facebook and blogs. On that I sent all my thank yous to the faculty and staff of the WTP conference. On it I did a lot of fine tuning to my writer’s web site. On it I made a number of posts to my Facebook author fan page. So the lack of a computer was not a true hindrance to writing.

So what did I accomplish these last twelve days while I was alone at the house, besides the things mentioned above? Here’s a list.

• Organized my thoughts about how to restructure the John Wesley book into a series of study guides, as suggested by the editor for Wesleyan Publishing House. This included an outline of the series, as well as some work on which of John Wesley’s writings would be in some of the small group study books.
• Researched SmallGroups.com, and downloaded and printed a study to use as a guide for how I might organize mine. I completed review of that one study last night; time to download another one.
• Read a fair amount in John Wesley’s Letters, volume 4. From this I identified some things that are suitable for the Wesley books.
• Completed a private critique of a short story for someone in BNC Writers, and began a second similar critique (almost complete).
• Read a book self-published by a member of BNC Writers.
• Did some research for The Candy Store Generation. Not a lot of research, but I developed a system for the subject I’m researching. It should go somewhat fast from this point on. At least I hope so.
• Did a small amount of research for a future volume of Documenting America.
• Completed a haiku that has been on my mind since February, and submitted it for inclusion in an anthology.
• Registered for SmashWords, which publishes e-books to just about every e-reader platform, and markets to each of them. Downloaded and printed their style guide and have reviewed a little over half of its 87 pages. That sounds like a lot, but I should have been able to finish all of it in this time.

When I list it that way, it doesn’t sound so bad. But I know what I could have accomplished in a quiet house with no one to interact with except myself. I could have completed two or three chapters of FTSP. I could have typed actual outlines of the Wesley project. I could have written a couple of chapters of the next volume of Documenting America.

Well, I have no way of reclaiming the last twelve days, and find no reason to bemoan the progress I didn’t make. Better to be thankful for the progress I did make, and do better the next twelve days. Writers group is tomorrow evening, so at least I have a focus for the next couple of days. And maybe I’ll get the computer back this evening, with its new hard drive cloned from the failing one.

When continuing classes were not in session, electives were being held. These were a series of unconnected, one hour classes, about virtually anything related to writing or the publishing industry. Having attended five conferences before this, I’ve sat in on quite a few electives. This year I did so on three.

The first, Wednesday afternoon, was “Building A Winning Marketing Plan” taught by Carla Williams. Carla is with a self-publishing company, Winepress, that does a quality job with the books it publishes. However, Carla threw me for a loop with her statements about how much we should expect to have to spend to market our book. She said if you have 40 hours a week to put into marketing your book, you should only have to spend $5,000 or so on marketing. It spiraled up from there: the less time you had to spend, the more money you should expect to spend on marketing.

I thought, I should just quit right now. Unless God drops thousands of dollars in my lap, I’m never going to have that type of money to spend. I think I didn’t concentrate as well after that. I was probably in the wrong class. What I needed was “Ten no-cost or low-cost things you can do to market your book,” or something like that.

The next elective I attended, Thursday afternoon, was “Writing Great Discussion Guides.” As I’ve been doing a lot of this over the last two years, I thought this would be a good class to attend. It was taught by Sam O’Neal, an editor with SmallGroups.com, an arm of Christianity Today. Sam gave some excellent tips on how to frame questions, and what type of questions to avoid. He did not, however, include anything on what makes a good small group study. What types of lessons? How long should they be? What about separate class book and leader book? I suppose these will be in a class titled, “Building a small group study from scratch,” of some such title.

Later on Thursday I attended “Meeting the Media,” taught by Mary Byers. She is a magazine editor, and has been in the writing business for a while. This was a worthwhile class, but I felt it was a little off topic per the title. It was more about how to get the media’s attention—that is, how to choose what to write about so that the media will take notice of you. I’m not complaining, for Mary gave us some good information. But I was a bit disappointed.

I did not attend any elective classes on Friday. I had two appointments with agents in the afternoon, my two main appointments, and then I was able to schedule a third, with an editor. I was also wanting to speak with another agent about one of my projects—not that he would represent me for it, but I was advised that he would be able to advise me about submitting it. I could have squeezed in attendance at one or two electives, though I would have had to pop in and out due to my appointments, but I chose to just hang out in Barrows Auditorium and do some journal writing between appointments, as well as discuss things with fellow writers.

So, herein I present my stewardship of my time, as far as electives are concerned. Hopefully I used the hours well, and took something away from them.

The Write-To-Publish Conference schedule included, as have all major Christian writers conferences I’ve been to, a continuing class—that is, a class that is taught over several days. The WTP ones covered all four days of the conference, amounting to five hours of class time.

The one I chose to attend was “Effectively Communicating Christ to non-Christian Audiences”, taught by Rusty Wright. I hadn’t heard of Rusty before, which speaks more about my lack of knowledge than his notoriety. He’s been on the lecture circuit, speaking at conferences, and writing articles for a long time. I just haven’t happened to cross paths with him. A big concern of his is that Christian writers need to branch out from writing only for people who are already Christian to people who are not. It takes a different approach.

The first day he talked about figuring out about who your audience is. What motivates them? How do they want to be entertained? What are their goals, hopes, fears, desires? This really isn’t much different from what we should be doing for any audience, but we don’t often do it. Or, when deciding to write something to reach non-Christians, we don’t adjust our writing style to really reach them.

An example of an adjustment we have to make to change our vocabulary. When writing for a Christian audience we use what he calls “Christianese”, the vocabulary of the church. Just how much we use this can be hidden from us. When writing pieces in which we want to reach those who want nothing to do with the church or their Jesus, we need to carefully consider every word used, and strip away all language that will even not be easily understood or will be off-putting.

On the third day Rusty told us about using humor. It’s a universal technique. Almost everyone likes to laugh, regardless of their spiritual beliefs. Why not use humor in writing and speaking, and sprinkle in the Christian message through that humor. He gave many examples he has accumulated over the years. As I am not a naturally humorous person, this will likely be difficult for me. Still, it’s a good technique and I need to expand my writing abilities to include it.

Rusty gave examples from his writings of pieces he wrote that went into secular magazines, yet included a small pro-Christian message of some type. usually these were subtle and short, though at times longer and more overt. He gave us links to his website where he had examples shown. In some cases, an article he wrote for some newspaper was picked up and republished, with or without permission, in a dozen other publications. His message went out.

I found this class to be useful, and a good use of my time at the conference. I’ve passed up these type of classes before, not because I didn’t want to take them, but because I had many things I needed to know and lots of choices. Finally the right time and mix of classes came along. I have some good notes and handouts to review. Hopefully I will be able to put some of this into practice soon.

Last week, from Tuesday evening through Friday evening, I attended the Write To Publish Writers Conference, held on the campus of Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago. This is the second time I’ve been to this particular conference, the previous time in 2004. I would not have been able to attend except for receiving a Cec Murphey scholarship, one of eight members of The Writers View 2 e-mail group to receive one. We stayed in a college dorm, ate at the college cafeteria, and had our meetings in the Billy Graham Center, also part of the college.

On Tuesday evening the scholarship recipients met in the dorm lobby, then ate supper together. One of the eight was due to come in late and we didn’t expect her; another arrived in time but didn’t find us. Some combination of us then ate together most meals together, though also took time to network with other people.

Years ago I read a health book Fit For Life by Harvey Diamond. In it he talked about our bodies going through three phases in the typical diurnal cycle: accumulation, assimilation, and elimination. All three processes are at work simultaneously, but each of the three also has its dominant part of the diurnal cycle, overpowering the other two during that time.

This conference was the assimilation phase for this writer, and I suspect for others as well. For three days the hours were full of editorial panels, keynote addresses, continuing classes, electives, critique groups, fellowship, meetings with editors and agents, impromptu meetings with all parts of the writing business, and commiserating at the difficulty of becoming published by a traditional publisher—at least as far as books are concerned. And each day included a time of worship, for this was a Christian writers conference.

I took the continuing class on sharing Christ with non-Christian audiences. This was somewhat by process of elimination, as I’d taken some of the other continuing classes before. However, since I intend for most of my writing to be for the general market, not the Christian market, I also felt this class would be important to me. The instructor was Rusty Wright, whom I had not met before. An excellent teacher, he suggested several things I hadn’t thought of before. On Friday he covered how to use humor. About half of that day was concerning writing, half speaking. It was all good.

The accumulation phase of this conference is over. I brought back a ton of stuff (an exaggeration; at most 15 pound) which I have to go through, find out what’s good for me, what’s not, and begin implementing it. Meanwhile, I am working up a post-conference to-do list. That’s all part of the assimilation phase.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll blog about the assimilation phase of this particular conference, mentioning what I picked up during the accumulation phase, and maybe even something about what I’m eliminating. Stay tuned.