Very late today. We had our Thanksgiving meal today rather than yesterday due to one family member’s schedule. And a good meal it was, including good fellowship.
See you all Monday with a real post.
All posts by David Todd
Book Sales
We are now a little over 10 1/2 months into 2022. I thought it might be a good time to report on my book sales. At this moment, my book sales this year have already the highest of any year that I’ve been publishing. I have 275 sales.
I know, I know, shockingly low, isn’t it? Especially considering I have 38 separate titles for sale. But, that is the life of the self-published author. Getting sales is difficult.
The numbers are skewed to the high side by sales of our church’s Centennial history book. It was hard to get an accurate count of those sales vs. copies given away. As best as I can tell, we sold 67. I suspect it’s a little higher than this, but that’s all I’ll claim. If you subtract the 67 from the 275, that leaves 208 sales of my main body of work. That would be behind my previous best year, 223 books in 2021.
I feel okay claiming those Centennial book sales as mine. So 2022 is already my best year. Three late-in-the-year author events helped quite a bit toward that. I don’t know how many more I’ll sell in November and December, since on-line sales have dried up almost to nothing.
But I will keep plugging away, selling some here, some there, waiting for the breakthrough every author hopes for.
More On Those Three Special Projects
Back on September 26, I posted about three special projects I was involved in and how they were keeping me from writing. The projects were:
- inventorying the Stars and Stripes newspapers before donating them to the University of Rhode Island Library.
- Digitizing years of printouts of letters, as a deaccumulation project.
- Finishing the Kuwait Letters book and make it available to family members.
I wrote about each of these projects in the previous post and won’t detail them here.
By a strange set of coincidences, all three projects finished on Friday, November 11.
I finished inventorying the Stars and Stripes not too long after I made that post in September. But the newspapers sat waiting on me to make up my mind whether I was going to ship them to the library or not. I hemmed and I hawed. I carried two of the three boxes upstairs. I gave it much thought. Did I really want to trust this precious cargo to a shipping company? At last I made a to-do list of all the things I have to do and included shipping them.
When I saw the large number of tasks I must complete, I decided to go ahead and ship them. I self-scheduled that for Friday afternoon and brought the last of the boxes upstairs from The Dungeon. I loaded them in the car and headed to UPS. I wasn’t impressed with the people there and how they might handle them. They recommended re-packing the newspapers in their boxes, which provides better assurance of safe delivery (and insurance against damage). I decided to go ahead and do it.
I left the boxes there. Due to busyness on UPS’s part, I wasn’t able to hang around and supervise the transfer to new packaging. I’m trusting that they will do it right and, when they are delivered this Thursday, November 17th, the Library will find them undamaged.
Also on Friday, around 9:00 a.m., I completed scanning the printouts of emails I found in a thick, bulging, 3-ring binder. These were from 2002 to 2005, consisting mainly of e-mails and messages that I sent or received when I was a member of and later moderator/administrator of a couple of poetry critique boards. I wrote a little about that in this post. The letters were arranged more or less chronologically, but were interspersed with printouts of poetry critiques I made during that time. Those critiques, posted at the poetry boards, might be considered correspondence but I chose not to do so. I will deal with the critiques some time in the future.
That one notebook is now devoid or letters. It is full of those critiques, but they are consolidated from two smaller binders and are in an arrangement that I can tackle with less effort sometime in the future.
These are not all the letters I need to digitize, but they represent the lion’s share of them. I have one other notebook that contains letters from about 1990 to 1999, a mix of typed, handwritten, and e-mail letters. I started on them Saturday. But it’s just a 3/4-inch binder and will be short work. I hadn’t even counted them as part of the special project. Why? Because this binder is small enough that I won’t mind if it stays on the shelf for several years. It won’t, but it’s not part of the special project.
The other special project was my book of correspondence, The Kuwait Years In Letters. I’ve blogged about this several times, one of the best of those posts being here. When I wrote that, in June 2022, I had the proof copy in hand. My wife and I were either just starting or well along in the proofreading process. I finished that a couple of weeks ago. But before publishing, I decided to ask the family about the cover and if they wanted changes in that. Yes, they did. I put together four alternate covers, and they chose one as the best.
I uploaded that cover to Amazon, and it was approved with no changes. I again sent it out to the family. My daughter liked it, but found one typo on the back cover. I fixed that on Friday night, and uploaded to Amazon. Since the only difference between that cover and the last one was a single letter on the back cover, I knew it was going to be accepted. I went to bed Friday night knowing it was all over but the ordering. Sure enough, I started Saturday morning by looking at an e-mail from Amazon. The cover was accepted and the book published. I quickly ordered family copies. Once they arrive and are in good condition, I will unpublish the book.
So, in a 14 hour time span, those three special projects that were preventing me from doing much writing came to a close. I will continue to worry about the Stars and Stripes until I hear from the Library. I will continue to scan a handful of letters most days, probably into early December. I will anxiously await the arrival of the Kuwait Letters book and the family’s reception of it after Christmas.
But I think, now, I will feel much better about carving out time to write. When will I start? Maybe as early as today. The Key To Time Travel awaits my attention. Eddie is in trouble, and I need to figure out how to extricate himself from it.
Book Review – Christian Reflections
The book Timeless Writings of C.S. Lewis is actually three books in one volume. The first is The Pilgrim’s Regress, the first book he wrote after his conversion to Christianity, which I read earlier this year and reviewed.
The second is Christian Reflections. This is a compilation of Lewis’s papers, talks, and essays published in 1967, four years after his death. They were collected, edited, and published by Walter Hooper, who was Lewis’s secretary near the end of his life and became his literary executor after his death. He took on the job of organizing the mass of Lewis’s writings into collections.
This book has items composed from 1939 to 1962. The fourteen items are arranged more or less chronologically. The first is “Christianity and Literature”, a paper Lewis read to an Oxford society in the 1930s, and which was included in his first collection of essays, Rehabilitations, published in 1939. I read this in one sitting back in 2019, and found it to be a great help. I found several things to inspire my writing.
The next was “Christianity and Culture”. Published in a magazine in 1940, this essay generated a debate with several critics—a debate that played out in the pages of the magazine. This book includes Lewis’s three contributions to the discussion, the original essay and two responses to his critics. I’ve been looking for the other site of the discussion. I found one item. When I find the other, I’ll come back to this for a fuller reading. I reviewed this essay previously on the blog. I read this in both August 2019 and September 2021, though I’m not sure I finished it the first time.
After this, the essays are a mixed bag. I’m not going to give all the titles here. I read them slowly, in many sittings, in 2021 and 2022. Many of them I found hard to digest. Several I don’t remember at all. I read them, at least according to the notation in the book I did, but I couldn’t tell you what they are about. Were they too difficult for me, or did I read distractedly, without the wherewithal to comprehend what Lewis was saying? The only way to know is to read them again.
And that I shall do, though I know not when. The third book in this volume is God in the Dock, another of Hooper’s posthumous collections of Lewis essays. I’ve read a couple in this, but have yet to tackle this formidable looking document. I’m going to read something lighter before I do.
What about Christian Reflections? Is it worth reading? Is it a keeper? Yes, it is worth reading, but probably only for the dedicated Lewis reader. It is available as a separate volume, if you want to pick up a copy. As to it being a keeper, yes, for sure. Not only because I have more to read in this 3-in-one book, not only because I don’t want to break up my C.S. Lewis collection just yet (if ever), but also because I need to re-read some of these, sometime years hence. Perhaps I’ll still be posting at this blog, and will have something more to say about it.
Difficult Days
Readers, sorry that I didn’t post anything on Friday, and that I’m late today. All I can say is I’m going through some difficult personal times right now. Also, I’m terribly busy with non-writing things around the house. For example, all morning so far I’ve been trying to estimate my income tax due next year for the 2022 tax year. I have to figure out if I will need to make an interim payment to the government so that I won’t be hit with penalties and interest. Since this year had one unusual income item (sale of all my stock in my former company), this is quite important.
I have other things going on, such as needing to replace the microwave oven (difficult since it’s a built-in), needing to get our main car to the shop, needing to get our back-up car running, cleaning/resetting things after some inside repairs, needing to schedule appointments. That doesn’t seem to include everything. Oh, yes, voting tomorrow, and figuring out who I’m going to vote for in local races.
So, I’m unable to do any better post than this today. Here’s hope for a real post on Friday, because I have much to tell.
A Difficult Transition
Yesterday was a sad day, as it was our pastor’s last Sunday at our church. Rev. (Dr.) Mark Snodgrass has been our pastor for close to 12 years. His children, Paul and Luke, were 4 and 1 when he and Lauren came to Bentonville in January 2011. Now they are teenagers, and this is the only home they know.
Pastoral changes are never easy. I was trying to figure out how many I’ve been through since I’ve been in the Church of the Nazarene. I think it’s around eight, though one of those happened while we were overseas. Mark is the pastor I’ve had longest, which perhaps makes it most difficult.
I haven’t been in any positions of church leadership during Mark’s tenure, as I pulled out of church leadership long ago, believing it wasn’t the ministry I was meant to be in. But as a Life Group leader, I interacted with our lead pastor quite a bit. He came to us right at the time I was starting to self-publish. I gave Mark several of my books. When I published books on Christian topics, I asked for guidance from him about whether my writing was doctrinally sound.
From time to time, I would have lunch with Mark. Once I retired in January 2019, my trips from home to Bentonville greatly reduced but, not having a job to do, I suggested we get together for coffee when I made the 13 mile drive for some purpose and when he had time and I had time. This resulted in us meeting at the Bentonville Library around four times a year. Those were good times. We discussed church topics, politics, social types—just about anything.
In these conversations, it became quite apparent that our politics differed. So did our belief in what I call social styles. Mark is big on community. I’m big on individualism. He’s an extrovert (a social style also called “Expressive”). I’m an introvert (a social style also called analytical). I tend to crave being alone and thrive working by myself. I embraced self-checkout at Wal-Mart, not because I want to do that work but because that means one less person I need to talk with each time I went shopping. Mark loves to be among people and probably thrives when working in committee. But despite these differences, we became good friends. I will miss these occasional meetings.
In November, 2020, Mark asked if I would write a history of our church’s Centennial. I agreed, and began work in January 2021. I made some amazing discoveries, which I shared with Mark along the way. He seemed pleased with the work I showed him, though some I didn’t tell, but let him see them as posts on the church’s website. The impact of those surprises were good. I don’t think Mark ever felt he made a mistake in his appointment of the “church historian”. That’s the closest I got to church leadership during his pastorate.
Mark has been called to a strong church in the Kansas City area. That’s only four hours away, and Kansas City was once Lynda’s and my home. Is getting together possible sometime in the future? Part of the process of a pastoral change is the letting go. The pastor has to let his/her current church go in order to fully minister to the new church, though of course a pastor never totally forgets those he/she ministers to. But the church also has to let the pastor go, not keep bugging him/her as they seek to acclimate to their new congregation.
The separation is hard, especially after twelve years. But I’ve prayed that God will confirm his call to his new church as he ministers there.
Godspeed Mark, Lauren, Paul, and Luke.
The Best Season of the Year?
You hear it ever year: Fall is the best season of the year.
Nature lovers who can’t wait for winter to end say it. Beach lovers who long all year for summer and waves and sun and umbrellas and sand between the toes say it.
You hear it almost every year in just about any season. People who really like another season will, as September fades and October with its cooler temperatures come on, will proclaim the glories of fall.
Why? In the American south, it will be the joy of those cooler temperatures after fighting heat for three or four months. For the northern US it will be the fall foliage. Other parts of the country will have foliage changes also, but not like the north and northeast.
What about the Virginia-North Carolina Piedmont area, you ask? Yes, the colors are spectacular there too. What about the Ozarks? Hmmm, let’s discuss that.
I remember a drive I took one fall day in the mid-1980s from Asheboro, NC thirty miles north to Greensboro. It was the peak of fall colors. The wide, clear right-of-way on the interstate allows for incredible views. The rolling hills were ablaze with solid oranges and reds. Just great to look at.
But I was reminded of my native New England. There, the fall colors are a little more muted but a lot more varied. I remember a trip to Vermont in October 2002. It was a little before peak foliage season. Lynda and I got out on some back roads, looking for beaver ponds and other wildlife. We found a secluded valley and sat for a couple of hours. I don’t remember much wildlife coming by, but the view there and coming and going to there were all very nice. The colors were a mix of yellow, purple, red, orange, and green. Evergreen trees dotted the mixed hardwood-softwood forest, creating a color palate mix that any artist would love to have.
Which is better, the Piedmont or upstate New England? That depends on if you want foliage like blazing fire or like an artist’s paints board. There’s no right or wrong.
What about the Ozarks? Well, for me, the foliage is not as good. In towns, you have a good mix of maples and other trees, not native to the Ozarks but brought in by people. Drive through most towns at peak season and the colors are great. But, out in the natural world, the forests are mostly oak. And the oaks we have here, the leaves just turn brown. They do so at least a week past the softwood tree peak. Brown after mixed colors. Hmmm. You would think the color mix would be better.
But, if you can catch the oaks on a sunny day, with the sun hitting the hillside just right, the brown oak leaves reflect back to you a wonderful orange-brown. It’s not as uniform in color as the Piedmont forests. It’s not quite as vibrant as the New England woods. But it’s a good sight to behold. If that’s all you see, it’s good enough for fall.
And, the mix of trees means you have a longer foliage season. The peak colors in town are around Oct 15-25 in our part of the Ozarks. The oaks tend to peak around Nov 1-10. I always like to drive a little on the first Sunday in November—provided it’s sunny. That is one drawback to oak foliage season. If you don’t have bright sun, all you’ll see is the dull brown. But, since this is generally a dry time of year, cloudless days abound during this time, and you have many good viewing days.
It helps that I’ve lived in four different areas of the country, and observed fall colors in towns and countryside, and saw the contrasts. I’d like to think God led me to these different places for me to enjoy fall in a number of different ways. Foliage variations is certainly one of them.
A Project Complete
Dateline: Saturday, 22 Oct 2022
It was earlier this year, in the spring, that my wife asked me to do something that I wasn’t excited about. On our wood lot, adjacent to our house lot on the uphill side, was a large brush pile. For years I took deadfall from the trees in our front yard and built that brush pile. We didn’t own the lot at the time, but the owner was nowhere to be found, and rather than haul the stuff way downhill behind our lot, I put them “next door.” By this spring, the pile was about 7 feet high.
For years it was nicely hidden from the street by the many saplings and weeds in the space between the street and the big trees line. Back in early 2020, the power company cleared out all the saplings so as to keep them from growing up to the powerline. They also took out a few of the bigger trees. Since then, I’ve worked on that area to keep it in grass but let the blackberry bushes grow up. As a result, the brush pile became quite visible from the street. Lynda asked me to move it way down the hill.
Being a dutiful husband, I resisted. Then I said okay, I’ll do it. I think it was April or May that I began. That was about the beginning of “snake season,” and I was sure that they would be living in the pile. So I started very carefully. Working from the downhill side, standing as far away from the pile as I could, I used a strong garden rake to pull the top branches off the pile. Once I got them to the ground, I threw them down the hill, saving my legs.
The first day, I spent maybe half an hour on that. I figured I had to take the pile down a little at a time. Week by week, I raked branches off the top and threw them down the hill. Slowly, I could see the pile height reducing. Slowly, if the snakes were in it, they must have moved because I never saw even a one. This summer, when the oldest grandson and his friend were here, I hired them to move the thrown branches to the downhill brush pile.
I’ll fast forward. Around three weeks ago, the brush pile was gone. All that remained was several little piles of smaller sticks. I raked these up into small piles. This week, I spent time almost every day taking wheelbarrow loads down the hill to the lower brush pile. This morning, I took the last three loads away. I had already raked and smoothed the area of the brush pile. This is near enough to the tree line that I hope some volunteer grass will sprout next year.
And why, you ask, am I telling you this? A few weeks back, I posted about special projects I was working on. Those were three things in the house—paperwork stuff—that were cutting into my writing time and sapping my energy. I forgot about this big project mainly because it was outdoor work. But it was also taking time and energy. Now it’s done. Also, my work on the Stars and Stripes is very, very close to being done. They are inventoried and boxed. All that is left is to take them by the UPS store, get their guidance on whether the packaging is suitable for transporting with them. Then, I’ll add padding to the boxes, seal and label them, and ship them. That will then be only two special project left.
I’m making good progress on digitizing my old letters. My wife and I are also making good progress on proofreading the Kuwait Letters book. I believe we have only five or six reading sessions left. I’ve been making corrections as we go, including moving a couple of un-dated letters that we decided I had in the wrong place. We are down to 45 pages in the original book, maybe 60 pages including items I found after I had the proof copy printed.
I feel so good about these projects, that this week I plan to back off the letter digitizing some and resume work on my latest novel. Just today, I wrote a letter to grandson Ezra, detailing more of the plot to him so that he can be thinking about it and help me if he can think of anything else.
This all feels good. I’m going to go now and finish that letter, or maybe read some and save that for tomorrow. Life awaits. I will awaken the dawn.
The Poetry Wars
As I’ve described in other posts, one of the special projects that is taking me from my writing is scanning/saving copies of old letters. The goal is to get rid of notebooks of paper. The letters get saves to the “cloud”, also to my harddrive, and I can get rid of notebooks.
I’m currently working on a notebook that contains letters from 2003-04. This was a time when:
- I was still working fulltime, in a fairly stressful job;
- We had four foster kids, up until June 2003
- I was a moderator at two different internet poetry boards—successively, not at the same time.
- I had a different e-mail address, one that I later abandoned and lost whatever e-mails were stored on its servers when it went defunct.
What I did back then, not thinking much about the future, and still somewhat stuck in a pre-internet mindset, I printed e-mails and instant messages, saved the papers, and deleted the electronic files. I know, what was I thinking? I obviously wasn’t thinking about a time, almost 20 years in the future, when those notebooks of paper files would be a heavy burden to get rid of.
On the other hand, since I printed and saved these communications, I still have them in 2022 even though those electronic files are lost. So, that is the silver lining to this.
In February, 2003, I agreed to become a moderator at the Poem Kingdom website. This was another “what was I thinking” moment. The site was the main place where I learned poetry, and how to critique poetry. I had been to other sites earlier—Wild Poetry Forum and Sonnet Central—but PK was what I needed in my early learning process. I studied hard and learned fast.
Alas, the site was beset by strong personalities that clashed, and argument after argument came upon the site. The better, more experiences poets and “critters, ” as we called ourselves, left. They formed other poetry message boards and started over, bringing people from PK to their site. It was when PK was already in this decline that I was asked to join the mod squad there.
As I described it to one former member who tried to recruit me for his site, it was like putting a Volkswagen engine in a battleship and trying to get it turned and moving back in the correct direction. It could be done, but would take time.
Scanning and saving these paper files from that era has brought back a lot of memories, many of them not that pleasant. We had a poetry war in early April 2003, as poems for and against the then-raging Iraq war were posted and critiqued. Strongly opinionated people let their feelings come out and did more than critique poems.
There had been poetry wars in October 2002 and January 2003 and February 2003, each of which resulted in much poetic talent leaving the site. ‘Twas sad times, and sad communications from those times.
But good also came. I had many written conversations with other poets about the art and craft of poetry. I forged a few friendships that continue to this day.
As a result of this, I spent a little time on Facebook looking for these old comrades and opponents in the poetry wars. I found some. One man in particular, who was the biggest thorn in my side, I found living in a foreign country. Now married (I think) to an Asian bride, he resides in her native land. His FB posts make it seem like he has done a 180 in his politics. I almost clicked on the “Invite Friend” button, but I hesitated. Did I really want this man back in my life? After reading a few more communications from him, I decided I did not and moved on. He obviously hadn’t come looking for me.
Another one or two people I might message or friend. We’ll see.
Even though this is giving me a significant amount of work, I’m now glad (given that the electronic files were lost) that I printed and saved these communications. I’m only skimming as I scan. I hope someday to cobble them up into a book that I will have printed just for me, and read them at leisure. How was my performance during the Poetry Wars? Did I behave well? Did my attempts at peace-making have any positive results? Did that Volkswagen engine at all move the battleship before the owner let the domain name die and lose the site? Reading these will tell.
Book Review Concluded: The Control of Nature
The third part of John McPhee’s The Control of Nature concerned the San Gabriel Mountains east of Los Angeles. I had a difficult time identifying them on maps and aerial photographs, so this review will not be illustrated. See part 1 of this review here, and part two here.
Somewhere close to L.A., this mountain range is unusual in that it is growing, not eroding. Tectonic forces are pushing the mountains higher. Yet, the mountains are eroding in a sense in that they are sloughing off rock. In any given heavy rainfall, rocks and mud flow down from the mountains. No big deal, you say…except the growth of Los Angeles has caused subdivisions to be built up onto the mountains, right up to the point where the land gets too steep to build on. These subdivisions are what the sloughing rock and mud encounter first.
McPhee does a good job of explaining the terror that residents had when first the noise, then the detritus, hits their property. The flow goes into yards and through houses, or sometimes moves houses, and tears up and blocks streets.
To protect residences, various governmental agencies, such as regional flood control districts, have been formed to construct and maintain catchment areas upstream of the houses. I have a difficult time envisioning this. Since the rockslides could come anywhere on the mountains, and since predicting the quantity of “rock flow” would be less of a science than predicting runoff from rainfall, for this to be effective, you would need a huge catchment basin across the entire face of the mountain range. It sounds physically impossible and financially impractical.
Yet, it is being done (as of 1989, the time the book was written, that is). Sometimes the catchments are successful, sometimes not. But officials and residents labor on, doing whatever can be done to anticipate from whence the rock will come, and catching it before it hits houses—to control nature.
In this section, as in the two previous ones, McPhee tells a compelling story, but tells it too long. Too many stories. Too many names of victims and officials. Too many occasions for the reader to zone out, as I did all too frequently. The 272 page book would have been just as informative and more compelling if it had been told in 200 pages, in my engineering opinion.
Now, the big questions: a rating and a disposition. The latter is easy. This book is not a keeper. I read it in anticipation of putting it on the donation/sale stack, and there it goes after I post this. As to a rating, I think only 3-stars, and those two stars marked off because of the length. Would a non-engineer be able to read it and glean information from and be entertained by it? Yes, absolutely, maybe even more than I was. This is a book I’m quite glad I read, but could never see myself reading again.