Yes, how sad it is: The babysitting is over. We spent a great time from Wednesday evening until Saturday evening watching our three oldest grandchildren. But we said goodbye to them just after 6:00 p.m. on Saturday and made the drive home.
Sunday I just rested. That is, I didn’t go to church. I had no responsibilities there, so I decided to sleep in and take it easy. Fixed a nice breakfast, made a Wal-Mart run in the afternoon. Prepared a simple but nice supper. Went to bed by 11:00 p.m.
So, how did I spend my time while watching the kids and yesterday? Thursday and Friday mornings I did work for the office. I had my work laptop with me, and connected to our system via a VPN. I kept up with e-mails, made calls and received calls on one project, and stayed in the know. Afternoons I began reading The Gutter Chronicles: Volume 2 for the third time, mainly to look for redundancies, but also for typos and better wording. I read Thursday, Friday, and Sunday, and typed the edits Sunday afternoon. I hereby declare it ready for publishing.
Also on Sunday afternoon, I started and completed my mother-in-law’s income taxes, Federal and State. She doesn’t owe anything, so I don’t know if I’ll file the forms or not. I’ve done her taxes for 16 years now.
Also on Sunday, I began reading for research for the next book in my Documenting America series. It will be on the making of the Constitution. I took the right volume from the Annals of America set with me to Oklahoma City, but found I couldn’t concentrate on it enough to read. But last night I did read in it. I scanned a letter from John Adams, found it germane to the book, and marked it to be included. Next I started on a long piece by Noah Webster, a book excerpt. I’m pretty sure I’ll use it in my book, but it’s long and rambling, and I need to know it much better before I know exactly how I’m going to use it. Having begun work on this book, I’ll have to start a writing diary for that. I shall do so on my noon hour.
The other thing I did, or actually my wife and I did, was to finish reading aloud The Prisoner of Askaban. We each read this separately some years ago, but decided to re-read them together. Actually, it wasn’t so much a conscious decision as it was a falling into it. When the grandkids were here last month, we read some of The Chamber of Secrets to them. We then finished the book on our own after they left, and it just seemed natural to pick up the next volume and read it. Whether we go on or not we shall see. I have much other reading I want to do, so my choice will be to take a break from the Harry Potter books.
There you have my report on my stewardship of time for the last five days. Hopefully, this week will be equally productive.
Yes, the wife and I are babysitting the three older grandchildren, while their parents have some engagements that required both of them. It’s been a great couple of days, and the end is not yet. I’m working half-days while we are sitting.
So, I wasn’t able to get a real post written and uploaded for today. Once I finish my work for the day, I shift to writing tasks. My main one is re-reading The Gutter Chronicles: Volume 2 in a rapid manner. Rather than looking for structural edits, line edits, or fixing typos (all of which I’ll do if needed), I’m looking for duplication. When I read it aloud to Lynda, I noticed some areas that seemed repetitious—such as repeating something about a character three or four chapters apart, something that only needs to be mentioned once in the book.
I’ll be back with a new post on Monday, possibly a writer interview.
I had hoped to take time yesterday afternoon to write a blog post for today. Alas, obligations and other things took time away from me, and I didn’t get it done.
I did manage to finish reading The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 2 to my wife. She loved it, and laughed at all the right places. Then I typed the edits from the second round of editing. I decided to print it once more and read it once more, with as few interruptions as possible. I feel I have some duplication, and that I need some additional character descriptions. I should be able to do that this week.
I also managed to read a good part of a book proposal I’m reviewing for a fellow writer, a retired missionary who is part of our church. I have a little more to do, which should happen tonight. That obligation will then be complete.
So, no blog post today, except for this excuse for a blog post. I hope to have a writer interview for you on Friday.
As I’ve tried to make a habit, after reporting sales for a quarter, I then look at my writing plan for the year and see how I’m doing, and if I plan to make any changes. First, here is my writing to-do list as posted on January 5, 2018, in the order I planned to do them.
Finish The Gutter Chronicles, Vol. 2. Finish by the end of February; publish by the end of April.
Finish Adam Of Jerusalem by the end of the year; publish in 2019.
Begin work on Documenting America: Constitution Edition. I hope to be working on this by October.
Write “Tango Delta Foxtrot”. At present I’m not going to put a publishing target date on the list.
And, one other item, which is really planning for 2019: Decide on which of my Bible studies to publish in 2019.The other things on the list don’t have any deadlines in the second quarter. I plan to move next to Adam of Jerusalem. I’m a few chapters in to it, and I know the story I want to tell (i.e., it’s somewhat planned-out in my brain). If I can get enough time to put to this, I could actually finish it by summer. Time, however, is in short supply these days. Time to write, that is.
So, this is my 2nd quarter to-do list.
As you can see, it wasn’t an ambitious to-do list. But it considered where my circumstances in life stood, and what I thought I could realistically get done. Only one item was listed for the first quarter: Finish The Gutter Chronicles, Vol. 2 by the end of February. I actually completed it around mid-March, so missed it by two or three weeks. That wasn’t bad. It’s now in the editing phase, and I should have that done in just a few days. So, publishing by the end of April, as in my to-do list, is entirely possible.
Publish The Gutter Chronicles, Vol. 2 by the end of April.
Finish Adam Of Jerusalem by the end of the year; publish in 2019.
Begin work on Documenting America: Constitution Edition. I hope to be working on this by October. And, I will add to this, begin reading for research within the quarter.
I believe the first Bible study I’ll publish is Sacred Moments. I just finished reading a book for research, a book which, unfortunately, didn’t help all that month.
I’ll check back in against this list in early July.
April fool’s day. Easter Sunday. They fell on the same day this year. It’s also the first day of the new quarter; meaning yesterday ended the first quarter; meaning it’s time to report book sales. So, here it is; someone give me a drumroll.
In the first quarter of 2018 I sold 6 books.
Yes, six books over all venues. That’s none at Smashwords and the people they distribute to. None at CreateSpace, the printed books distributor. No personal sales. And six at the Kindle store. There’s always a chance another sale or two will show up at Smashwords from those sales outlets that are slower in reporting. Possible, though unlikely.
So this was my worst quarter, and my first single-digit sales quarter since 2nd 2016. During this quarter, I had no new publication. I did nothing to promote my books other than a Facebook post here and there. I had several occasions to meet with people at the office and urge them to buy a book. No one did.
Such is the life of a self-published author. “Discoverability” is the new buzz word we all talk about, and how difficult it is to achieve. I’ve thought about running ads at some places, and have been researching where. But finding time to complete that research and make a decision just didn’t materialize.
I’m not sure that time will materialize this side of retirement. That event is drawing closer, as my last post indicated.
The quarter wasn’t all bad, however. Three of the six sales were of books I published early in my career. One of them, Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles, was something of an affectation that I never really expected to have many sales of. The other three were of more recent items. The six sales were for six different titles. So having a backlist helped sales.
Also during the quarter I finished my latest work-in-progress. Yesterday I started my second round of edits on it. My beta reader has it, and will hopefully give me some ideas in a week or so. When will it be published? Right now I can’t say, but I sure hope it’s before the end of April.
In a future post, maybe on Friday, I’ll give an update on my writing plans.
Yes, the day draws ever closer. It’s now down to 9 months and 2 days (at the start of today) until I retire. I’ve already given notice to my supervisor, and have, for the last 6 months, been off-loading my work and training others to take over things.
One thing I’m also doing is looking at my personal stuff, and seeing what I can take home now. It would be a good idea not to walk out of the office on New Year’s Eve with four or five boxes of stuff. So, since the beginning of the year, I’ve been removing things and taking them home.
At one point this was full of personal, non-engineering books that I thought I’d read on my noon hours. Many are already at the house.
The photo is of my personal books shelf in my office. Not my engineering books, but those having to do with things other than engineering. These are things I picked up at bookstores or thrift stores and brought straight to the office. My thought process was that I would read them on noon hours and breaks. Alas, I’ve read none of them, some having been here five or ten years. So, I’ve made it a practice to take one book home a week, being realistic about which one I’m most unlikely to use in the time left. They all could be considered research books, supporting one of my many writing projects. Which projects will I work on at the office, and which won’t I?
I’m now down to 18 books plus my Bible. I’d be very happy to carry that out on the last day. So, in 18 weeks I could be done moving books. But which one to take this week?
I think it will be Stories by O. Henry. Bought for the exorbitant amount of 50 cents at a thrift store, I got it to use as an example of how to write short stories. But, I have only one short story in my writing queue at the moment, and it’s questionable that I’ll really get to it this year. So, off it goes to the house when I leave the office tonight.
That will leave 17 yet to go home. I won’t take one every week. Some weeks I’ll take a coffee mug home. I have six of those to move. I’m not sure yet what to do with my engineering books, which are shown in the next photo. They are two deep in this cupboard. Some of them I’ll either give away or silent-auction off in my office. Some I may just toss.
Some of these engineering books I haven’t looked at for years. Some are from school, and badly out of date. Why am I keeping them?
Then, there’s my books-for-sale inventory, my creative writing. I keep them at work rather than at home. Every now and then someone comes into my office and buys one. At some point, I’ll have to take them home.
How many of these will I actually sell at work? Not too many, if the future stays as it’s been in the past
Yes, deconstructing a work station after 44 years at the job (different companies, different cubicles or offices, but the same engineering) takes time. I don’t want to just move the clutter in my office to join the clutter at home. Hopefully, by making an early starts, the job won’t be so bad.
During World War 2, my dad had an interesting story. Older than the average G.I. at 26 when the war broke out for the USA, he found himself in North Africa, staging to go on the invasion of Italy. Just before he embarked, he was transferred to the Stars and Stripes, the G.I. newspaper and on his way to Algiers to set type. Before long he was in Italy, setting type on the mobile unit of the paper: within sound of the guns.
Rick Atkinson is an excellent war historian and writer.
So, some years ago I found The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy at some discount store, I grabbed it. It sat in my reading pile for a couple of years, until I finally read it beginning last fall and ending in early January.
I’m glad I did read it. Rick Atkinson has done a wonderful job of making the war in these areas come alive. He deals with the generals and the soldiers. He helps the reader see what it was like to be pushed forward by Patton. Or how impossible missions were undertaken in Italy and men slaughtered as a result. I had never read any detailed information about the campaign in Italy. Atkinson brought it alive for me.
I’ve read some of the reviews on Amazon. Most are positive, though a few are that are negative. At least one criticized Atkinson for using obscure words. He did have a few of those, but, in my mind, not many. I only looked up one or two. I was able to pass over the others without loss of meaning. A few seemed to be military technical terms.
This book is a keeper. I have a fair collection of WW2 books. Most I’ve never read, and those I’ve read I haven’t retained as well as I wish I had. Someday in the future I might pick this one up again, and re-read it. Or, if I ever do get around to writing that memoir of my mom and dad, this could be source material for the conditions Dad worked in.
If I review this on Amazon, I’ll give it 4 or 5 stars.
For my few readers who come by to see what I may have posted lately, I’m sorry to have been disappointingly absent. I have reasons for what divided my time. Some was busyness. Some was being overwhelmed by my task list. Some was just laziness.
20 year old airbags deployed
But, I do have one big excuse that I think is valid. On February 14 I was in an auto accident. This was my first accident since April 1969 (when I was a junior in high school) and my first as a driver. I don’t count a few fender-benders here and there. A man pulled out in front of me, while a large truck was blocking his view of our lane and my view of him pulling out. My right front hit his left front, with a slight angle.
I wasn’t hurt. My passenger wasn’t hurt—or so it seemed. Burn marks showed up on my right arm and left thumb, and on her stomach. Those were just superficial. Later, I found pain in my shoulder, and went back to the doctor about it. I had injured my shoulder in a fall on the ice five days before. But, it was healing from that. The prior injury was aggravated by the accident.
Burns were from the air bag, I think. It healed in less than a week.
Simple things were suddenly made hard, such as: closing the car door from inside; rubbing my hands together to wash them; reaching for things; lifting even light things; threading a belt into my pants while wearing them. I could go on.
Typing on a keyboard was, surprisingly, not very much affected. I do need to keep my arms closer to my torso as I type, but I can do that. Holding a book to read hasn’t been a problem. Driving is okay, except for turning the steering wheel. I have to do more of it with my right arm now, and baby my left arm.
When I went back to the doctor, she said the pain I described in my arm is typically caused by neck damage, not shoulder damage. They took x-rays, confirmed nothing was broken, but that my neck has damage. I went on steroids and muscle relaxer. They may have helped some, but not completely. For several nights I couldn’t sleep. I would wake at 2:00 a.m. in bad pain, and have to go out and sleep in my reading chair for a couple of hours. The change from horizontal to vertical back to horizontal seemed to work. Still, I wouldn’t say I was getting good sleep. The last couple of nights have been better.
This has all taken much time. Dealing with doctors and workman’s comp (since we were on company time going on company business). Dealing with insurance companies, which isn’t over yet. Missing work time for accident issues, resulting in things backing up.
The second volume in the series should be out in a month or so.
But, during this time, I was able to finish the first draft of The Gutter Chronicles – Volume 2. I wrote “the end” on Sunday afternoon. And, I’ve now completed a round of edits and sent the thing off to my beta reader today. I started the editing process before I finished the writing. So, on Sunday and Monday I only had a few more chapters to edit, and was able to get them done and typed. This feels good. Publication is probably a month off.
One other thing that’s big for me: I have learned to use my laptop with the laptop keyboard. For over a year, this laptop has been my main computer, but I use it with a regular keyboard. Of late, however, I’ve been disconnecting the laptop from its docking station and using it as a real laptop. I typed a couple of chapters on it. I’m typing this blog on it. Before this, I would have great difficulty with a laptop keyboard. Now, I’m finding it easier.
So, although I haven’t been faithful in making posts here, my time has, I think, been well-spent.
I had intended to write a book review today, but circumstances have worked against me. I got to the office this morning to find the workmen not done, and I won’t be working in my office today—at least not at the beginning.
You see, the outside wall of my office is under duress. Shortly after I moved in there, about a year ago following major remodeling throughout our building, the outer wall began to crack. It seemed to be just the stucco finish on the wall, not the drywall behind it. That would mean no major problem. About three months later, the contractor returned to take care of various punch-list items, and repaired it. They cut out the parts that were cracking, back to undamaged stucco, and re-did it. Excepting a slight change in the texture, you would never know it had been a problem.
Then, about a month after that, it started again. Same exact thing, same exact place. Only this time it progressed faster and was a little more extensive. Last week the contractor finally got back to try to figure out what’s going on. Clearly, this was not just cosmetic. They decided to tear the drywall out, see what’s behind it. They scheduled the work for 7:00 a.m. Saturday morning, and advised me they were unlikely to be finished on Monday.
Sure enough, they weren’t. New drywall was in place, but not yet mudded. So I found an empty cubicle nearby, set up my laptop, and here I am. It appears to me that I will have limited access to my office for the next three days. That’s the bad new. The good news is: maybe, at last, I’ll become more proficient at using a laptop keyboard. Something’s going on in my office; I hear their machines behind the closed door.
The morning routine was also changed in my taking a different route to the office. Coming home yesterday afternoon, I went a certain way to check out my morning commute route in the daylight. As I expected, the route is littered with potholes. Enough so that you can’t always dodge them if there is on-coming traffic. So this morning I went a different way. It had almost no potholes. The drive was easy, traffic heavy but moving. I had to put gasoline in the pickup, and arrived at the work only five to seven minutes behind my target arrival time.
I was coming home yesterday afternoon from an afternoon writer’s event, not from church (which did fill my Sunday morning). Yes, a real writer’s event, the first one I’ve been to in about a year. It was a book event held by the Village on the Lakes Writers and Poets, a local organization in Bella Vista. Bentonville author J.C. Crumpton . He has several books published. His talk was about his writing process, how he came up with ideas for these books. A total of nineteen people were there. I had a chance to talk at length with the head of the organization, and briefly with J.C. Hopefully, I’ll interview him on this blog before long.
Saturday was an interesting day. Rain graced the early morning, or the promise of rain at the time I got up. I made some coffee and headed to The Dungeon, not to write, but to do whatever indoor chores I could. First, I went on-line to my bank to update the checkbook. Then, I entered income and expense into my budget spreadsheet, getting that up-to-date and double-checked. Then, I tackled mountains of receipts that I hadn’t yet dealt with. For the Wal-Mart receipts, that mean checking them against budget entries to make sure I had them in the right expense categories, then filing. For others, it meant filing or moving to the shred pile.
After that, I filed financial papers. This took some time. I got mine done, but not my mother-in-law’s. Hers are in a big pile, which I will get to probably next weekend.
Then, I went back to income taxes, which I had started last week. First is our trading partnership tax return, which is due March 15. I had made all the trade entries, along with miscellaneous income and most expenses. Saturday I finished the expenses, and looked for a $100 discrepancy between my records and those of my brokers. It took me fifteen minutes to find my mistake, a simple typo, and get that correct. That meant I had everything I needed to actually fill out the return. I hadn’t planned on that for Saturday, but I thought, it’s pouring rain; I can’t work outside; might as well stick to it and get ’em done.
So I did. In about an hour I had the forms filled out, ready to print and proofread. That will be a Monday-Tuesday task. I feel great getting to this point, which is way ahead of where I was last year.
As a result of all of this, I did no writing on the weekend. None. I had hoped to write several thousand words in The Gutter Chronicles – Volume 2, but it was not to be. Maybe tonight. I did get a lot of reading done, research for a future, maybe-this-year, publication. Maybe I could have written instead of read, but both are necessary tasks.
So, I post this from Cubicleville, commending you all the grace of God this Monday morning.
Linda has a number of items for sale—well worth checking out for the Christian reader.
Have you ever thought about a friend or acquaintance and wondered “Now, how did I meet that person?” It doesn’t happen often to me, but it does happen. Linda Olin is one of those people for me. It was at an on-line writing site, I know that much; but whether it was a writing blog, a writer’s site, or something else, I don’t remember. But when I saw the types of books Linda writes, checked out her website and saw the many things she’s been involved in, I decided I wanted to interview her. Posting this has been somewhat delayed due to my website hacking, and making sure everything was good. Here’s the interview. I see Linda even caught a mistake in one of my questions to her. Rather than sanitize it, I’ll give it to you with the error and the correction.
David: Your website says, “I’m excited to tell you about my writing, art, ministry, and life in general.” You have subpages that read: Hymns and faith songs; Poems; Church skits and longer dramas; Bible studies; Devotions; and more. And that’s just under writing. Sounds like you’re staying busy.
Linda: Busy is right! My writing time has to be shoehorned into spaces between other obligations. I’m retired from full-time employment, but I still handle all the bookkeeping, payroll, tax work, etc. for our dairy farm. And life tends to insert unexpected demands, like taking care of my husband during his months of recovery from a serious accident in 2016.
David: Under books, I see five different ones. Some have to do with songs or hymns; all have to do with Christian ministry. You must see your writing as a calling.
Linda: Absolutely. It was that call that led me to leave my salaried job to concentrate on writing. My prayer group had encouraged me to pray for my heart’s desire (Mark 11:24; Matthew 21:22). Seemed pretty iffy to me, but I took it to God. My heart’s desire? To write something with eternal significance, like the great hymns that continue to touch lives long after the writers are dead and gone. I didn’t ask for fame and fortune, or even to be published. Just that God would use my writing to accomplish his purpose. He answered my prayers with a promise to grant my heart’s desire, provided that I would write according to his daily direction. Needless to say, I agreed.
My “Holy GhostWriter” has led me along a squiggly path in the ten years since we made that covenant. As you mentioned, my little body of work includes quite a few different genres. Writing instructors advise you to stick to one genre, to establish your “brand.” Evidently my HGW didn’t attend that class. J
For the past several years, my main writing focus has been hymns and faith songs. I write the texts (lyrics). I’ve written tunes for some of them, but mostly I set them to public domain hymn tunes.
Published Nov 2017, this is Linda’s newest book.
David: What is Then Sings My Soul about?
Linda: Ha! You picked up on the reference to “How Great Thou Art”: “Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to thee.” The title of my book is Now Sings My Soul: New Songs for the Lord. It’s a collection of over a hundred of my new texts. I chose to emphasize “Now” because the songs speak to, and for, our souls wherever we might be on our walk with the Lord. Maybe right now we’re in a place of joy and praise and gratitude. Maybe now we’re in a place of pain, or penitence, or loss, or questioning. Like the psalmists, we can take all those things to the Lord in song.
David: Now Sings My Soul is your newest book?
Linda: Yes, it came out the end of November. A few months before that, Were You There When They Crucified Our Lord? Meditations on Calvary was released. Several of the songs in Now Sings My Soul were originally written to accompany the devotions in Were You There.
A timely book for this season of the church calendar.
David: Your books seem to show a special interest in Lent and Easter themes.
Linda: That’s because they originated from several series of weekly Lenten soup-and-study programs put on for my local multi-denominational group of churches. I figured, why let all the work of writing studies, dramas, devotions, and music go to waste after one presentation? Better to polish them up into books for other churches, small groups, and individual readers to use. Were You There, Transformed: 5 Resurrection Dramas, The Sacrifice Support Group, and Giving It Up for Lent came about that way.
As Linda says, this is a group of studies concerning Lent.
David: Your website mentions novels-in-progress. Tell me about that.
Linda: Mystery novels are my reading of choice, so those were the writing projects I started with. One cozy mystery and a women’s fiction manuscript, both with a light spiritual element, got pushed to the back burner by other projects. (Actually they’ve been shoved right off the back of the stove onto the floor with the dust bunnies!)
David: What are your writing/publishing plans going forward?
Linda: That’s up to my HGW. A Christmas Eve cantata is waiting to be completed. Dramas from another year’s Lent program haven’t made it into book form yet. And a how-to book about personal puppet ministry (based on my experience with my son and his puppet pal) is finished and edited but not yet published. Who knows? Maybe my HGW will plop one of those projects onto my plate tomorrow.
Meanwhile, my soul’s ear is always open for new song ideas. It still amazes me to be given the gift of a new faith song. Never imagined I would write music, having zero music training. The power of the Holy Spirit in action!
The publishing process has been a major undertaking for me, far beyond writing the material in the first place. My smaller pieces (devotionals, poems, hymns, short fiction) have been picked up by regular publishers, but my books are all independently published as Kindle ebooks and/or print-on-demand paperbacks. The song book, especially, was a huge effort to compile and lay out. I don’t recommend do-it-yourself book production as a rule, but that’s where God’s “daily direction” happened to lead me.
I post extra goodies like audio files, PDF scores, and other online resources on Faith Songs http://LindaBonneyOlin.com. Maintaining that website is a big job too.
David: Can people buy your books there?
Linda: No, Faith Songs is geared to information and ideas, not selling stuff. All my books are available on Amazon.com. The easiest place to start is my Amazon Author Page. http://www.amazon.com/Linda-Bonney-Olin/e/B0079M4OMW
Thanks very much for inviting me to your blog, David. I really appreciate your helping get the word out about my books and songs. God bless!
David: And thank you, Linda, for being a part of An Arrow Through The Air. I hope my readers give you some sales.
