Category Archives: Carlyle

Carlyle, Daddy Daughter Day, self-publishing, Writing

Stewardship of My Writing Time

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I was supposed to post to this blog yesterday. But it was Election Day, and so I was tied up watching returns in the evening; and I had plenty to do and work to do during the day, and I didn’t get anything written and posted. Today I’ll rectify that with a day-late post.

It seems good for me to talk about how I’ve used my limited writing time of late. I’m still in the Time Crunch, and will be for several months. Rather than having big blocks of time, I have small chunks of time, perhaps a half hour in the evenings after finishing other obligations. Or maybe that much time before work or during the noon hour. They are small enough that I couldn’t take on a large project, but they are still snippets of time in which I can somehow further my writing career.

Over the last two weeks I’ve had two main projects for these snippets. One is to continue to skim/read the letters of Thomas Carlyle, looking for references to his written works. I’ve done that on a hit or miss basis before, looking for specific references to a specific work. This time, I’m going through the letters from beginning to end. My purpose for doing this is to support the composition chronology of his writings. I don’t know if I’ll ever publish that or not. Heck, I don’t know if I’ll ever finish it or not. For sure it would be a huge project, and the form of it would be tough to pull off in a standard size book (meaning height and width, not length). But for now I’m doing it, from beginning to end. I’m concentrating on his first 50 compositions (excepting letters). In fact, I’m almost done with that . I’ve gone through his letters that go up to the days of his 50th composition, and have entered the letter dates and recipients in the chronology. I think I have only three or four more compositions to do the typing on.

The other project is my poetry book, Father Daughter Day. As I’ve reported before, that book has been done for a long time. I’ve been stalled for years because I wanted to publish it as an illustrated book. I finally gave up on ever finding an illustrator willing to take it on spec, and so plan on publishing it soon. But, I need to have a cover made. I’ve been looking around for a photo to serve as a cover, but will still need an artist to add things to the cover.

This week I may have found the artist. I asked a man in my Life Group at church, who has done some sketches and posted them to Facebook of the type I’m interested in. He said he couldn’t do it, as the inspiration to draw has left him for a time. He said he would get one of his artist friends in touch with me. He was true to his word, and yesterday I had a conversation with that artist and shared my vision for the book and the cover. Today she reported to me that she had read the book, has ideas not only for the cover but also for some interior illustrations. And, she’s willing to do it on spec, rather than as up-front compensation. I need to e-mail her again today to further the process, and will do that as soon as I post this.

So, even though I’m in the Time Crunch, and writing of books and articles isn’t possible, I’m still at work with my flickering writing career. Perhaps I’ll have my poetry book out in January 2015. That would be a nice outcome.

Carlyle, poetry, Writing

Little Snippets

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Clearly my world has changed in the last couple of days, and it’s fall. As I got ready for work this morning, I heard hard pinging on the skylight in the bathroom. At first I thought that strange, because we had no rain in the forecast. Then I realized it was acorns falling from the nearby oak tree. Not many branches extend as far as the skylight, but a couple do. However, this seemed to be too many pings relative to the probable supply of ready-to-fall acorns, and I realized it had to be wind pushing them from other branches onto the skylight.

Sure enough, when I went outside for my commute, a blustery wind greeted me; not strong enough to have been heard in the house, but strong enough to easily move leaves and push acorns. It’s definitely fall.

I got in my pickup and started it, and almost immediately lines for a haiku came to mind. This is my commuting writing endeavor. Either on the way to work or on the way home, though more often the former, a haiku will come to me while I’m driving. Typically the first line and perhaps the third line come right away. As I drive the 15.6 miles to my destination, I work on it in my mind. The second line will eventually come. By the time I get there, I have a completed haiku—subject to further revision, as always.

That’s if I don’t forget it between the time I park and get to a place where I can write it. So often the lines leave me, and another writing idea is lost. Today, however, the lines didn’t leave me. I had worked on them enough, especially massaging the second line, that by the time I got to my desk, then went and weighed and got coffee, came back to my desk, had my devotions, prayed, and woke up my computer, I pulled out one of the prior days from my desk calendar, and on the back of it wrote the haiku. I don’t know that it’s final, but it meets all the criteria I usually put into a haiku.

A haiku isn’t much, but it’s writing. It’s creativity focused. I’ll take it, and be glad for it during the Time Crunch. Just as I’ll take the little bit of research I can do a few days a week, in the letters of Thomas Carlyle, which will work towards a couple of future (maybe) projects.

The Time Crunch will pass and I’ll dedicate more time to writing. Meanwhile, I’ll have to find joy in these small snippets.

Carlyle, Writing

Adjusting to the Time Crunch

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So, as I said in my last post, the Time Crunch is here. Finding time to write will be difficult. Therefore, it’s time to make adjustments.

What I find so far in my new schedule is that I have snippets of time—a half hour here, forty-five minutes there—in which I can do something. That includes minor time at work, before and after being “on the clock,” but also some time in the evenings. I may have 30 minutes before we watch a webinar, or a similar amount of time after a conference call with our mentor. How do I fill that time?

To work on the formatting of Father Daughter Day I would have to go to The Dungeon and work on the computer there. That would be the same for the formatting of my next Thomas Carlyle book (which I’ve never posted about in detail; must put it on the schedule to do so). If I want to sit upstairs next to Lynda rather than abandon her, I need to find something to do with my Nook tablet, or even with paper books.

For the moment, I’ve found the solution. For my Carlyle book on his book Chartism, my intention is to add excerpts from some of his letters. In pursuit of that I’ve skimmed/half read his letters from 1838-1839 and a little into 1840, looking for those references. I could finish 1840. I’m writing notes on paper, and someday, after the Time Crunch, will be able to use those notes to go back to the right letters, pull the excerpts, and dump them into the Word document on the computer in The Dungeon. Or maybe, by that time, we’ll have a second laptop and I’ll be able to work upstairs.

But, I’m using Carlyle’s letters for a second project, a chronological bibliography of his works based on date of writing rather than date of publication. I can’t remember if I’ve ever written about this before on this blog. Two older bibliographies of his works are arrange based on publication date. Another partial bibliography of his early works is by date. It was published as a short magazine article, and doesn’t give much information as to why the writer places certain things where he does. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a great partial bibliography, and I’ll certainly incorporate his findings and conclusions in mine, but it’s somewhat short compared to what I’d like to see. And, of course, it’s only a partial.

I’d like to do a full one, with plenty of references. I’d like to include a list of Carlyle’s letters interspersed with the other works, to show researchers/scholars what exactly he was working on at different times. I started on this some years ago, long before I found the published bibliographies. This past spring I went back to it. I decided on a format, and spent some time placing Carlyle’s works in an order, starting at the beginning, coordinating the four published bibliographies (including the very incomplete earliest and the partial), and making some good progress.

It was a bigger job than I realized, but I was actually pleased with it when, sometime around March or April, I laid it aside in favor of other writing tasks. But during the Time Crunch, I realized I could easily access the Carlyle Letters Online in the snippets of time I had, skim them for references to his works, and write paper notes about what I find. Having a printout of the bibliography as it currently stands, I can handwrite edits. At work, where the electronic file resides at present, when not on the clock I can type the edits.

So, the last three or four evenings I’ve been doing just that. Actually, I started it last week. I’m making progress. I have several pages of notes about the letters and references therein to Carlyle’s writings, nicely organized to be savable, retrievable, and searchable. Right now I’m in 1822. Since he lived till 1881 I still have a long ways to go, but that’s okay. My immediate goal is to get through 1825, at the time when Carlyle began publishing book-length translations with commentary.  I’d like to settle on an order of writings, complete with all references, correct any formatting problems I may have, and come to a resting point.

The next segment after that will be 1826-1833, about the time Carlyle finished what may be his best-known work, Sartor Resartus. After that, we’ll see. Perhaps I’ll tire of this and be ready for other snippets of work. Perhaps the Time Crunch will be over by then, and I can resume a more normal mix of activities, a mix that includes more writing time.  That’s what I’m hoping for.

Carlyle, Health, Writing

Work on my two Carlyle Projects

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Saturday I woke up with my knee hurting more than it has been lately. Friday evening it felt good, and I wanted to walk to the highway and back, a 1.3 mile round trip. However, I was barely out of the driveway when the pain told me I wasn’t going that far. I walked a total of 15 minutes, more or less hobbling back.

Yet, Saturday morning I was determined to work in the yard rather than baby my knee. So I went outside early and began sawing logs, along with bringing a large tree cutting up from halfway down the yard. I cut for over an hour, adding about 25 logs to the pile. I didn’t finish the big one, but I made a start on it, cutting two or three logs off of it. After that I raked for a while, then went up to the front of the house and swept and did other minor work. I had hoped to go for two hours, but after an hour and forty-five minutes I was done, heading back inside for some rest. In fact, I laid on the couch and slept for an hour or two. My knee hurt, but probably no worse than Friday evening.

Later in the day I vacuumed the basement, including The Dungeon portion of it; changed batteries in a couple of key technology pieces; washed out the furnace screens; put the recyclables into the van for delivery on Sunday; and made the weekly Wal-Mart grocery run. All in all, it was a busy and active day. I didn’t try walking in the evening.

What does that have to do with writing, you ask, which is, after all, the supposed subject of this blog? The activity, the busyness of the day, left my brain in no condition to work on my writing. I had two chapters to read to prepare to teach Life Group on Sunday, and barely had the brainpower to read them and prepare. In an unheard of event for a weekend night, we were in bed by 10:30 p.m.

Sunday afternoon found me ready for a nap, but I think I only slept 30 minutes at most, and was at my computer. Logic told me I should work on my Civil War book, still standing at 40 or so percent complete. Instead, still being somewhat below par in brainpower, I decided to format my book on Carlyle’s Chartism. I haven’t worked on this since March or April, when I downloaded most of the source documents into it and planned the purpose, contents, and order of the book. I decided to work on the formatting. I had pulled in things from at least 15 different websites, and had over 50 different text styles, all of which needed to be regularized.

I worked on this for about an hour and a half (after writing and posting at my other blog). I’m a long, long way from finishing the formatting, but it’s certainly in much better shape. I need to do some more searching for related out-of-copyright documents: contemporaneous reviews, historical reviews, and even some predecessor documents. I’ve also identified three copyrighted reviews from 1990 onwards that I’d like to include in it. I contacted one copyright holder about a different matter, so know where and how to reach them. I need to determine the other two copyright holders and contact all three to see if I can get permission to republish their articles.

So, I made progress on Sunday. It’s nothing that I can say, “Oh, three more hours and I’ll be done with that.” I don’t know how long the formatting will take me. If I were forced to guess, I’d say two more days like Sunday and the formatting of what I have in hand would be done. I need to find other documents and include them. And I need to write my own essay, or perhaps a couple, about Carlyle’s Chartism, but those are down the line. I think, if I concentrated on this only, I’d be a year or so away from having it done.

In my next post, possibly I’ll explain exactly what this book is, and its purpose.

Carlyle, Daddy Daughter Day, Documenting America

Going with Where Inspiration Leads Me

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Last night I went home after two days of intense training (as facilitator, not trainer or trainee) and urgent work. I was bushed. Yet, my mind remained somewhat active. Right after eating supper I couldn’t get on the Internet on my Nook. So I went to look for something printed on paper to read, and pulled out a literary magazine special issue about Thomas Carlyle.

Now, except for occasionally reading a little in the Carlyle Letters Online, I haven’t thought much about him since some time in April. But reading this caused me to think about my two unfinished Carlyle projects: the book about his book Chartism; and the composition bibliography. I spent a little time in both last evening.

Now, today, my mind won’t leave the composition biography. I’ve been fixated on it all day, to the detriment of it getting in the way of thinking about my day job. Oh, I’ve done my work, but with half my mind elsewhere. Fortunately I didn’t have any tasks requiring major concentration laid on for today.

How long will this sojourn with the sage of Chelsea last? I don’t know. I don’t want to leave my Civil War book for long, nor abandon Father Daughter Day. But, for a day or too, or even a weekend, this is a good, intellectual pursuit that should stimulate some atrophying gray cells.

Carlyle, It Happened At The Burger Joint, self-publishing, The Gutter Chronicles

Typos are Killing Me

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I consider myself a good typist and good proofreader. But, as the experts say, it’s difficult to proofread your own work. This has certainly come home to me lately.

First, in March I published the e-book version of Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles. I did much proofreading of the text, especially in the two longest articles, which were from optical scans and had all the usually scanning errors in abundance.  In April I was putting the print book together, which included my first print cover creation using the graphic arts program G.I.M.P. I posted the cover to my self-publishing diary at the Absolute Write forums, and a person pointed out a typo: Enclyclopedia instead of Encyclopedia. It wasn’t published as a print book yet, which made it easy to change. I clicked the “publish” button in April.

After I did, I had an odd feeling that I didn’t remember the contents of one article. I was pretty sure I had proofread all the articles twice, and the two difficult ones three times. I pulled out the print book and read that article. Sure enough, somehow I had skipped that in the proofreading. I then went through it, and found one optical scanning error. Not awful, but something I shouldn’t have let slipped through. I haven’t yet corrected it and uploaded revised versions for print and e-book.

Then, earlier this month I published my short story “It Happened At The Burger Joint“. Shortly after I did I posted about it on my Facebook personal page and author page. A FB friend pointed out to me a typo on the description. I think it’s a “the” that should be “they”. Since I was waiting on the Smashwords premium catalog approval, I decided to wait to fix the typo until I had that. That approval has come through, but busyness has prevented me from fixing the typo.

And last, in October 2012 I published the e-book version of The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 1. It’s a novella, not a full length novel. I’ve had only eight e-book sales of it. Finally last month and this I worked on completing the print version and getting it up for sale. I did that, ordered the proof copy, and did some spot reading. Found two typos, not awful ones. I decided to go ahead and publish it with the typos and fix them with a revised version ASAP. It went on sale around June 8.

My wife hasn’t read it, so last Saturday we read it aloud to each other, each taking a chapter or two and switching off. As we were reading, here and there we found a typo. At a few other places I noted where I could have worded something better. We marked those as I went along. Last Sunday I made the changes in the print book and uploaded the new version. It went live Monday (yesterday) evening. Error free? I hope so, but make no such claim. Since then I’ve typed the corrections in the Kindle version and uploaded them. The revised version went live sometime during the evening. Tonight I hope to make the corrections to the Smashwords edition.

These are way too many typos. I realize that even books by trade publishers have typos, that proofreaders are fallible people who don’t catch every error. But doggone it, I have to do a better job than that.

Carlyle, self-publishing, The Gutter Chronicles, Writing

More On Creating Book Covers

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I now know enough about using G.I.M.P. to create book covers to be considered dangerous. Last night, on coming home from the office, since the wife was resting and there was no immediate need on either of our parts for supper, I went straight to The Dungeon and began tweaking my two latest book covers. The one for Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles about killed me to have to do, since it had been accepted on first submission. But the glaring typo right on the front cover had to be fixed. I also decided to add some quotation marks to the back cover.

I made the tweaks, saved it in three different file formats, and resubmitted it to CreateSpace. At the same time I resubmitted the interior of the book, which needed two typos corrected and a minor tweak to the margins. So here’s the final cover for TCEEA.

TCEEA print cover 01

After that, I went back to the cover for The Gutter Chronicles. Even though it’s an e-book cover (at this point, at least) and thus should be easier than a print book cover, I’m finding it harder. The problem is the text I’m pasting over the photo of the computer monitor needs to be put in a double perspective view. It’s tilted back from bottom to top and from right to left. This looks like it should be easy with G.I.M.P. You just select the text layer, call for Transform Tools > Perspective from the menu, grab the four corners of the layers one at time, layer by layer, and click Transform.

The problem is, my text is in several layers. This is because the normal spacing between lines of text in a word processor (and the G.I.M.P. text entering window is a simple word processor) is too great for them to look good. Printers call this “leading,” and so I put each major line of text into separate layers (text boxes) and move them closer together than a word processor will allow. But then, in doing the double perspective work, I need to do that with each layer of text.

That wouldn’t be a problem, I imagine, if I understood what I’m doing. when I grab the corners and move them, a table of six numbers changes, the numbers going from zeroes to other numbers, some positive, some negative. The numbers are to five significant digits, and control of the mouse is such that getting the edges of the text in the right place is difficult. Fortunately you can undo and re-do to your heart’s content.

Of the five text layers, only one seems to be in exactly the right spot. So I wrote down the six numbers for that one, and went to work on the others, but the mouse control to get the numbers on those other layers to be perfect is impossible. And you can’t just click on the table and enter the perspective numbers you want. Thus, I have five layers of text, one at a perfect perspective and four at odd perspectives. Here’s where the cover stands now.

TGC-Vol 1 Cover

You can see how the lines of text aren’t all at the right perspective. My name on the “nameplate” is good, but the others are all askew. I’m sure G.I.M.P. has a way to handle that. There are Path commands, which perhaps allows one layer to have the same attributes of another layer. Maybe there’s a way to get into that table of perspective numbers and enter them, and—poof—the layer will go to exactly the right perspective. I’m still learning, and have much, much more to learn.

But, for now, this is the cover. And, I just sold a copy! I posted the new cover and link to the Kindle version on Facebook, and one of the women in our Accounting Department bought one. We’ll see where it goes from here. I must get back to doing some writing, and set covers aside for a while, but more work in G.I.M.P. is not far away.

Carlyle, self-publishing, The Gutter Chronicles

More on Learning G.I.M.P.

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So I’m still working on learning G.I.M.P., and the whole process of creating book covers with graphics software of good quality, not with PowerPoint, which is borderline-suitable for e-book covers but not for print books. I downloaded the program, and at first sat there stunned at what I was looking at on the screen. Three windows, not touching each other, and no idea of what to do next.

As I’ve told people before, the only two things you really need to know about software is how to open the program and how to get help. I had the program open, and I had downloaded the user’s manual, so I opened that and started reading. The first twenty pages were about how the program came to be, who the creators were, and how to use it with various operating systems. Someone needs to know all that, I suppose; I just wanted to know how to create a book cover.

Eventually I came to some things I needed. How to create a new graphic image. How to manipulate the graphic once you had it open. I must confess to some impatience on my part. I didn’t read all that far into the manual before going back to the program and proceeding. I don’t know which way would have been faster for me. Normally I learn well from written instructions. The problem with these instructions, however, were they weren’t really explaining things. They assumed someone understood certain terms they were using. But I didn’t. So I decided to just dive in with the menu system and see what I could accomplish.

Slowly, mistake by mistake, my cover for the print version of Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles began to come together. Fortunately G.I.M.P. has very good “un-do” features (and re-do as well) that allow you to see exactly which step it was you did incorrectly and go back to how it was before that step. A lot of things I didn’t understand. Often I had to erase things I’d done and start over. Eventually I did ok, created the cover, submitted it, and CreateSpace said it met all specifications for a print cover. The first time! Yea!

Last night, with three-year-old grandson Ezra in the house (the third night now), I didn’t expect to get much done. But another cover I had to work on was for The Gutter Chronicles. Not a print cover right away, but an e-book cover. Smashwords didn’t like the one I had, and wouldn’t distribute the e-book to their premium catalog. Thus it won’t be for sale at places such as Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and others. The cover was this.

Gutter cover__2013-06-11

I had wanted to show a computer screen with a little bit of office showing around it, and the words of the book title and author name on the screen. I put the words on the screen, in the largest font possible, and took a couple of photos at high resolution. Unfortunately, the flash obscured the words on the screen. I should have figured on that. So I sweet-talked the Spiff Lady in the office to do that cover for me, and used it as a place-holder for a future cover. Since I’m learning G.I.M.P., the future is now. So last night, after Ezra went to bed, crying, I headed to The Dungeon and got to work. I had uploaded the photograph I wanted to use to Dropbox. My plan was to just paste the words I wanted over the computer screen, on a white background, to cover over the flash image and make it look like a computer screen. Of course, the screen was tilted backwards a little, and the camera was at a horizontal angle to the screen. This mean I’d have to put in something other than a rectangle, and that the words should also show this dual perspective.

That was both more difficult and easier than I expected. I thought I would have to jump through many hoops to make that happen, but a writer friend, Veronica Jones-Brown, who has created a couple of covers for me, said that this should be on the Transform menu, probably as “Perspective”. Sure enough it was. It took me a while to figure out how to use it, but I started to get the hang of it. I created the opaque white layer, sized it to match the computer monitor in the photo, dragged it to where it needed to be, and pulled two edges into the perspective needed. It wasn’t perfect, but it was close. Then I typed the words, in five separate text layers so that I could drag them where I needed them to be. Putting them in the same perspective as the monitor turned out to be difficult, and I don’t have it correct yet.

The other problem I had was that the monitor was too small, relative to the size of the full cover, to hold all the words and make them readable at small size. They would be okay at full size, but not in a thumbnail. So I decided to pull my name off the monitor, and create a black layer under the monitor to serve as a nameplate. I pulled it into perspective—not quite exact yet—and pasted my name in and pulled it to perspective as well. By this time I was a little handier with this perspective thing and the name looks good. I saved the graphic, and exported it also as PNG and JPEG files, saving them all to Dropbox. Showed it to the wife on my Nook, and she liked it.

So, here it is.

TGC Vol 1 - Cover

It’s not finished yet. Tonight, or this weekend, as Ezra allows, I’ll have to tweak it in several areas. The white line along the right side isn’t supposed to be there, and I need to improve the perspective on most of the layers. But, at this stage of my cover creation “career,” I’m not unhappy with this.

One thing I decided to do, at the last minute, was add “P.E.” to my nameplate. Non-engineers won’t understand, but engineers will, and that’s a good chunk of my target audience.

Carlyle, self-publishing

Learning GIMP

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PowerPoint works well enough for e-book covers, but not for print book. The reason is PowerPoint produces graphics that will print at 72 to 96 dpi (dots per inch), whereas a print cover should really print at 300 dpi. And it’s not a matter of creating the cover in PowerPoint, loading it into a good graphics editor, and printing it like that. The dpi won’t increase to print quality. At least that’s as I understand it.

So my choices with regard to a cover for my current book I want to get into print, Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles, were:

– Do it myself; or hire it done.

– If I do it myself, use Photoshop Elements, which I have on our laptop; or buy a full-fledged graphics editor; or download a free graphics editor, such as GIMP.

– If I do it myself, with any of those three choices, I’ll also have to learn how to use the program.

Since I need to know how to do covers, and since my wife often travels with the laptop, or is otherwise engaged with it, I decided to download GIMP and use that to produce print covers. I’ve heard nothing but good things about GIMP, that it’s more than adequate for cover productions, and that everyone who’s used it has been please with it. But before, when I downloaded GIMP, I was actually at a site masquerading as GIMP, and got a nasty virus from it. This time I asked out I.T. people for a link to the correct site (since they have GIMP on their work computers, I knew they knew the right one). I downloaded it late last week, and spent a lot of time on Friday and Saturday trying to figure it out. Then last night I knuckled down, using the small amount I learned, and created a cover. Here it is:

TCEEA print cover 01

I’m not saying it’s great art, or that it will win any self-published cover awards, or that it’s even the one I’ll use. I lost the “pedestal” from the e-book cover, as I don’t see how to do that in GIMP (something to learn at some point). But I think today I’ll create a PDF from it and upload it to CreateSpace and see if it passes muster. If it does, I’ll at least use it as the cover for the proof copy.