Category Archives: Carlyle

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.

Carlyle, Writing

Beware the Introduction

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Every non-fiction book needs one: an Introduction. A section that tells what the author’s purposes are with the book, what they hope to accomplish, what the reader will take away from it. Sometimes the Introduction is labeled as Chapter 1, but it’s still an Introduction.

I’ve read many books that have introductions, some short, some lengthy; some interesting, some boring. Sometimes the Introduction is the best part of the book. Sometimes the Introduction is so long it constitutes a book in its own right. I have a book on Old Testament pseudopigrapha, and the Introduction is about as long and as interesting as Leviticus. Then there’s the Introduction to Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, which is the first chapter. It’s fairly long, but perhaps not in relation to this three-volume book. For sure it is dry reading, a hindrance to me getting into the book.

Introductions have proven difficult for many writers. I recall reading in one of Charles Lamb’s letters about his friend, George Dyer, who had written and published a book of his poetry. He had a long Introduction—80 pages sticks in my mind. When reading the proofs off the press, before actually releasing the book, Dyer found an error in the Introduction. Lamb doesn’t say what the error was, but since the type had been set, the Introduction couldn’t be changes. All Dyer could do was eliminate the Introduction and let the poems stand on their own. This he did, at his own cost, probably as much as the profits he hoped to gain from the book. Yes, writer, Beware the Introduction!

In my book Documenting America I had an Introduction. I did exactly what I described in the first paragraph. I included a quote from C.S. Lewis, even though the book was about USA historical documents. I thought it was pretty good: fairly short, describing why I was writing the book. For The Candy Store Generation the first chapter served as the Introduction. In this I gave the record of how the idea for the book came to me. The chapter was about the same length as chapters forming the main contents of the book. Again, I was pleased with it.

For my current non-fiction book, Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles, I took a long time to decide what to do about an introduction. First I uploaded the printer’s notice and editor’s Introduction from the 1897 book that included about half the total material in the book. That was a given activity. I knew I needed to do something more, but what? After considerable thought, I decided to pull in some apt quotes from a handful of Carlyle’s letters from the time when he began to write these articles. I also pulled in an important footnote from The Carlyle Letters Online. Those things gave me the ideas I needed to flesh out an Introduction, and I did so.

It’s not terribly long: about five pages for a 220 or so page book. It gives my reason for having published the book and the methodology I used. I avoided using the royal “we” in it, or avoiding first person all together and going with totally passive voice. So from that standpoint it doesn’t meet the criteria of a scholarly Introduction. But it’s mine; it does what I want it to; and the few people who I’ve shown it to have had few comments.

I have one more night of editing tasks on the e-book, and it’s ready then to upload to Amazon. It could be live and for sale a day and a half from when I post this. Then it will be on to other things, things that don’t need an Introduction.

Carlyle, critique group, poetry, self-publishing, Writing

Acquiring an Editor’s Eye

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MEditing Illustration 03y time in the poetry wars, as I call the days I spent at Poem Kingdom, was my first time to begin to acquire what I recently termed an “editor’s eye”. At that site I critiqued hundreds of poems, first as a participant, later as a moderator and still later as an administrator. That actually wasn’t my first time and place to do that. I had already been critiquing at Sonnet Central for a few months, and had been in a writing critique group for a couple of years.

After Poem Kingdom there was Poem Train (with it’s critique forum Café Poetica), Poem 911 (which died in the whole EZ Boards hacking fiasco), and Absolute Write’s Poetry Critique Forum. In all of these I’d estimate that I critiqued somewhere around 1,000 poems. No, I don’t think I’m exaggerating. I copied off a bunch of them, but not all I’m sure, and have them in notebooks, preserved for posterity and research, should I become a famous author who someone ever wants to research.

Editing Illustration 02A thousand critiques at an average of perhaps 300 words each is 300,000 words. If anything I’m probably short with that. That’s a lot of time and effort given to critiquing. What I did was analyze the poem as a work-in-progress. Literary criticism—whatever that is exactly—was not the goal, but rather helping the poet bring the poem to a state of completion as the best poem possible for the subject matter and desires of the poet. In short, it was to be an editor. Not a cheerleader. Not a critic. But an editor.

During the years, ever since around 1998, I’ve also been in writers critique groups in real life, and one time on-line. It was the same thing: look at works in progress and consider how they might be made better in the writer’s quest for publication. These weren’t written, or at least not type-written and posted for all the world to see. A handful of us sat around a table and marked manuscripts in pen/pencil and gave oral crits. Still, it was the same type of editing, it seems to me. Sometimes I was most concerned with what is essentially proofreading. At other times it was line edits: looking at grammar and sentence structure to see how the writer’s intent can be better communicated. Still other times it was structural edits. I remember critiquing one piece at an e-mail critique group where the woman described a character as timid. Then she had the girl go up to a fellow student she knew of but didn’t know and offer help to her. It was completely out of character. I pointed that out; I’d call it a structural edit. Still other times I’d do a big picture edit, such as is the plot interesting? Are there holes or conflicts in the plot? Those kinds of things. Different types of edits as the situation arose.

Now I’m editing my next publishing project, a book titled Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles. These are public domain articles that I found in five different places, plus a few notes that others have written about them (explanatory notes, not critique). I know I’ve written about this project before. These twenty-one articles have never been gathered before, so I decided to do so and add it to the Carlyle bibliography. I pulled the publisher’s note and editor’s introduction from the 1897 re-printing of sixteen of them, and pulled some references to them that Carlyle made in his own letters. But I knew I needed to write an introduction of my own. So I did. Last night I sent the much-critiqued Intro to my critique group, which meets next Tuesday. We’ll see what they say.

Editing Illustration 01But I’ve had other things to do as well, things that an editor would do. Such trivial things as deciding how much info to give about each article. How the text should appear on the page. Whether to break up long paragraphs (I didn’t), whether to modernize archaic punctuation techniques (I did). How to make lists and tables work best in modern typesetting and e-book formats. I suppose some of this is book production, but it feels like editing to me.

So through all of this I’ve been acquiring my editor’s eye. They (that is, various experts and claimed-to-be experts) advise that one who self publishes should hire an editor before ever publishing their works. I think that’s good advice, in general, but a very expensive practice. Simple line editing for an average length probably costs $300 dollars. Add proofreading, structural edit, and big picture edit, and you will have a large editing bill. I don’t know about others, but I don’t have $500 or $1000 to pay for editing. Therefore I just have to do the best job of producing the book with the skills I have.

So maybe all my editing work through the years, even that from before I realized I was editing, is helping me with my self publishing. I’d like to think so.

Carlyle, self-publishing

3 Years of Self-Publishing

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Today is the third anniversary of when I put my first self-published item up for people to buy. It’s been a wild ride. Not exactly successful, nor can I say, I suppose, unsuccessful. I have another year to go on this experiment before I make some hard decisions.

Also, I’m going to insert here a small image of the draft cover of my Thomas Carlyle book, so that I can link it at the Absolute Write forums and get some critique on it.

 

Carlyle

Progress on the Carlyle Book

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Good heavens! The Internet is down at the office! How will anyone get anything done? Monday it was slow. Tuesday it was still slow, though seemed a little better than Monday. Now, Wednesday morning before the workday is to start, our intranet is working fine, but not the connection to the outside world.

Actually, most of our work is done off of our intranet, so most people should be good. Anyone planning to research something via the Internet is out of luck, for now.

Today I have scheduled to report on the progress I’m making on my Thomas Carlyle book. It is tentatively titled Carlyle Articles in the Edinburgh Encyclopedia. Except for the Introduction, it’s all public domain material. Carlyle wrote twenty articles for this work, from 1820 to 1823, plus translated one long article, for a total of twenty-one contributions. Sixteen of these were attributed to him in the encyclopedia. The others were identified by researchers over the years (the last in 1963) as belonging to him, based on references in his correspondence.

In 1897, seventeen of these were republished in Montaigne and Other Essays, Chiefly Biographical. The other four articles have never been republished, except in later editions of the Encyclopedia.

At the Absolute Write forums, one of the moderators has suggested that a way to gain knowledge and experience in formatting self-published books is to take some book in the public domain and republish it. She has encouraged people to do that on multiple occasions. While I’ve already formatted and published thirteen items as e-books, five of those also as print books, I’m not exactly inexperienced. But I can always improve, and the moderator’s suggestion seemed to be a good one.

I decided to throw a twist into it, however. Since all twenty-one of Carlyle’s encyclopedia articles do not seem to have ever been gathered into one volume, I decided to be the one to do it. They are all available on-line, so gathering them wasn’t too difficult. Text of the ones reprinted in 1897 was in good shape. Putting them into a word processing document was easy, and they formatted quite nicely.

The other four, however, turned out to be a major headache. These four include the two longest, “Persia” and “Political Economy” (the translation), which account for almost half of the total encyclopedia article material by Carlyle. The problems stemmed partly from having to bring the text into the word processor document in batches rather than as a whole. This was time consuming, and I made mistakes and had to do much over.

The other problem is that these four articles were optically scanned, not typeset as the other seventeen were. Optical scanning then converted to text is usually rife with errors: e becomes c, h becomes b, w becomes Av, etc. So all of this material, almost half of the total book, had to be proofread with great care. I finished the third round of proofreading about a week ago. I’m sure I didn’t catch everything, but I believe I did a good job.

Now I’m typing the corrections, taking about twenty to thirty minutes a night for it. After that will come a spell check of the entire document, just to see if I missed a “his” that became “bis” in the optical scan and conversion. That won’t catch a “are” that became “arc”, but to look for those I may do some search and replace and hope to catch the worst of them. Also I’m finding a few places where I entered a note that said something like [<<<<<>>>>>]. However, checking those places against the on-line documents I can access now, I find all those places have clear text. Whatever I saw originally that caused me to insert those notes is no longer a problem, and I was able to get rid of them. However, I’ll do a search for those characters and make sure I haven’t overlooked any.

That brings me down to the Introduction. I’m including the introduction from the 1897 book, along with the printer’s notice. However, the book needs an Introduction. Having read many books with introductions that seem endless, I’m determined to keep it short. The one I’ve written is four 8.5×11 pages, or maybe as many as eight pages in a print book. That’s plenty long in my opinion. I ran this by a reader-friend for an evaluation. He suggested some changes, which I’ve already made, but I’m not quite done. Some info on each article that I was going to prepend to the articles I’m now thinking about putting in a table in the Introduction. In fact, I’ll do that, then run it by my friend again to see how it reads. I expect to do that tomorrow evening.

So tonight’s work will be to finish typing the proofreading edits. Tomorrow’s work will be completing the Introduction and firing that off. Friday night will include tidying up the file to get rid of stray formats. Assuming I hear back from my friend on the Introduction, Saturday will be the day that I save the document out to e-book and print book files, and begin formatting each. The print book will be essentially already formatted and mainly require setting up a Table of Contents and whatever size page and margins I chose. The e-book formatting will be a matter of stripping headers and footers and creating an interactive TOC.

For both books I’ll have to add an about the author section and list of other works. For the e-books that goes at the end, for the print book at the beginning. Also for the e-book I’ll have to create some tables that I’ll import as graphic files, since most e-book readers don’t support tables based on cells and tab spacing.

Then it will be on to the covers. The e-book cover is done, unless I decide to tweak it a little. I may. The print book cover is another story. I’ve written the back cover copy (subject to edit), but creating a print book cover is something I haven’t learned to do yet. I have some software I can use to do it if I can just learn it. I’m not going for fancy on this one; utilitarian will do nicely.

So that’s the status. If I had to guess I’d say I’ll be publishing in mid-March. I have a business trip the end of February that will cause me to lose close to a week. Thus I’m within my publishing plan.
Sorry for the long, dryasdust post, but I wanted to get this all down.

Carlyle, self-publishing

Still Playing With Covers

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Words have eluded me lately, as I haven’t really felt like knuckling down and advancing any of my works-in-progress—except for proofreading the Carlyle public domain book.

So in a few spare moments here and there I continue to work on creating book covers. As I’ve said before (at least I think I’ve said before), I seem to have little talent in the graphic arts, and for sure I have almost no skills and experience with graphic arts software. But I can’t keep begging covers forever, so, in the absence of a bestseller or other windfall, if I want to continue to self-publish I need to learn how to do covers.

My last post showed an early attempt at a cover for the professional essay I about have ready to publish. It wasn’t really the look I was going for. This version is closer, and may be the one I go with. Based on comments received I got rid of the gimmicky 10. I also found the background I wanted, and changed the proportion of the figure. As I say, I think this is close now, or possibly final. Fortunately, for a professional essay flashy isn’t necessary.

The next one I decided to work on is the one for the Carlyle encyclopedia articles. In other posts I’ve indicated this book is scheduled for sometime in the first quarter of 2014. I don’t know that I expect much out of it, but it’s just something I want to do. An affectation, perhaps. But a cover concept came to mind; I sketched it; and then I decided to try to create it using PowerPoint as my low-end graphic arts program. Here are two versions of it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m in no hurry for this one. My concept is for the image of the young Carlyle to sit on a twisted pedestal. Getting it right will take some time. I may not be able to do it with a program as limited as PowerPoint; I may not be able to do it at all. But I’m having some fun trying, so maybe that’s enough for now.

 

 

 

Carlyle, Harmony of the gospels, Operation Lotus Sunday, Writing

Three-part Writing Problem

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Or four parts if you include my two blogs as another part, or if you count them as two then actually five parts.

I continue to read in Carlyle’s works, even going so far as to prepare my own bibliography of his works, and to purchase a printed bibliography. I found the ones on-line to be very inadequate. Even the one I downloaded from Google books, published in 1881, had a lot of gaps, as did the 1919 one I also downloaded. The 1989 one I ordered came, and it seems to be quite complete. From it I’m completing my bibliography, trying at the same time to figure out how to structure it. Each evening I try to read a few pages in Correspondence Between Goethe and Carlyle. This is going well, despite many formatting problems with the e-book. I should finish this by this coming weekend.

I need to resume my work on China Tour, and bring that to completion. As I think I said previously I have only 3.7 chapters to go, and I know pretty much what I want to write. Scenes from these chapters dance in my head. I believe I have the method worked out whereby the goals of both the CIA couple and the Bible smuggling couple are achieved. Even the denouement is clear to me. About ten days ago I realized I had a major omission in an early chapter, dealing with when the two couples meet and how they resolve a particular problem. The additions to a specific scene have at last come to me, and now I need to write it.

Then today, in my before work hours, I resumed work on my Harmony of the Gospels. It’s been a while since I wrote about that on the blog, and I haven’t touched it since last June. This is more a labor of love and a self-study aid. I’m down to having one appendix to write, that of the crucifixion. Today I wrote a few words in it, and pulled up a reference I downloaded many months ago and began reading it. I refreshed my memory of what needs to go into this appendix. I basically have about 30 minutes a day to work on this. I suspect it will take me two weeks, at that rate, to write this appendix.

I’d really like to add a couple of essays to the Harmony, not necessarily tied to specific chapters or times in Jesus’ life, but to some general topic, such as why try to harmonize the gospels at all. I started one of those over a year ago, and must see where it stands.

Then my blogs demand to be worked in. I’m trying to post at a six-per-week frequency: three to each blog, with one day off. I haven’t arrived there yet, generally achieving four per week, sometimes even three. I want to keep working on that schedule.

But for right now, here is how I plan on dividing my writing time.

  • Spend 30 minutes a day before work on the appendices and essays of the Harmony.
  • Spend 30 minutes a day (max) during the lunch hour on my Carlyle research, though toward what end I’m still not sure. This will never end until I make an end of it.
  • Spend the rest of my writing time, which is whatever minutes I can carve out of the evening and weekend monoliths, on China Tour until it is finished.
  • In whatever moments I can further find, perhaps in the pieces chipped away from the monoliths, to write six blog posts a week.

This is a worthy goal, one which I will work hard to make into a reality.

Carlyle

Researching for works far in the future

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For the last three or four weeks—I guess since I broke off from writing China Tour on Feb 4 as we prepared for our trip—my reading has been mainly for research.

Not research for China Tour, though I do have some materials on hand that I should be reading to flesh out national references and actual sights the Brownwells and the Whites would have seen. Not in the civil war volume of The Annals of America, which might lead me to good source material for a civil war edition of Documenting America. And not in the book on colonial America that I started sometime last year, and might serve as some background for a different edition of Documenting America.

No, all of those would make sense. Since when did anything I do with my writing make sense? No, I’m reading in the works of Thomas Carlyle, and even in critical evaluation of his works. I doubt this will lead to any marketable book, or to any publishable article, any time soon.

When I received my Nook, I searched Barnes and Noble to see if they had free books (as Kindle has tons of free books). I found they did, and so I loaded up on some. Most of them were John Wesley works and Thomas Carlyle works. I read one of Wesley’s, the shifted to Carlyle. One of my writer friends had spoken highly of his On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History, so I decided to read that first. As of last night, I’m seven pages short of finishing.

It’s been an interesting read (sorry, Mrs. Rosen). Based on a series of lectures Carlyle gave in 1840, which were then cobbled up into a book in 1841, it has some diverse subject matter. I can see some essays coming from it, and certainly a number of blog posts. One thing I found was a general lack of an on-line bibliography of Carlyle’s works, so I put one together. I since learned of one published in 1989, so I ordered it used and it should be here any day. It will be interesting to see how comprehensive the bibliography I prepared is. But I can’t see any of this giving any significant, immediate boost to my writing career.

So why am I doing it? Interest? Trying to be erudite? A sense that this is an important writer (despite his later lapse into racism; or maybe he’s important for that reason, to learn how it happened and avoid it)? That it seems my great-grand uncle David Sexton, based on books he left behind, was interested in Carlyle?

I wish I knew. I’ll finish Heroes tonight and start planning out some blog posts on it. The bibliography will come tomorrow or Thursday; I’ll take a few days to compare it to my list and most likely make some adjustments. Once all that is done, I’m hoping this interest in Carlyle will fade, at least somewhat, and I can get back to more profitable research and writing.

But, in doing this now, I’m happy. And that should count for something.

Carlyle, Wesley, Writing

Solitude

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A curious convergence today caused me to read two items on the same subject from greatly different locations. Literary agent Rachelle Gardner today posted to her blog an article titled The Lonely Life of the Writer. Her point is that, since the largest part of the world doesn’t understand what it’s like to be a writer or to seek publication, the writer is pretty much alone in those pursuits.

Then, looking for something to print and read during the lunch hour, I went to the Carlyle Letters On-line, pulled up a month in a target period for which I want to know more about Carlyle’s thoughts and pursuits, and I found this in a letter he addressed to a friend from his home town.

Zimmermann has written a book which he calls ‘the pleasures of solitude’: I would not have you to believe him: solitude in truth has few pleasures, uninterrupted solitude is full of pain.

So the solitude of the writer’s life is a converging subject in those two reads. Solitude can mean different things, however. As Rachelle Gardner used it, it was not being alone physically but being not understood by those we are around. Carlyle seems to mean it as the physical, though he quite possibly could mean either one or both.

Continuing in Carlyle’s letter, I find this interesting continuation of his thoughts.

But solitude, or company more distressing, is not the worst ingredient of this condition. The thought that one’s best days are hurrying darkly and uselessly away is yet more grievous. It is vain to deny it, my friend, I am altogether an unprofitable creature.

This reminds me of John Wesley’s statement in a letter to a woman friend, early in his life, about he feared passing through this life and not leaving his mark. Carlyle echoes this.

Perhaps this is a feeling more widespread among those who pursue the creative arts than I figured upon first discovering that Wesley quote. The time it takes from the decision to produce a written work that one hopes will impact the world until the time it actually does impact the world, a time of solitude of mind if not of body, is huge. No matter how short it may be it will seem long. Our words designed to entertain or inform reach no one for the longest time.

I have no real conclusion for this, no take-away value for the reader. Count this as a journal entry of an observer of his own writing life.