Category Archives: Carlyle

Beware the Introduction

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 I included a quote from C.S. Lewis, even though the book was about USA historical documents.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.

Acquiring an Editor’s Eye

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.

3 Years of Self-Publishing

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.

 

Progress on the Carlyle Book

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.

Still Playing With Covers

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.

 

 

 

Three-part Writing Problem

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.

Researching for works far in the future

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.

Solitude

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.

The Roller-Coaster Ride Continues

…I feel as of old that the only true enemy I have to struggle with is the unreason within myself. If I have given s[uch] things harbour within me I must with pain cast them out again.

Thus wrote Thomas Carlyle on August 27, 1833 in a letter to his brother John. I read this today, not for the first time, as I was doing some more research into the relationship of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle. The article I wrote and recently submitted to BiblioBuffet (now word yet, BTW) dealt with Emerson’s first letter to Carlyle after they met. I wanted to research more about their meeting, as background for the next of these articles or to perhaps expand and re-market the article already written. But I prate.

I found Carlyle’s words to be exactly what I needed today, for again I’m on the writing roller-coaster ride. Despite adding several new articles to Suite101.com as of late, page views are not really growing (just a little, perhaps), and revenues have quit growing and are regressing. For Feb 7-9 I earned 10 lousy cents. For all my 64,800 or so words posted there in a little less than ten months, I’ve earned just over $60 dollars, not including the one contest I won. That’s less than 1/10th of a cent per word, and less than $1.00 per article in total. The Suite gurus say $1.00 per article per month is the site average. I’m sure skewing the curve on the low side.

On days like this it doesn’t seem that I should continue to write there, if at all. Why bother? Fiction is too difficult to break in. Bible studies are saturated. Non-fiction requires credentials. Poetry is a non-starter. Political essays are fun but where’s the money in that? And freelancing requires so much work and so much patience and such a long lead time to earn any money or build any platform that it doesn’t seem worth it.

The only thing that recommends writing to me is that I enjoy doing it. Is that enough?

Carlyle seems to have ridden the same roller-coaster I have, or should I say I’m on the same one he rode almost 180 years ago. That wasn’t his first time. But is it “unreason within myself” to question whether this writing thing I so enjoy is something I should pursue for economic gain, or for ministry? I don’t know. I guess I’ll spend a couple of weeks considering this.

Meanwhile I will still write articles for Suite, so long as I have subjects to write on. This afternoon I wrote and published one about construction engineering; this evening I wrote and published one about pollution prevention at construction sites. I have perhaps twenty more articles cued up, some of the research already begun or done from my regular course of vocational duties. I don’t know how long I’ll keep it up, but I will for a while.

Although my novel in progress is open on my computer. I have a new poem rolling around somewhere inside my skull, waiting to land for a while at the correct side of my brain and in the correct lobe. A friend is reviewing one of my incomplete Bible studies, and I just borrowed a book from the pastor for research for another. So Suite better start making economic sense, if it wants me to continue.

The Sweetest Fruit

I am today continuing to draw nuggets of wisdom from Thomas Carlyle’s 31 March 1829 letter to Henry Inglis. I wish we had Inglis’ letter to Carlyle that spawned this letter, but we have only Carlyle’s response. Inglis must have asked for some advice on writing, for Carlyle responded:

As to writing, for the present, I will neither advise nor dissuade you. If you have any heartfelt interest in any literary matter; any idea that gives you no rest till it be uttered, commit it to paper, and if circumstances favour, to the Press, the sooner the better. Only if you have no such interest, no such idea, do not in any wise regard it as a misfortune (most probably it is a blessing, for the sweetest fruit is longest in ripening) but simply as a sign that your vocation as yet is not to impart but to acquire. Meanwhile tell me always what you project and accomplish in the way of study and reading; and for your own private use, keep plentiful Notebooks, on which let your pen be often occupied.

Ah, Thomas, you write to me! You say you don’t provide any advice, at least you will not “advise nor dissuade” in the matter whether to pursue writing. But you say to commit to paper any idea which seems good to my mind as a potential writing topic. Good, this accords with what I am doing. Just this morning I made a list of the Bible study/small group study guides that have been rolling around in my mind. I have most of these on a capture sheet, somewhere (probably in a certain, unlabeled notebook on my closet shelf; I can picture where that is.

You also say “commit…if circumstances favour, to the Press”, i.e. seek to have that idea published. That’s exactly where I am, writing but not seeking publication. Perhaps this effort in this time will result in sweeter fruit. If not, it should result in my sweeter disposition.

Meanwhile, Thomas, for my own private use, I am keeping plentiful notebooks, on which my pen is frequently occupied.