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.

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.

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.