Three days and no blog post. Experts in the publishing industry suggest keeping a blog updated more frequently than that. I’ve been very busy, mostly with publishing activities. The graphics for The Candy Store Generation continue to haunt me, sapping my time and energy. I can’t remember specifics of all I’ve written here, so I won’t say much; just that in the attempt to improve the graphics myself, I clicked on a disguised link and downloaded a particularly nasty virus. I think that is now all behind, and the computer restored with the help of on-line technicians.

But the bad graphics are still with me. Over the last couple of days a woman in my office is helping me. She’s our graphic arts person, the one who does the detailed work on our marketing materials. I had thought about asking her, but that would have meant asking her to use company computers and software for personal use. I can do that myself within corporate guidelines for that behavior, but didn’t want to ask another to do that.

She took my Excel graphs and went through the process: create the PDF at 300 dpi or better; load it in Photoshop to crop, resize, and save as a jpeg (rather than as a TIFF); shoot it back to me to insert in the drawings. Except when I printed them at book size, in both black & white and color, the grid lines of the graph had disappeared.

She and I looked at it and decided I needed to thicken the grid lines in Excel. They could be thickened in Photoshop, but that would put the work on her, not me. So I did that to one graph, send it to her, and in less than three minutes she sent me the jpeg, but without the resizing. It’s critical to do the resizing in the graphic arts program because any resizing in Word destroys the dpi settings.

So today I’ll have her resize that one graph and print it. If it seems to be okay, I’ll fix the grid lines in the other graphs on my noon hour and get them to her. By the end of the day I’ll have those nine or so graphics at print quality. Three are already there. That will leave the things I received from CBO or captured from websites. I think only two or three of those are what I would consider poor quality. I’ll have to make a decision at that point.

In all of this I haven’t really felt like writing—until last night. I find the tasks of writing and publishing don’t mix well for me. Kind of like when I was doing construction observation half-days. I found I couldn’t concentrate on office things the other parts of the day; my work suffered. I’ve found the same is true with writing and publishing.

But last night I put all publishing tasks aside and decided just to write. I went back to the short story I started a few weeks ago, left hanging at 1,050 words, at the end of the first scene. I re-read that and made some good corrections. Then I tackled the next scene. In not too much more than an hour of writing, that was done and the story stands at 1,950 words. I may re-read it tonight and think it’s junk, but I’m pleased with that.

Tonight I may switch back to some publishing things. Or maybe I’ll add one small scene to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. Either way, I feel much, much better about my writing life after the last two days. Maybe I’ll make it.

As of last Thursday or Friday, I finished the bulk of the text on my non-fiction book, The Candy Store Generation. I still have three chapters to tweak a little, where I’ve thought of something to add but haven’t done it yet. I started on one of those places yesterday. These will be enhancements or completion of thoughts I left hanging. After that, it’s print and re-read. My main fear is I have repeated myself extensively, and a 40,500 word book only needs to be 35,000. It will take several nights reading almost continuously to know that.

At that point I hope to improve some of the graphics. Several are copied from Congressional Budget Office reports available on-line. Most of them turned out well, but a couple are blurry because they are of poor quality in the original. I contacted CBO last week about getting some clearer copies. Six days later and no word yet. If I don’t get better graphs, I can go with those I have. And, I can always contact my congressman. His local office is only three or four miles from my office.

Yesterday I sent the manuscript for TCSG to a book designer, to let him assess whether the graphics will give problems for an e-book, as well as to give me a cost for the internal design/formatting. I formatted the four items myself that I currently have listed, but don’t think I want to tackle this one. I have the e-book cover in-hand, but not the print book cover yet.

In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People is done, and is with an editor right now. Today is day fourteen of the wait. Although this micro-press is considering it, I’m assuming I’ll end up self-publishing it (my inner pessimist being what he is). If so, I’ll do one more read-through, then all I’ll need is the covers for e-book and print book. I’ll wait until about July 1 for the editor, then forge ahead.

My regular column for Buildipedia.com is being cut from twice a month to once a month beginning in July. Bummer. I’ve been enjoying the money from it. I’m actually thinking of pulling some of those thoughts together and writing a construction administration book, maybe in 2013 or 2014. The columns I did are considered work-for-hire, so I can’t use them verbatim.

And, I prepared and uploaded my first article for Decoded Science, a re-work of an article I did for Suite101.com. But the DecSci policy has changed since I was approved to write there, and they no longer accept previously published articles. So, back to the drawing board—or the writing board I should say. I have an idea for a short series of articles there. I wasn’t planning on doing the research and writing quite so soon as this, but will think about it.

With my two main projects coming to an end, I’ll soon be moving on to the next one. More on that in the next post.

Saturday afternoon I finished reading through In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, marking locations to improve the text. Most of the edits were for typos, improving odd sentence structure, and fixing name problems. By that I mean where I used people’s names too much in dialogue. Also, I found one embarrassing error in a name, where I changed it very early on in the writing but somehow missed one place. The MS Word search and replace feature tells me that was the only straggler.

I finished typing the edits yesterday afternoon. I’ll print it today and set it aside for a couple of weeks. Actually, I’m not sure how long that will be. The editor I e-mailed three chapters and a synopsis to said he was sending the chapters to “readers,” and they would “get back to me in a few weeks.” While I’m reconciled that I will probably self-publish this, I’m willing to delay a little to let that run its course.

Meanwhile, I have to be writing. So yesterday I switched back to my non-fiction work-in-progress, The Candy Store Generation”. I added 400 words to it last night, coming close to finishing Chapter 5, Boomer Corporations. I still have research to do on that, to plug a hole reserved for it about 1/4 of the way into the chapter. But the words are almost done.

I haven’t been thinking of TCSG for over a month, and I’ve actually forgotten where I was in it. I know I’m shooting for 40,000 words, and that I’m at 32,800 now, implying another 7,200 to go. But that word count is a target only. I’m thinking the book may fall short of that and be at a logical concluding point.

I’d really like to get this done and published in time to perhaps ride the coattails of the current election cycle. Not that I think it will be a huge seller or have an impact on the election, but while people’s attention is on politics, it probably has a better chance at success.

Depending on how the research goes, I should be able to have it done in a month or less. I can then take up to a month to edit it, and try to have it published by mid-July. That’s later than I hoped, but it’s doable. I would then try to have FTSP out a couple of weeks later, still well within baseball season.

My plans are then to work on two short stories. One will be in my Danny Tompkins series, on teenage grief. It will probably be the last one. The other will be the first of what could become a series, but which might be a singleton. It will be an espionage story set in Cranston, RI (my hometown), with the heroine having the name of a classmate of mine, with her permission. I’ve written the first two paragraphs of this, and have been plotting it in my mind.

I don’t know where this will lead. If I like the way it turns out, I could turn it into a series, having this female CIA operative go to various places I have been overseas. That would be a way to use these experiences in my writing, something I’ve been wondering how to do.

After that, assuming I’m not brain-dead, I have a choice between three or four projects. I had been thinking about working on another novel, an espionage one, tentatively titled China Tour. I also see a possibility of working on more volumes in the Documenting America brand. I started a little research on what could be a Civil War edition of that. Given that we are at the sesquicentennial of that conflict, the timing is good.

However, I may just go ahead and write a sequel to FTSP. My friend Gary, who was a beta reader, said, “The ending says a lot but leaves much unsaid as well.  That’s a perfect setup for a sequel.” As I wrote in the past, I hadn’t really thought about that, and didn’t consciously write the end to launch a sequel. But I’ve looked at it, and he’s right. When I wrote out, in manuscript, all the loose ends, I came up with more than enough to make a similar length novel. The penultimate scene near the end has come to mine—indeed, I’ve had trouble getting it out of my mind. Even a potential title has reared up.

So that’s where I may be going. No shortage of work. And to think, back in 2000, I just wanted to tell a single story. Now it’s a snowball running downhill.

As I reported in my last post, I had trouble writing this week. Receiving the subpoena to give a deposition in a lawsuit (our company is involved only as witnesses at this point, and all the attorneys believe it will stay that way) resulted in my spending a lot of energy in preparation. Reading through the correspondence on the project made me sad, as I saw things go downhill through the material in my files.

Then there was the problem of the Ford dealership not getting my pick-up repaired. I brought it in for a tune-up last Tuesday, April 10. I didn’t get it back till yesterday, April 19. I covered that long story in a metaphors of life post at my other blog, An Arrow Through the Air.

So I arrived home each night mentally spent and, to a lesser extent, physically exhausted. After simple meals (Lynda is away), went to The Dungeon, in the quiet house, determined to write a thousand or more words. I managed to do that pre-subpoena, but not after.

The Candy Store Generation stared at me from the computer, a mere 4,000 to 10,000 words away from being finished. But I was lucky if I could add 100 words. The mental energy needed to add any significant amount to it just wasn’t there. I was at the point where I need a little more research to flesh out two chapters, and a part of another. With that research in hand I think I can knock out the chapters, but there’s writing to be done on them even without the research; I couldn’t do it.

It wasn’t writer’s block, it was just mental distraction. And tiredness. I spent some time playing mindless computer games, trying to concentrate on reading writing/publishing blogs, but making little progress. Then I remembered: I have another book to work on: In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. I had a review from a beta reader, who made some good suggestions, especially about when I called the protagonist by what name: first only, first diminutive, first nickname, first and last, last only.

That solved my dilemma. Wednesday night I began working through that, and got a little more than half through the book. Thursday night I picked it up again, and finished it, making a few other small edits along the way. I now think I’m consistent with using his name, and have all characters call him by what they would in a real life situations. I had some professional situations where he was called by his first name, when the speaker really would have said his last name.

The book now stands ready for a final read-through—or almost so. I still need to coordinate the hero’s won-loss record as a pitcher, and make sure I have the right number of wins for the time of year. I also have to dial back his number of wins a little, to something that’s extraordinary but still believable. What I had was over the top for the modern baseball era.

Tonight I’ll start the read-through, but will mainly work on the baseball season consistency issues. I expect that to take most of the weekend, including marking whatever edits are needed. That I think my brain can handle, and save the other book until after the deposition.

The experts in the industry say you should stick to one genre, not spread yourself around several. That’s because your “fans”—one you have fans—will be expecting you to produce another book just like the one they already liked. I know I should do that, but in this case I’m glad I had something different to work on, and keep some production going during a difficult time.