Category Archives: Headshots

Headshots, Writing

I Enjoy Editing

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Right now, or I guess I should say for the past several days, when not consumed by the busyness of life not related to writing, rather than writing I’ve been editing. I agreed to be a beta reader for a cousin who has completed a memoir, her sixth or seventh book. She has been beta reader for me a couple of times, and I was glad to finally be able to do this for her.

The memoir is painful to read, as her life had much trouble and trauma, things she had to overcome. I had some of that in my own life, but hers was different, more painful I think. Reading it has been hard. Until last night when I got to the point where she writes uplifting chapters about her Christian conversion. I have another 40 or 50 pages to go, which I hope to finish tonight. I was actually hoping to finish it last night, but a late start and a need to quit earlier than intended due to working on a sleep deficit put me behind where I wanted to be. Tonight, possibly I’ll finish, though I need to make a major grocery run tonight. We’ll see.

Some writers say they like to write, but they hate editing. They hate editing not only their own work but also the works of others. I don’t find it to be that way. Maybe all the editing I’ve had to do over the years for my engineering career has prepared me for editing in my creative writing. To me it’s an exciting thing to look at words on a page, figure out what the writer (myself or someone else) intended to communicate to the reader, and see if I can find a better way to say it.

A high school and college friend recently was one of my beta readers on Headshots. He sent me a couple of pages of notes, which identified some typos, and indicated places where he thought the plot was sub-optimal, or where character actions were not believable because something hadn’t been set up correctly. I agreed with most of his comments, and looked for ways to make those corrections to the text.

What I found was that fixing these things didn’t take a lot of time or words. Adding one sentence, somewhere in the text, might be all it took to foreshadow a coming event. A plot issue could be fixed in a similar manner. At other times, it took adding in a whole scene (maybe a short one) to fix the problem.  Either way, I enjoyed the process.

Now, I’m enjoying the editing I’m doing as a beta reader. For a memoir it’s different than for a novel. Events happened, and the memoir is conveying them factually along with the writer’s thoughts, emotions, reactions, etc. A memoir can’t have a plot hole, can it? Not really, but it can give information that is sprung on the reader in a less than optimal way. Found one of them last night. It can have good sentences and awkward sentences. Plenty for an editor to do.

Of course, we’ll see how the cuz likes it. “What? You want to change my sentence? No way!!” Or maybe, “It’s fine how it is, thank you.” Or possible, “Thanks; that will make it better.” As writers we fall in love with our words, sentences, paragraphs, and books/stories. Changing them is sometimes hard. The cuz might look at the Word file, filled with track changes notations, and wonder if it was a good idea sending it to me.

That’s okay. I have enjoyed the process. Maybe, if I don’t make it as a writer, I can be an editor some day.

Headshots

HEADSHOTS Available for Pre-Order

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Headshots 2014-07-09 Cover 01Yesterday was my scheduled day to post to this blog. I didn’t do it, however, as I spent my pre-work hour at the office on putting some finishing touches on Headshots. That meant putting back in some new chapter divisions, working on the copyright page, and something else I can’t remember right now. That took up the time I would otherwise have spent writing a post. I still intended to write one, either on the noon hour or at home after work.

Alas, the noon hour went by on something else, and when I got home I discovered I had failed to e-mail myself the Headshots file I’d worked on at the office. So I had to do all that work over again, an hour more or less. My goal was to upload it to Amazon last night, and take advantage of their new pre-order feature on Kindle Direct Publishing, with an issue date of August 28. So I did the work over again, tweaked the copyright page a little more, built a table of contents, and added the “About the Author” and “Works by the Author” sections. This took another hour, more or less.

When that was done I went to KDP and began the uploading process. This is not difficult, but it is somewhat tedious. You have to pick your book’s genre (you’re allowed to list it in two) and add description for the book. I find both of those fairly difficult to do. As for genres, I put it in:

> Fiction > Sports

> Fiction > Thrillers > Crime

I suppose those work. As for description, I used this as the tag line: A young pitcher must make a comeback while protecting his family from Mafia hit men. That seemed a good one-line description. I was supposed to add something more, much more, but moved on for the moment to other parts of the uploading process. The cover gave me some trouble, as I had never adjusted the size to the dimensions Kindle and Smashwords wants. It took me a while to get the right file loaded and to make the adjustment, but it was done. With the book file uploaded, I checked it on the Kindle previewer. It seems the chapter titles aren’t displaying correctly on the Kindle. They are correct in the Word file. I decided that was something I could fix between now and the 28th, so didn’t worry about it.

I went to the second page of the uploading form and worked on pricing, royalty rate, rights, etc. I had it all done. As I’d been at it for two and a half hours and was tired of it all, I clicked on “Publish”.  I got the notice that it would be about twelve hours before it showed up at Amazon as available to pre-order. All was well. Then I remembered I’d never gone back and finished the book description. All that was there was the one-liner.

So today, sometime, I’ll need to finish the book description and re-publish. Hopefully that won’t take too long. Here’s the link to the book in its pre-order state:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MVFV6R8

My next step is to see if I want to make another change suggested by all my beta readers. They all said too many characters were introduced in the first three chapters, making it overwhelming. In response to that I had already written out one character, a police detective. Well, I didn’t actually write him out; I just deleted his name from the text. I had already decided I could delete the names of two key associates of the New York Mafia Don. They had no real role in the first chapter—they were just there, and I had referred to them by name. I could introduce them in the chapters where they first appeared with substantive contributions to the story.

I went upstairs and began marking up a copy of the book. I re-read the first three chapters. As I said , taking out the associates names were fairly easy. I decided the only other names I could remove from those three chapters were of the three Cubs’ players who had had slumps during the playoffs in the first book, In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. They are key characters in Headshots, but I decided they really didn’t need to be introduced by name in the first three chapters. So I took an hour to go through those chapters, see what would need to be changed or moved to make it a good change, and marked-up the manuscript accordingly. That took me all the way till bed time.

My mind was very tired by then, but I was satisfied. I knew I could delete six character names from the first three chapters, which should improve the reading experience. The book publishing was in progress. Yes, I still had more to do, but that was okay. For now all was good. And there’s lots of time between now and August 28th to make other corrections. And I still have the Smashwords edition to prepare, but won’t have that up until the publication date.

Headshots is my 17th item published, all at Amazon, and all but one at Smashwords. Hopefully this will spur sales.

 

Headshots

Back on “Headshots”

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Night before last I went back to working on my novel Headshots. Back around July 20 I sent it out to five beta readers and have been anxiously waitingHeadshots 2014-07-09 Cover 01 for their reviews.

I received the first one back from my cousin Sue. She is also a writer. She gave me a detailed review via a Word document, with color coding for suggested changes. I scanned it to see the nature of the comments, and saved it to my computer in The Dungeon.

The second review to come back was from my Internet writing friend, Veronica. This was a partial review, sent as a PDF document. She pointed out a number of things that need fixing, as well as a few things that were good. I read her comments, and saved it. Today my inbox had another doc from her, with the next section she’s completed.

The third review I received was from high school/college friend Gary. He’s not a writer, but is well versed in literary issues based on interest and experience. He sent me a Word document with his comments—not the text marked-up, but his comments alone. He noted typos by page (all three noted typos, actually), noted some areas where more description would do some good, and pointed out a few things that seemed incongruous to him, things that stretched believability too much.

Wednesday night I started the process using Gary’s review. I went through and fixed the typos he’d caught. I then read through his critique in considerable detail, trying to see what things I needed to tackle. Alas, I wasted some time, listened to some music, and didn’t have much time to write. Last night was different. Yes, I wasted some time and listened to some doo-wop, but I also knuckled down and tackled Gary’s substantive comments. I “yellowed them out” on the screen as I did them. Some, I felt, were things I couldn’t do, as they would change something too much. These I “greened-out”. By the end of an hour I didn’t have all his comments answered, but most of them. I still have a few descriptions to add—or not, as I look at them.

Tonight I hope to finish with Gary’s, and move on to one of the others, probably Sue’s.  By the end of my writing time on Sunday I hopefully will have all three completed, and maybe a book ready to go! Hoping to have it published before baseball season is over.

Documenting America, Engineering, Headshots, Writing

Three Main Writing Paths

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That’s  what I’m following right now: three main writing paths.

First is the technical paper I wrote about in my last post here. Last Thursday-Friday I made good progress on it, though I didn’t finish it. I hope to get it in today. I worked on the paper over this past weekend, adding a good amount of text to what I already had. Yesterday I found the couple of missing data points, added them to the mix, and recalculated my results. I’m pleased with the way it turned out. Hopefully IECA will give me grace, and not kick me off the conference schedule.

The second path is my next non-fiction book, Documenting America – Civil War Edition. Last weekend I completed three chapters. Two of these I had started late last week, but they were in an unfinished state as I approached the weekend. I was able to finish those two, start a third, and finish it. I now have nine chapters complete (subject to editing, of course).  That’s between 1/3 and 1/4 of the book. My next step in it is research into the Battle of Battle of Shiloh, which takes me up to April 1862. The three chapters after that already have research started, though not far along. I hope to complete three chapters a week for this, which will see it done in seven to eight weeks, and thus published before the year is out.

However, I may slow down on that briefly, as I pick up Headshots again. I have received feedback on the full book from two beta readers, and on part of the book from another. This is plenty to allow me to look closely at those comments and see what edits are needed. One I already know, expressed by all three, is that the reader gets hit with too many characters in the first 14 pages or so. Somehow I need to either add other scenes without characters, which delay character introduction, or in some other way reduce/delay names. It will be a challenge.

One beta reader said a couple of things were incongruous. Too many murders, and them being unsolved makes the police/FBI look incompetent; and not enough media attention to a couple of items. Adding scenes of media attention won’t be too difficult. I’m not sure what to do about the murders. I don’t mean to make the police look incompetent. It’s just that the Mafia is good at hiding their tracks. Still, I can have some shooters picked up and be kept in lock-up. That I can do.

So, this week will be a mix of 1) completing my paper, 2) trying to continue with progress on DA-CWE, and 3) making major progress on Headshots edits, which I hope will be final edits. Then, since one beta reader said there were numerous typos, despite my two rounds of editing that included proofreading, I obviously have to do another.

Fun times ahead.

Headshots

Status of “Headshots”

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Headshots 2014-07-08 Cover 02  My latest novel, Headshots, is very close to being finished  and ready for publishing. Consequently I have started some other activities, including creating the cover. I’m going to put in three renditions of the cover, beginning with the second one I did up till where it stands now.

When I say it’s close to being finished, here’s what I mean:

  • I’ve read Headshots 2014-07-08 Cover 04the completed novel twice, once out loud.
  • My wife joined me in that reading out loud, becoming my beta reader.
  • The readings revealed a number of plot lapses, changes in plot, redundancies, and of course typos to fix. All of those have been noted and typed.

So now I need to give it one more reading for typos and smoothness of flow and plot. I’d like to get one or two more beta readers. Last novel, however, the beta reading process didn’t go so well, and so I’m hesitant to put out a wide call for beta readers. I’ll probably ask two or three people, and hope at least one, preferably two, will be willing to read it in a timely manner.

And, here’s the latest version of the cover. I think it’s close to being done as well.

Headshots 2014-07-09 Cover 01

 

Headshots, home improvements, Independence Day, Writing

What to do on a Holiday

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It’s Independence Day! On my other blog I’m going to sneak in an extra post about that. But on this blog, I’ll talk about what I’m going to do. Unfortunately, I have way too much to chose from.

Writing is something I could do, of course. I have a manuscript of edits for Headshots, things Lynda and I came up with as we read it aloud last weekend and earlier this week. The edits are: fixing typos, improving word use, improving sentence structure, eliminating redundancies, and correcting a few plot lapses (where I changed something as the book went on, or forgot I’d already written something another way). All but the last can be accomplished in a day, and I’m looking forward to doing so, possibly on Sunday. Another day is all it should take to fix the plot issues. I’ll then be very close to publishing.

Alas, I have some things I need to do before I can give time to the book. The back yard still looks like a disaster zone. I’ve cut most of the small branches from the tree cutting and piled them. Those piles need to be hauled off. Most of the branches that can easily be carried up to the road and hauled to the stump dump have been so hauled. I’ll have one more load to take. All the others I’ll be hauling off into the woods, far enough away, at the request of the wife, to be non-visible from the house. Dealing with the small stuff should be about a six hour job, I figure, or maybe more, too much to do on one day in this heat. But it would be nice today to get the one load to the dump and get two piles hauled into the woods.

Then I’ll begin dealing with those limbs that are big enough to justify cutting into firewood. On Tuesday I moved a bunch of them over to where they are at a convenient place to cut. Others are too heavy to move and will have to be cut into smaller pieces first. I’d like to pile a few more of them, and will try to do so today.

But, alas, we are dog sitting for the weekend, beginning today, and we have company coming in on Saturday. The toilet in the hall bathroom is turned off due to leaking, so fixing that by Saturday midday is a priority. As is getting some things from the store to feed the guests on Sunday. So a couple of hours must go into that.

As they must into clean-up and preparing the house for guests. We aren’t in bad shape, except for papers for filing or sorting on tables. Most of these are Lynda’s mom’s papers. We have taken over that part of her life. Lynda has been working on that sorting and filing this past week. It’s possible that most of that will be done by noon today, with me having to do little or none of it. I’m not even going to think about straightening the computer room, or perhaps will do it a little.

So, will I really get to write? Hopefully an hour on Friday, and on Saturday, and maybe two on Sunday. Except, I’m way behind on filing our own personal papers, and on my budget tracking spreadsheet, on my health expenses spreadsheet, and on our business financial sheets. I see close to ten hours of work on those, though I did make some headway on it last week and this. Then, of course, it is the start of blackberry season. Those blackberries don’t wait to ripen just because I have writing to do. So I will be taking time for them.

But I will write this weekend. I will write. If I keep saying that it might just come true. Now on to the back yard and the cleanup, while it’s still cool outside.

Daddy Daughter Day, Documenting America, Headshots, self-publishing

Upcoming Publishing Schedule

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My decision to self-publish Father Daughter Day as a non-illustrated book, in paperback only (because poetry doesn’t work all that well with e-books) has caused me to think about my publishing schedule and all the tasks related to that. Here’s what I’ve come up with—subject, as always, to finding time to accomplish everything and sudden inspiration that causes me to change or reshuffle.

  • complete the writing of Headshots, my novel-in-progress. I think I have a couple of weeks left in the writing, after which I will let it sit and simmer a couple of weeks before going on with editing and publication steps.
  • publish my short story “It Happened At The Burger Joint”. This will require creation of a cover. I have an idea and have located a graphic I’d like to use, but have yet to contact the one I need to for permission to use it. This will be an e-book only, so the cover and formatting should go quickly, just a day or two.
  • create and publish the print book for In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. This requires that I wait on a certain photo that a certain person has promised to take and let me use for the back cover. This should only take a few days to do, though waiting on proof copies will occupy some time, which I will fill with:
  • create and publish the print book for The Gutter Chronicles. My novella has actually picked up some sales recently. I know a few people who want it who don’t own e-readers. I’ve decided on the back cover image, so I just need to format the book for print and put the cover together. I think a week or so.
  • by that time I’ll be done editing Headshots and be ready to do the publication tasks: e-book formatting, e-book cover, print book formatting, print-book cover, upload to three places. At this time I don’t think I’m going to do a launch team. It didn’t work out so well with my last novel, so I’ll just publish and hope for the best.
  • write and publish another short story in the Danny Tompkins series, dealing with teenage grief at the loss of a parent. I’ve had the next story rolling around in my mind for some time, at least the start of it and subject matter. After Headshots is done I’ll be ready for something short. Since this involves new writing I’m not really sure how long it will take. That will give me four Danny Tompkins stories, which might be enough to put together in a short collection as an e-book.
  • Publish Father Daughter Day. The toughest part of this will be the cover, for which I’ll be doing my own “artwork”. I have a comic-like font in mind for the words, a font I’ve already been drawing out for practice. I have a scene in mind I’d like to use for the front cover, though finding a photo for it might be difficult, and drawing it will be impossible. So, I’m a little up in the air about it; also about what to use for a back cover. That may be easy, though, as I could use a synopsis of the book on a uniform or textured color. I think the internal formatting will be fairly easy. The hardest part will be figuring out appropriate page breaks. Poetry books tend to have lots of white space, and you want to end the poems at a place that makes sense.

After that, I’ll have a whole host of projects to chose between. Most likely a sequel to Doctor Luke’s Assistant? Possibly a Civil War edition of Documenting America (for which research has already started)? Start getting serious about another volume of The Gutter Chronicles? Perhaps another Sharon Williams short story, probably titled “Sierra Kilo Bravo”? Or perhaps work on another Thomas Carlyle project? Time will tell.

Harmony of the gospels, Headshots, Writing

Typing Edits

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The last two nights the only writing work I did was type edits on my novel-in-progress, Headshots. The manuscript is currently at 220 pages, 62,000 words. About three weeks ago, maybe even a month, I printed the file and began reading through it, trying to remember all the plot lines and figure out what I needed to do to make sure nothing was lost.

I finished that reading and editing a week or so ago. Two new scenes were obvious to me to continue one plot thread that I had left hanging. I wrote them, and that brought the manuscript up to 225 pages and 64,360 words. But there it sat as I worked on book covers and other things, not necessarily writing-related.

Finally, Wednesday evening I found a little time to begin typing the edits. I think I got about 50 pages done then, and another 70 last night. That’s good progress, but it also means I have another 100+ to go. It’s tedious work. The edits are marked on the manuscript. I have to find the place in the computer file, type the edit, and mark it out on the manuscript. It’s not at all hard; it just takes time.

Then today, in my pre-work time, I decided to type edits to another book I wrote, A Harmony of the Gospels. I recently re-read this, for my morning devotional time. In doing so I found a few typos, and realized I had never changed the format of some footnotes as I’d intended to do. This morning I got all that done, a number of changes over 100 pages. I see that I also have some edits to type in the Passage Notes and Appendixes. I’ll perhaps begin work on those next week.

Edits typing is somewhat mindless work. Sometimes it takes a little more concentration, such as when the reason for the edit isn’t obvious, and I have to re-read the manuscript to gain some context. Occasionally, with my novel, while typing the edit I notice something else that should also be taken care of, and the edit is more extensive. Still, even with those times, typing edits isn’t likely to stimulate the brain to think great thoughts.

Last night I was interrupted by a Facebook contact from a high school friend of my sister, and we talked a bit. Otherwise I concentrated fairly well. A hundred some odd pages to go, and the edits will be done. I should be able to do that tonight and tomorrow. then I can begin writing the ending. Much of that has run through my mind in detail, so I don’t think I’ll have too much trouble getting that out—depending on whether I feel the need to add a little more to any given plot thread. Except for a trip that’s coming up, I’d say I should be done with the book in three weeks. Let it sit a couple of weeks, edit it again, type the edits, get feedback from beta readers, type that, and I’ll be ready to publish. Hopefully that can all happen before the end of June.

 

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Headshots

Progress on Headshots

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Last week I was in Nashville for most of the week, attending the IECA annual conference and presenting a paper there, “Who Pays the Fine?” It was a great trip, and I’m writing a detailed trip diary about it. It’s not something that I’ll publish, though possibly I might take some of it for a blog post. It’s just something I want to do, something I have to get out of my system before returning to work on Headshots.

And, that’s the subject of this blog post. I last worked on Headshots on February 23. I left for the trip on February 25 and came back just before midnight on the 28th. March 1 was moving day for my mother-in-law, with tiredness overcoming me and having no mind or energy to write, little enough to read.

Today is the day I planned to have a blog post here, but my blog post planning record is at work, and I’m at home on a snow day. Having shoveled the drive this morning, I came down here, uncertain of what to write. I just finished a travel log of my trip to Nashville, running on to seven typed pages. Next is this post, which I have decided will be on Headshots.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m slogging through the sagging middle. The idea came to me to make this mostly about baseball, since I had very little baseball action in the early chapters. The timeframe has moved into during the season, so I’ve written about Ronny’s comeback attempt. This has taken me through Chapter 18, and 56,222 words. Since I’m heading for around 80,000, and I think the ending action will take close to 20,000 words, that means I’m almost through the sagging middle.

But, I have other things to add to it. I have to add that Sarah gets kind of stir-crazy, hiding out at the farm, not being able to go anywhere without Federal protective agents going with her. I need for her to do something stupid to make her situation worse. I also haven’t touched on any Mafia/gang actions for a while. I can’t forget them in the midst of the baseball action. Some ideas have come to me for both of these problems. One is to give back story on the four main mobsters: Mancini, Russo, Cerelli, and Washburn. In both books I’ve said very little about what motivates them. Washburn and Mancini got a paragraph each in FTSP, and I think I gave some of Mancini’s back story earlier in this book.

Once I add those things in to the sagging middle, I suspect I’ll be somewhere around 65,000 words. So either the book will be a little longer than I thought, or perhaps the end game will be shorter. Either way, I’ll try to get back to this in a few days, or perhaps next weekend.

The end is in sight.

Headshots, Writing

The Sagging Middle

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My blog has become impossible to use. For whatever reason, whether I access it using Internet Explorer from work or Chrome at home, the entering visual window doesn’t work, especially on the first paragraph, and I have to type in the html window. That works fine, except entering line breaks in the html window doesn’t work, so I have to switch back to the visual window to hit [enter] then back to the html window to type. As I’m at the end of a paragraph, I’ll do that now.

Back, with a code included in the html window that I assume is a line break code. Excuse me while I go back to visual and see what gives…. Well, something looks funny in the visual window, but it doesn’t appear when I preview the document, so I’ll keep going. Part of the problem is I installed this theme (or more precisely my son did) back in 2011 using the then-current Wordpress 3.1.3. The now-current version is 3.8.1. Maybe that’s the problem, that older versions of WordPress don’t work with current browsers. I’ve hesitated doing the upgrade because, being a technophobe, I’m scared of what will happen. Will my blog disappear? Or will everything from before the upgrade be messed up? Those who know more than I do say no, that won’t happen. Alas, when I finish this post, I’ll do the upgrade. If you never hear from me again….

But my post today is supposed to be about something different. There comes a point in the writing of just about every novel where the writer encounters and must overcome…the Sagging Middle. Most advice about novel writing is that there are three parts to a novel. The beginning is a period wherein the main characters are introduced, conflict is established, and the protagonist moves through a point where there is no going back.

The ending action begins with another point of no return, typically caused by the protagonist him or herself, something that causes the protagonist to have to save the day. From that point on is the rising action to the end and eventual denouement.

Between these two is the long middle part of the novel. It’s a place where, if the novelist isn’t careful enough or good enough, the action will sag, causing the middle and thus the novel to fail. It should be a series of actions that pit the protagonist against whatever evil he’s facing. But keeping the interest up during this time is difficult. How do you keep coming up with events that move the action along? How do you keep raising the stakes, getting the protagonist into new kinds of trouble, yet leaving room for the major conflict at the end?

This has proved difficult for me in Headshots. Ronny Thompson begins this book lying on the mound at Yankee Stadium, severely injured and bleeding. The possibility of him never pitching again is on everyone’s mind. He was just estranged from his girlfriend, Sarah, and had been barely speaking to his parents. Meanwhile two groups of Mafia figures have been crossed, and are out to get that person. I have a hard time saying much about it without revealing the plot, but it turns out that it’s Sarah that the Mafia is after.

The thing I turned to last week and weekend to prop up my sagging middle is baseball. That was lacking in the first part of the book, as the action then takes place in the off season, when there’s not much baseball going on. I need to see if there’s a way I can work more baseball into that, maybe have Ronny watch films of the World Series. But the last writing I’ve done is of baseball scenes: pitchers throwing bean balls, batters making outs or driving in runs, strategy with pitchers and pinch hitters. The baseball fans that read the book should, I hope, be pleased with this section.

I’m not through with the mid-book baseball action yet, but another plot line that’s helping prop up the sagging middle is the three Cubs who had been bribed to throw the World Series in the first book. The Mafia feels the three double crossed them, just as Sarah has, and they must pay the consequences. This has given me several scenes of good action.

At this point I’m almost through writing the middle section. I’m not sure how long the book will be, but I think around 80,000 words. This weekend I crossed 54,000 words. I’m thinking that the end action will take 20,000 words or so, so if my estimate is correct on how many words it will take to tell this story, I haven only 5000 to 6000 words left in the middle. I have enough action planned for the rest of that middle to finish it out in, hopefully, good shape.

So maybe my middle isn’t sagging too badly after all. I won’t know till the entire book is finished, I’ve let it sit for a while, and then come back and read it as a whole. But I’m reasonably pleased with it at this point. That’s better than the alternative.

Now, I’m off to upgrade. Hopefully I’ll be back….