I have been extra busy this week, mainly with workplace related issues and at-home things to do. I’m working on a post for later today, and if I can find enough time on breaks/lunch I’ll have something posted before the workday is over.
Category Archives: miscellaneous
Something in the Air?
Yesterday, driving home on my evening commute, traffic was awful. Not awful in the sense of heavy, but in the sense of drivers doing extremely stupid things. Cutting people off. Crossing a five lane highway with a car length to spare. Running red lights. Failing to take a turn when it was safe. Driving at excessive speed, even more so than normal. Zooming in and out between cars just to be one car ahead when stopping at the next traffic signal.
I wanted to say, “Suppose they learned to drive in Bentonville Arkansas, and suppose they were idiots. But I repeat myself.”
Now, today, the craziness seems to be in the on-line writing sites I look at. A literary agent has made a post, “I Don’t Need No Stinking Agent,” a push-back against various self-publishing, anti-agent gurus. Then, in the Indie Author Group on Facebook a fight has broken out over negative posts. Yesterday, at the agent blog I read most a guest post was a blatant sales pitch for a writer development service costing $37 or $55 per month. About half the comments were negative. This morning that post had been pulled.
What’s going on? Is there something in the air that is causing normally sane people to do crazy things? Are the stars aligned in Vertigo, or whatever crazy scheme people think controls their destiny?
Today is primary election day in Arkansas. That could be the reason for the Bentonville traffic nitwits but not the on-line stressors. I just know I’ll be driving home very carefully tonight.
Busy Writing, Just Not Here
I haven’t posted anything here for a while. I’ve been writing, just not here.
Last week, May 3-4, I attended the Story Weaver’s conference of the Oklahoma Writers Federation, Inc. This was my first time to go to this conference and my first general market conference. I spent several days preparing material. I figured this was my last big hurrah as far as pitching In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People goes.
Since coming back from Oklahoma City on Sunday, after family activities for several days, I’ve been busy with two projects. One is preparing two submittals requested at the conference. I got the second one in just before 10 p.m., so that is over. The second is proofreading and final editing of FTSP. That’s going fairly well. I’ve read 138 pages of the 321 page manuscript. I had hoped to finish this by Friday, but obviously won’t.
I also completed a column for Buildipedia.com, my twelfth. I’m under contract to do another, which is due May 18. I expect them to keep coming at two per month.
I’m also spending a little time on The Candy Store Generation. That’s what I shared at BNC Writers Monday night, and what I hope to get back to in a big way as soon as FTSP is put to bed. Still 8,000 words to go, but some research needed before going too much farther.
Consequently, I haven’t spent much time with my blogs, especially this one. And I don’t expect to for the next week at least. I’ll try to pop in and let you know what’s going on, but realistically I just don’t have the time to spend on it now.
My Kingdom for an Internet Connection
I’m writing this at 10:07 AM, Central Time, at my computer in my office at work, taking a short break from what has been an intense morning of work so far.
Tonight is our biweekly meeting of the BNC Writers. Normally between meetings I send out two e-mails to the group: one at about the midpoint between meetings, just saying high and updating everyone on what’s going on in the writing world, and reminding them of our next meeting; and one the night before reminding them of the specifics of the meeting. Last night when I went to bed, as soon as my head hit the pillow, I realized I hadn’t sent the e-mail. No problem, I thought. I’ll send it first thing in the morning.
But this morning, after my devotional time, after I printed my first-of-the-month forms, I discovered I could not connect to the Internet. Not a big deal, I thought. Our e-mail seemed to be working, so it must just be a modem or router needs resetting. As soon as the IT department gets in they’ll take care of it.
But I still couldn’t connect at 08:30 when I went into a one-on-one training meeting on floodplain modeling with a young engineer. When I was back at my desk after that meeting, at 09:30, it still wasn’t available. An e-mail from our IT guy said it was external. Sprint is having issues, and had not given us an ETF: Estimated Time of Fixing. I saw him about 09:45 and he said it’s a major issue for Sprint. They mentioned problems in Fort Worth TX and maybe even on the west coast. So this is not going to be solved any time soon.
Great. The one day in fifty when it’s imperative I send an outside e-mail first thing in the morning and we don’t have the stinking Internet available. And, I e-mailed a client late on Friday, after he’d left the office, telling him I’d completed a task and asking for instructions on what I should do with some documents on Monday morning. It’s some stuff his lawyers need concerning a lawsuit. Since the Internet is down, only our internal e-mail is working, not our external, and I don’t have his instructions. Guess I’ll have to use the telephone.
When I made my to-do list for today, I figured I’d use some time on the noon hour to begin my research into corporate leader ages, data required for Chapter 4, “Boomer Corporations”, for my book The Candy Store Generation. That research will require the Internet. Will it be available to me? It’s now 10:35, and that little circle on Internet Explorer is just spinning ad nauseum. Still no Internet.
Oh well, I could always walk during the noon hour. I could drive the two miles to the Bentonville Public Library, ignore the librarian who wouldn’t add my book to the shelves and use their computers—calling ahead first, or course, to see if they are on Sprint and thus out of service. I could read some in The Federalist Papers, which will serve both for research and promotion for a couple of books. I could work on the formatting needed for Volume 7 of the letters of John Wesley. I could pull up a study document I downloaded a few months ago concerning the Harmony of the Gospels, and read and/or print a few more pages to supplement what I’ve done with it so far.
But none of those are what I want to do. So I’m an unhappy camper right now. Which is 10:40, and the Internet is still down. If you are reading this, you will know that Internet service finally returned, and I just cut and pasted this into my blog.
P.S. I came home at 8:15 PM after writers group. An e-mail I had sent to the house from the office (with this text) was in my inbox, so I guess Sprint/ATT fixed their problem.
Miscellaneous Monday Musings – On Tuesday
I had great intentions to blog yesterday. I did so over at An Arrow Through the Air, but didn’t get back here. We had quite the storm yesterday and last night, and actually it’s not over. Radar shows another storm wave is about to come over us, probably more potent than the last couple.
I’m batching it again, Lynda having gone to OKC to help Richard and Sara with grandkids and other things. It’s a busy time for a young pastor and his wife, and it’s good to be close enough that Lynda can go up there from time to time and help out.
So in my temporary bachelorhood, I should make good progress on a number of fronts. I should get the income taxes done—except I haven’t even touched them the last few days. I should get caught up on the family budget—except that has gone the way of the income taxes. I should maybe clean somewhat in the house, and use this opportunity to throw out some things that Lynda’s saving, but which she will never actually miss—I’ve ignored all that.
What I have done over the last two days is write. I added over 4,000 words to The Candy Store Generation between Sunday and Monday. I wrote all of chapter 4, Boomer Congress, and most of chapter 14 (the last chapter), Had Enough. At the same time I completed some good research on Saturday, did some more on Sunday and Monday [the rain just started again], and outlined the remaining research for the book. I don’t have a lot more to do.
I can now see an end to this project. I at first thought it would be around 40,000 words, but the chapters are completed in fewer words than what would make up the 40 thousand. That tells me I’m more likely to be around 35,000, maybe even a little less. I don’t want to pad the book and make an arbitrary word count. I feel already that I’m more repetitive than I want to be.
All other writing is on hold, except for articles for Buildipedia.com. My last one went up Friday March 16. As of a few minutes ago it had been read 132 times, but remained unrated and without comments. That’s how all of them are. These are informational pieces, not subject to controversy and not likely to generate comments.
Meanwhile, over at Suite101.com, I haven’t written an article since February 2011. Changes in the Google algorithm in February, May, and October of last year pretty much killed the site. Page views and revenues (which had never been much) dried up, and continuing to write didn’t seem to make much sense. Except lately page views are trending upward, and revenue has somewhat recovered. So far this month I’ve earned $5.29 for my 127 articles. That’s not much, of course. For the full month it might come out to between $8 and $9 dollars. But every little bit of revenue helps.
A few days ago I received this comment on my article on George Washington’s cabinet:
Mr. Todd, Thank you for your article and your work. It gave me a nice insight into the workings of the early government which I needed for a class. I made sure you received credit! Mark I.
It’s not exactly fan mail, and doesn’t make me a rock star among writers, but it’s a nice comment. I’m glad I was able to help a student out.
I haven’t yet pulled the trigger on writing for Decoded Science. I may do so after I finish TCSG.
Interspersed with all of this, I should be preparing Doctor Luke’s Assistant for Kindle and Smashwords, and making one last round of edits on In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People before also e-self-publishing it. I think, though, I need to get two to three thousand more words done on TCSG before I pull off for a short while and tend to these other books.
Well, these musings have certainly been miscellaneous. This week I may blog a few times about TCSG, or at least about the premises behind it. They say that a blog, to attract visitors, needs to be about something more than yourself. It needs to give value to a reader. I don’t want my blog to become a political blog, but since TCSG is about a political topic, a few political posts will be necessary. Hopefully I’m going to post all the rest of this week on that.
An Interesting Post About the Current State of the Publishing Industry
Leave it to Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler to take on the titans of the publishing industry without fear. In a recent blog at A Newbies’ Guide to Publishing, Joe and Barry take apart a post made elsewhere by Scott Turow. Scott is the president of the Author’s Guild (I guess; so say Joe and Barry). His post was against the recent lawsuit threats made by the Department of Justice against Apple and five of the Big Six publishers.
The lawsuit is about price-fixing between Apple and the five, based on Apple’s “agency model” for e-book sales via Apple’s iTunes store. I’m not sure I fully understand what the agency model is, but that’s probably not germane to this post. Suffice to say that DoJ considers it price-fixing, and are in the process of taking the perpetrators to task.
Warning: Joe and Barry are not shy about the language they use. You will have to wade through a few four letter words, though not too many.
The writers basically say that Turow and the Author’s Guild are supposed to represent authors, but the post appears to be one in favor of publishers at author’s expense. Turow argues that the actions by the five were justified because Amazon is taking too much market share. This is bad for the literary world in that it will restrict consumer choices and reduce author income.
This is clearly ridiculous. Amazon’s e-publishing platform and store have busted wide open the stranglehold that the Big Six previously held on book distribution. Consumers now have a much greater range of choices, and authors have a distribution outlet that doesn’t require a Big Six or Little Seventy-Five (or however many other publishers there are) contract.
One wonders why Turow and the Author’s Guild aren’t sticking up for authors. I’m working through the comments on Konrath’s blog. It will be interesting to see if Turow himself leaves a comment, or if anyone defends him.
I have no stake in the traditional publishing industry (or legacy publishing, as Konrath calls them). So far they haven’t deemed my work worthy of inclusion in their publishing plans. Then again, the world isn’t beating a path to the door of on-line publishers to buy my stuff either. As I’ll report in the next post to this blog, I currently have no submittals pending to any traditional publishing outlet, neither agent nor publisher/editor. I think I’m pretty much locked in to independent publishing from this point on.
But I have nothing against the traditional publishing world (other than they don’t recognize my obvious genius :), but I’m going another way. This lawsuit, if it comes to that, will be an interesting development. If the Five lose, it seems that will hasten the day when they will be obsolete.
Writing and Christmas
My writing work continues, though slower than I’d like it to. Last night was a good example. This was my last night before having to devote all my efforts to the Christmas trip we will take. Yet, preparations for that trip were already necessary: making three batches of Chex Mix. This is a task that has lots of down time. Mix the mix, put it in the over, stir it every fifteen minutes, done after an hour. In an hour and ten minutes you have about 55 minutes to do other things. So in three and a half hours that would be 2 hours 45 minutes of “other things” time.
What other things could I do for writing? My novel In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People is begging me to edit it. I’m hoping to e-self-publish it in March, cover permitting. The two items I’m eSP-ing before that are ready to go, waiting only on covers. So I can spend time on FTSP, and have let it sit enough time since writing it to have some fresh eyes on it. This seemed as if it would be the best thing.
I could also have taken a little time to make some minor edits to this website. Several things are needed, some of which I can do myself, some of which I’ll need help with. The things I can do myself I should get going on.
I also have a few publicity/promotion things to do for Documenting America. I’ve let those go this month, doing a little research into places where I want to promote it, but not near enough to decide what to do. I could do that in 15 minute chunks.
But what I decided to do instead was something I wanted to do for some time: try to figure out these indecipherable explanation of benefits forms from Blue Cross/Blue Shield. From the couple of procedures I had from the ehrlichiosis and the rheumatoid outbreak that followed, I have a bunch of medical bills. It seemed like way too many. But I was dreading doing it.
But I used those fifteen minute chunks to do that. I gathered all my EOB statements (well, I might be missing one or two from early in the year) and put them in order. I found the group health insurance policy and any amendments that have been issued since the policy was. I began going through the two. The policy was, as expected, more indecipherable than the EOBs. I think, however, I finally figured out the EOBs, and understand what the policy covers, where the deductibles apply, etc. Looks like I have a bunch of money to pay out.
Over the Christmas holiday we will be with our son in Chicago. He’s going to help me with website corrections, and hopefully we’ll have some time to discuss covers and even for him to do some work on them. Hopefully I’ll have a few hours to edit FTSP. And to read for enjoyment as well as for writing craft. I’m looking forward to it, even to the long drive.
Spam
Folks, I have temporarily disabled comments while I deal with a spam problem. I had over 200 spam comments posted to the blog today, and I can’t deal with it. This is all very confusing to me on WordPress. On Blogger it was much easier to protect against spam.
Okay, I’ve installed protection, so I’m re-opening comments. Nothing showed up on my screen, but maybe that’s because I’m logged-in as administrator. I’ll try logging out and see what I get.
Conference Assimilation: The Thank Yous
At every conference I’ve been to—well, at least the national ones—they suggest that attendees send thank yous to faculty and staff with whom they interacted. I think that’s a good idea, and have done so after prior conferences. For the Write-To-Publish Conference, the organizers made this easy by providing a sheet that had all faculty and staff listed, including e-mail addresses.
Now, I admit to in the past never having been a hundred percent faithful in this. I always started the process with good intentions, but then trailed off as life and other conference assimilation activities got in the way. I generally did the most important thank yous first, and never made it to completion.
Not so this time. I suppose my computer woes, and not being able to begin work on the various writing pieces that will be part of conference follow-up, gave me the time and focus to write all the e-mail thank yous. I finished that process Wednesday night. By my count it was twenty-two e-mails. A few of these were to fellow attendees who asked to see some of my works, or who might be interested in a collaboration.
So this is a good feeling. None of these e-mails were submittals of material requested by agents or editors. That comes later—hopefully not too much later.
Why do this? Not to curry favor. It’s a simple matter of kindness and professionalism. I have done that from time to time after engineering conferences. I suspect the organizers of any conference, who have just been through a stressful period or preparation and then the actual carrying out of the conference. They know all the things that went wrong: the faculty member whose plane was late and so they needed a ride from the airport and still missed a class or appointments; the credit card processing machine that broke down at the conference bookstore; the construction in progress at the conference facility that caused a slightly different foot traffic pattern to be needed every day; etc. I suspect a little thank you goes a long way for them.
Insert Witty Storm Metaphor Here
This weekend I wrote what I wanted to write, not what I thought would lead to publication. As I had time, I worked on the passage notes to A Harmony of the Gospels, and completed several of them. Unfortunately I looked ahead and saw just how many of these are left to be written. It might be fifty pages of writing materials.
It’s pouring outside right now. I’m searching for a witty storm metaphor to insert here, but haven’t one. It poured last night. People may have seen news reports about tornadoes in our area. Some were spotted in our county, but I’m not sure they have been confirmed. Joplin was devastated, as you might have read. That’s just 45 or 50 miles north of us.
I’ve been reading a book I picked up at the thrift store, titled The Templar Revelation, and it’s turning out to be awful. From 1996, I think this is one of the books from which Dan Brown drew material to write The DaVinci Code. It is not well written, it is not documented. I’ve invested several days of my reading life into this, after 50 cents of my budget, hoping it would get better, or would become more substantive as I got past the introductory chapters. Not so.
My next article for Buildipedia is due Thursday. I think this will be an easy one, on erosion and sediment control.
I’m currently fighting with my home owner’s insurance company, Nationwide, over how they jacked up the rates on me because I turned in claims last year, and then billed me 12 percent more after the renewal was complete. Just got off the phone with Kelly of Nationwide, a nice man who bore my wrath with dignity. But I will not stay with his company nor with my agent who made a mistake on the renewal. Goodbye, Nationwide. It was a nice 15 year relationship up until last August.
My quarterly doctor’s appointment is tomorrow. Hopefully he’ll give me three more months. I’m not apprehensive about it at all. Now that I’m checking my blood sugar I know exactly where I’ll be at this appointment. I’m hoping he’ll take me off my blood pressure medication. It was marginal that I should be on it in the first place. About a month ago I checked it at the blood pressure check station at Wal-Mart (I’m sure not the most accurate machine). It was 87/59, so I began breaking my pills in half. Last Saturday it was 81/69. Let’s hope it’s low like that tomorrow.
I’m back to this after a ninety minute hiatus. Had a couple of phone calls, ate lunch at my desk, read some writing blogs. I called Friday’s post “miscellaneous”, but this one is more so. Maybe that reflects my state of mind. I need to latch onto a project and run with it. With the Wesley study aside, I suppose it will either be improvements to Documenting America and expanding it’s published locations or completing A Harmony of the Gospels or getting back on In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People and seeing if I can finish that.
Meanwhile it seems the worst of the storm has passed, and no witty metaphor has come to mind. Will post now.
