Category Archives: Writing

Christianity, expatriate life, family, History, Writing

Thinking Back

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Will this be the title of my autobiography? Stay tuned.

My current read is a large autobiography. How large? Let’s just say I’m on page 448 and am not quite 3/4 of the way through it. So it’s going to be a while before I finish it and post a review.

So what to blog about today? I’ve been slowly putting together material for my own autobiography. Not because my life is notable enough for the world to care, but perhaps someone in the family will. My plans are to write it and leave it behind, at least as reasonably completed electronic files if not printed on paper.

This is surprisingly more difficult than I expected. What are the things I should put in it? How to organize it? What to title it? What style to write in—very formal or casual stories? Do I analyze my life or just report it? How long to make it?

As to titles, I’ve thought of these possibles:

  • The Journey Was A Joy
  • Stories, Secrets, Legends, and Lies
  • Tales Of A Vagabond

My current thinking is that I’ll use the third of these, but I’m still thinking about it.

One thing I’m also wondering about is how much emphasis to put on transitions as opposed to everyday living. The important transitions I could easily focus on are:

  • Death of my mother in 1965, when I was 13
  • Off to college in 1970
  • Relocation from New England to Kansas City upon graduation in 1974
  • Marriage in 1976
  • Birth of our children in 1979 and 1981
  • Move to Saudi Arabia in 1981
  • Move to Asheboro, NC in 1984
  • Move to Kuwait in 1988
  • Iraq invades Kuwait 1990
  • Move to NW Arkansas in 1991
  • Retirement 2019
  • Move to Lake Jackson, TX in 2026

The listing of these transitions show why Tales of a Vagabond is one of the titles I’m considering and the one I’m currently favoring.

The transition I’m thinking about most currently is my move to Kansas City. This made no sense. I had four job offers I was considering. Three were in Boston and one in Kansas City. Surprisingly, the KC one was for the most money despite the much lower cost of living compared to Boston. But if I worked in Boston, I could have lived at home in Rhode Island and taken the commuter rail to Boston. What to do, what to do? I took the job in KC. When my last semester was over, I loaded up my 1966 Plymouth Valiant with 3-speed on column, well-used snow tires in the rear trying to get some last little use out of them, and headed west.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

So I’m now wondering, 52 years after the event, why I did it. I guess I needed a complete break, a change in surroundings. I was taking baby steps in my new spiritual life, and I needed my physical life to also be new to allow those baby steps to quickly transition to the start of spiritual maturity. That’s my current analysis.

Well, back to writing. Currently working on the next volume in The Forest Throne series.

 

miscellaneous, reading, Writing

Wanting Something Else

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Carlyle in 1855, so nine years after the letter in question.

One of my reading places is The Carlyle Letters Online, which has 11,000 letters written by Thomas and Jane Carlyle. They were active letter writers during the Victorian era in England, and earlier mostly from Scotland. Thomas wrote for a living. He struggled in the early years, picking up encyclopedia hackwork and magazine contributions as he could get them. By around 1840, with the help of Ralph Waldo Emerson championing Carlyle’s books in the US, he had reached a measure of financial comfort. I’ve written other blog posts about Carlyle.

Maybe two months ago, I came across an interesting tidbit in one of his letters and wanted to blog about it. But I faced a dilemma of my own making: how to properly reference the letter and location? Traditional referencing, handed down through various academic organizations, expects you to give the publisher, publisher’s location, name of publication, author name, page no., etc.

I’ve come to believe that’s an archaic way of doing references in the Information Age. Here’s my example. The specific letter I’m interested in was written 8 April 1846 by Thomas to his wife Jane, who was on holiday at a seaside villa. It’s been published in a  4-volume biography of Carlyle by Anthony Froude written in the years after Carlyle’s death in 1881.  That biography has been republished, and the letter has been in other collections of Carlyle’s letters. Now it’s available at the Carlyle Letters Online.

Since there are so many potential sources for someone to go to check my work and the quote I’m fixing to give, it seems like the traditional methods of citing sources forces the reader to get a copy of the exact publication the person doing the quote used and find the page. How about we do something like this.

Here’s the letter I want to make the quote from. I find an interesting observation of Carlyle in the third paragraph of the letter. Assuming the paragraph breaks are Carlyle’s own and not the publisher’s [online publisher in this case], why not just cite the source as a particular letter written by Carlyle to a particular person [his wife] and found in a particular paragraph? In this case, it would be:

Carlyle, Thomas; a letter to his wife Jane Welsh Carlyle, 8 April 1846, paragraph 3. Accessed 7 September 2026 at Carlyle Letters Online.

If the quote is from a long paragraph, you can add a letter to designate approximately where in the paragraph the quote is from, e.g. paragraph 3a, or 3b, or 3c…. In this case the quote comes from a relatively short paraph and starts the paragraph, so a letter shouldn’t be needed to clarify the location. The person wishing to verify the quote can look through the entire paragraph if necessary, which is no more work than having to scan an entire page based on the traditional citation method.

Of course, my method will result in the person making the citation having to do a little more work to count up the paragraph and decide on the letter designation, but I think it’s time well spent. Of course, I doubt if anyone at the Chicago Manual of Style or other organizations care about my better way of doing it.

Well, that’s a lengthy introduction. Time to give the quote.

I really wish you could find an eligible House somewhere out under the quiet sky,—removed fairly from these tumults and loud-braying discords of every kind; which it is growing really horrible and miserable to me to spend the remnant of my days among!

Carlyle, Thomas; a letter to his wife Jane Welsh Carlyle, 8 April 1846, paragraph 3; accessed 7 September 2026 at Carlyle Letters Online.

Thomas was at their London home, Jane at some friend’s seaside villa near Liverpool. He was working on the second edition of his book about Oliver Cromwell, she just lazing around and enjoying her holiday. Thomas had asked her to look around for a house in a quiet place they could rent for a season to get away from London’s summer climate.

I must say I sympathize with him. How often do I think it would be nice to get away for a long stretch, not have to worry about home repairs, organization of stuff, other routines. It would be nice, if I could swing it, to have a cook and a house maid. I think we could do without a butler and a footman and a chauffer. We sort of tried that with a four week road trip last summer that included a week on Cape Cod (unpleasant) and two weeks in the Berkshires (very nice). Perhaps we’ll get to do that again some day.

Well, that’s my post for today. Not exactly earth shattering—that is, of course, unless the CMOS sees this and decides to adopt the Todd Method as an alternative way of making citations.

ETA: I see that I also posted about this comment in this letter earlier this year. I forgot about that. Ah, well, it was obviously still on my mind.

Daddy Daughter Day, Danny Tompkins Short Stories, Harmony of the gospels, letters, miscellaneous, The Forest Throne, The Gutter Chronicles, Writing

Somehow Gotta Get Writing

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Sold one of these last week, the first one in several years.

Life has been quite busy for a while now, including some family stuff that has taken away much of my free time. Except for minor work on the next book in The Forest Throne series, I haven’t done any writing for a while. I have done a little editing the last two days on the harmony of the gospels I wrote close to twenty years ago to get it ready to share with a friend.

Almost every day the urge to write hits me. A novel. Non-fiction. An essay. Letters. A blog post. Doesn’t really matter. Just let me get back to writing.

And one of these, same conditions.

But it’s been hard to set my mind to it. I’ve had a little time, here and there in bits and snatches, but at those moments I just couldn’t shift gears from whatever had most recently consumed my time. I took a few notes on paper. I did some organization of what may eventually become my autobiography. I better organized my computer files and folders. I found a good quote in one of Thomas Carlyle’s letters that will serve for a blog post. Ideas for essays passed through my head, and I documented a few.

But actual writing has been almost nil. Last Monday I couldn’t even get my act together to make a blog post. I’ve been wondering if my decision back in June to cease actively trying to sell books has contributed to this writing lethargy. Maybe so. But a few sales in August, despite no advertising of any kind, should have perked me up. Yet, no real writing.

and one of these. Someone dug quite deep into my backlist.

So here I am on Saturday writing a post to go live on Monday. This morning I completed—or nearly did—a project organizing family photos and papers. It felt good to have that done and not hanging over my head. Some home renovations are just about done. One door to be hung whenever our contractor gets to it. That includes a mended bookshelf, which will allow us to finish shelving our books. That will be a good feeling. And a little locksmith work.

I think, to ease back into writing, I’ll go back to that Carlyle letter and see if I can write a meaningful blog post on it for next week’s post. Then I’ll pull The Forest Throne book back up and work on it a little. One grandchild is anxious that I do that. Maybe getting some words on paper, or rather pixels, will be a few what I need to jump start my writing. Maybe September will be the month.

books, memories, miscellaneous, Writing

Moving On

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Seems like every part of the house is a mess with photos to be sorted through.

On Saturday last (so two days ago), I completed a project. No, this post is not about that project. It will be the subject of my next post.

Nor am I going to go into detail about what the next project is. I’ve made enough posts over the last year about what my plans are—how they get fulfilled or derailed—that I suspect my readers are tired of hearing about those plans.

Suffice to say I’m moving on to something else. Actually two something elses. Or maybe it’s three something elses. I’m not really sure what’s next. I’ve consulted my last list and have started on the one listed next. But my brother-in-law threw a monkey wrench in the works of two projects and I need to wait on him to send me something. Other ideas are floating about in the space between my ears. I may make a few jottings on them, see which one presents the lower-hanging fruit, and shift to it.

Meanwhile, I still have family budgeting work to do (dreading it and so avoiding it), at which I’m falling further behind. I still have filing of bills and paper (same), which still show up in my mailbox even though I’ve gone mostly paperless. I still have boxes and boxes of “things” to sort through after our move (tired of it, and still irked by it). I worked on photographs on Saturday and Sunday, because two of my projects involve dealing with photos. While I made progress, the living room is not yet free of boxes of photos, folders of photos, and loose photos waiting to find their place. It’s possible that by the end of today or tomorrow, I will have all photos in clearly marked boxes, arranged by locations or subjects, and ready for me to do what is needed for the next two projects. That’s my goal, at least.

Welcome to the ides of June.

letters, miscellaneous, reading, The Forest Throne, Writing

Stardate 2026.06.08, Miscellaneous

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  • On Friday, I finally found a box of photos I’d been looking for in our disorganized new home. “It was poorly labeled” will be my excuse. Of course, I’m the one who labeled it. I sorted through the photos and, on Saturday and Sunday, began scanning them to put them in the right format for adding to the WW2 letters book, learning more about formatting photos in G.I.M.P. in the process. It now looks like I might be able to finish the book, complete the formatting, and publish it within the week.
  • Not related to writing, other photos finding/sorting/evaluating is also in progress, with some progress, though also with some dismay at finding many more photos than I realized we had. The task I thought was merely humongous is actually gigantic.
  • I’m sticking to my reading and making my reading goal almost every day.
  • Today, in writing a letter to a friend, I made the first tangible documentation of an idea for another book. I know, I don’t need another book in the queue, but nor do I need this idea consuming so much brainpower with no outlet. Perhaps now I can direct more energy to projects already in progress.
  • After three or four weeks of undisciplined eating and failure to exercise, I’ve at least partially righted those wrongs and my weight is dropping a little. Gotta keep it up. Also seeing progress on blood sugar daily readings.
  • Perhaps related, perhaps not, my sleep seems to be better regulated.
  • The wall I hit, at mentioned in my last blog post, hasn’t totally come down, but it has enough chinks in it to see to the other side.

Bulleted items aside, I start off this week in a significantly better mood than last.

family, stock market, Writing

Getting Things Done, Version N+1

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It’s a mess for a while, but it will all come together fairly quickly.

Retirement sure is a busy time. As much as I have to do, I wonder how I survived 45 years in the working world (not including 8 years pre-college graduation). But I did, and am now—surviving, that is.

By saying “surviving” I’m not implying a lack of enjoyment. I have plenty of enjoyment times: my noon reading time on the covered, screened patio, evening TV time, before bed reading time, morning devotions, church activities, frequent times with our daughter’s family. Yes, in the midst of my self-imposed busyness, I have plenty of time for enjoyment.

Take this last week, for instance.

  • On Saturday, I pulled out a large box of packed photos with the intent of sorting them and finding permanent filing for them. That job is half done, and the office floor is a mess. I hope to finish today, Monday.
  • Last week I made major progress on the book of my father-in-law’s World War 2 letters and journal. As of work completed yesterday, I have only 27 letters left to proofread, a one-day task including adding them to the book file. Between 20-40 letters require comparison to the original letters, a Tuesday task. Hopefully I can get that done in a day.
  • Then I scan to text his war journal, which may not be as many pages as I thought it was. No prediction on when I will get to that, though hopefully it will be this week.
  • Now that our home in Bella Vista AR has sold, it’s time to get serious on replacing the tub/shower in our bathroom with a walk-in shower, and buying the furniture we need (chairs and a table, maybe a replacement couch). I’d like to get the ball rolling on that the week, but fear it will slide to next. I did a little scouting last week on Friday.
  • Two of the ideas for future books, which are far enough out that I can’t predict if/when I’ll ever get to them, have started to gel in my mind. I hope to have some outlines done, at least in part, by the end of the week.

So yes, life is busy. At least in part fulfilling. Oh yes, two more things I should really do this week: Catch up on mail/filing/budgeting/bill paying. And figuring out how much I have to pay the IRS in quarterly payments this year in anticipation in next year’s taxes. That’s a two or three hour, spreadsheet-driven task I’m not looking forward to but which will be very good to have behind me.

expatriate life, History, letters, memories, self-publishing, Writing

A Project Never Seems Done

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In the full cover, the photo and text is not out of center. This Amazon photo of the cover is, though.

About a month ago, I wrote about the projects I had on my to-do list and what I might tackle next, what would come after that. I have no shortage of projects in some stage of thinking through.

So after thinking through my projects list, and after having finished my income taxes, I spent a little time at paperwork reduction, then jumped into my list. The first item that seemed best to me was revisions to my book The Saudi Years in Letters. This promised to be the shortest of my projects, and it truly did go quickly.

First, I loaded the recently found letters into the book and formatted them. That added around 16 pages to the document. Next, I proofread the book using Word’s text-to-speech read-back feature. I was able to go through the book in three or four days. I probably could have done it all in a day and a half except for the concentration fatigue. Proofreading caused me to flag four letters to check against the originals. That took only an hour to do.

That brought me up to formatting the overall book. I had to do that page by page, making sure to have text and photos in right relation to each other, eliminating excessive white space and adding white space where needed. This took a day of work and eliminated about five pages from the file. I uploaded the new text file to Amazon without re-doing the cover. Alas, the extra pages from the extra letters were a few too many for the existing cover to work, so I had to re-do the cover. Fortunately , I was able to re-size the cover and upload the book to Amazon in about an hour.

So the project is finished, right? Not quite. As I went through the on-line layout checking of the book, I saw that it would be possible to add six to eight photos without having to reformat anything. Should I do it? That would mean finding the right boxes in storage closets (not impossible), going through the photos, making selections, scanning and formatting. A day or two of work, most likely.

I decided not to do that right now. If I let the book go out to my kids and grandkids, the intended audience, with a little extra white space, I’d say no big deal. I’ll take a few weeks to work on something else, then maybe come back to this.

On to another project.

miscellaneous, Writing

A Great Weight

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This year, filling out my taxes was worse than normal.

At the moment, I still don’t feel at home at our new house. At least in part, this is because I don’t feel like we’ve gotten into a rhythm yet. Daily tasks are a mixture of the old routines brought here, trying to finish unpacking and finding a place for things, and doing tasks that are one of a kind.

One of the latter has been dealing with Lynda’s eye infection. That has required four appointments with a new eye doc, with one more to go. Another one-of-a-kind task has been setting up autopay on our new utilities and cancelling the old. That’s about done now, with a few glitches along the way. Learning to use an unfamiliar range top, unfamiliar streaming service, stores with things in unfamiliar places, all of these are making life difficult.

But the big task that has been a weight around my neck has been the income taxes. I was able to complete my home business taxes calculated in March and the partnership forms filed by the March 15 deadline. Then other things got in the way. I finally got back on our personal income taxes last week, mainly last weekend.

And to my horror, I owed over $1800 in additional taxes! How could this be? Every year since I’ve retired, the amount withheld had been enough that I never owed much, sometimes even got a little back. What happened this year? Had the law changed a lot? Or had I missed something? Or did my spreadsheet have an error?

Then I realized: I had made more money this year than normal in our stock trading business. Despite trading only about six months of the year, a new way of trading of my own design had been successful, and the profits proved it. To test the theory, I took a little time to re-figure my taxes with no business profits included. Sure enough, the IRA withholdings were about right with the taxes owed. That makes sense. Make more money, don’t pay in taxes as you go along, expect to have to pay more at the end.

On Tuesday, I was able to get the tax forms filled out, printed, signed, copied, and the painful check written. I wrote it on the business account, since after all that was the cause.

Of course, then I had to do my Arkansas taxes. Those are normally easier. My spreadsheet fills in all the blanks. I just need to verify that I’ve entered the data correctly and make sure the forms didn’t change since last year. I completed those forms on Wednesday and mailed them Thursday. Since they owe me, I don’t think Arkansas will object to my being a day late.

Having this done for another year feels like a great weight having fallen off my shoulders. I think now I will feel comfortable moving on to other things. On Thursday I tackled the family budget. That was after Wednesday was filled with church activities and dealing with the potential sale of our house in Arkansas.  Friday will be setting up my files for next year and entering data for the start of the year. Saturday will be a mix of work around the house, looking at the status of my writing projects and maybe getting a little done on one. Also Saturday I have an author even, the Stacks N’ Snacks adult book fair at Brazoswood High School for two hours in the afternoon. I’m looking forward to that.

 

Bible study, self-publishing, Writing

Book Published: “He’s Alive”

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The series is finished. Time to make a few tweaks and move on to something else.

Well, it’s done. My Bible study series A Walk Through Holy Week. On Saturday I typed a few edits from my last read-through, formatted the book for Kindle and print, created the e-book cover, and uploaded the e-book to Amazon. By the end of the day, it was approved and live for sale. This volume actually goes beyond Holy Week and covers the Easter season up to the Ascension.

I suppose I should say it’s “almost done”. I still have to create the print book cover and upload it. That’s hopefully a one-hour task today. Then there will be creating and uploading improved covers for the entire series, because the covers right now could be much better. But new covers can wait for a long time if need be.

I declare the eight-volume series done. The final word count for all eight books is somewhere between 320,000 and 330,000. Of course, total sales thus far for Volumes 1-7 is zero, so I don’t have great hopes for calling the series a success.

Now, it’s time to figure out what to do next. A plan is beginning to gel and will be the subject of a future post or two.

movies, moving, Writing

Routines

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The worst part of moving, apart from downsizing to a house about 1/3rd of what we had, apart from going from a mostly rural area to a fully developed city subdivision, is trying to establish routines.

I am a creature of routine. Give me the same thing to do every day and I’ll be happy. Up at 6:30, work on writing, stock trading from 8:15 to 8:45, breakfast at 9:00, more work in the office (writing or household budget), reading at noon, lunch at 1:00, etc. I like routine.

Alas, my routines were stolen by our move from Arkansas to Texas.  For the first two weeks I did nothing but move and unpack boxes. At the two-week mark I was able to resume stock trading with a partially set-up office. Then a crisis of missing medications that took a few days to work out. Then I was able to resume my writing work, more editing at present as I’m trying to get previously written works ready for publication.

I’m slowly getting routines established. My reading place is now the screened patio instead of the sunroom. The Dungeon has been replaced by an office, now mostly fully set-up in the 3rd bedroom. My evening reading place is sprawled out on the living room floor while we are without easy chairs. Tuesday this week I was able to get the minivan registered. That’s one big, non-routine item I had facing me. Now I can concentrate on re-establishing routines.

Not so fast. On Wednesday I went through a pile of mail and worked on changing addresses, filing documents, and learning to use my bank’s remote depositing feature. Oh, yes, and using PayPal to pay a bill for the first time.

Routine is returning, though more slowly than I would like. I’ve figured out when I need to have outgoing mail for the mail carrier to pick it up. I’ve started to learn when local utility bills are debited. How long it takes to get to church to know when to leave home to be on time. I’m not sure when I’ll be ready to reestablish a routine for posting here, but I’m working on it.