Category Archives: Writing

Carlyle, Writing

Adjusting to the Time Crunch

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So, as I said in my last post, the Time Crunch is here. Finding time to write will be difficult. Therefore, it’s time to make adjustments.

What I find so far in my new schedule is that I have snippets of time—a half hour here, forty-five minutes there—in which I can do something. That includes minor time at work, before and after being “on the clock,” but also some time in the evenings. I may have 30 minutes before we watch a webinar, or a similar amount of time after a conference call with our mentor. How do I fill that time?

To work on the formatting of Father Daughter Day I would have to go to The Dungeon and work on the computer there. That would be the same for the formatting of my next Thomas Carlyle book (which I’ve never posted about in detail; must put it on the schedule to do so). If I want to sit upstairs next to Lynda rather than abandon her, I need to find something to do with my Nook tablet, or even with paper books.

For the moment, I’ve found the solution. For my Carlyle book on his book Chartism, my intention is to add excerpts from some of his letters. In pursuit of that I’ve skimmed/half read his letters from 1838-1839 and a little into 1840, looking for those references. I could finish 1840. I’m writing notes on paper, and someday, after the Time Crunch, will be able to use those notes to go back to the right letters, pull the excerpts, and dump them into the Word document on the computer in The Dungeon. Or maybe, by that time, we’ll have a second laptop and I’ll be able to work upstairs.

But, I’m using Carlyle’s letters for a second project, a chronological bibliography of his works based on date of writing rather than date of publication. I can’t remember if I’ve ever written about this before on this blog. Two older bibliographies of his works are arrange based on publication date. Another partial bibliography of his early works is by date. It was published as a short magazine article, and doesn’t give much information as to why the writer places certain things where he does. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a great partial bibliography, and I’ll certainly incorporate his findings and conclusions in mine, but it’s somewhat short compared to what I’d like to see. And, of course, it’s only a partial.

I’d like to do a full one, with plenty of references. I’d like to include a list of Carlyle’s letters interspersed with the other works, to show researchers/scholars what exactly he was working on at different times. I started on this some years ago, long before I found the published bibliographies. This past spring I went back to it. I decided on a format, and spent some time placing Carlyle’s works in an order, starting at the beginning, coordinating the four published bibliographies (including the very incomplete earliest and the partial), and making some good progress.

It was a bigger job than I realized, but I was actually pleased with it when, sometime around March or April, I laid it aside in favor of other writing tasks. But during the Time Crunch, I realized I could easily access the Carlyle Letters Online in the snippets of time I had, skim them for references to his works, and write paper notes about what I find. Having a printout of the bibliography as it currently stands, I can handwrite edits. At work, where the electronic file resides at present, when not on the clock I can type the edits.

So, the last three or four evenings I’ve been doing just that. Actually, I started it last week. I’m making progress. I have several pages of notes about the letters and references therein to Carlyle’s writings, nicely organized to be savable, retrievable, and searchable. Right now I’m in 1822. Since he lived till 1881 I still have a long ways to go, but that’s okay. My immediate goal is to get through 1825, at the time when Carlyle began publishing book-length translations with commentary.  I’d like to settle on an order of writings, complete with all references, correct any formatting problems I may have, and come to a resting point.

The next segment after that will be 1826-1833, about the time Carlyle finished what may be his best-known work, Sartor Resartus. After that, we’ll see. Perhaps I’ll tire of this and be ready for other snippets of work. Perhaps the Time Crunch will be over by then, and I can resume a more normal mix of activities, a mix that includes more writing time.  That’s what I’m hoping for.

stock market, Writing

A Time Crunch is Here

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Time has always been a factor in how much writing I can accomplish. The day job sure gets in the way of writing production! Still, I’ve been able to manage, and think I’ve published quite a lot the last (almost) four years.

But, I think I’m heading into a very dry six-month period right now. Lynda and I have signed up for some intensive training in stock trading, in an attempt to figure out what we’ve been doing wrong and, as a result, get to the point where we will be more consistently profitable. We are paying for this training, of course. Upon starting it we learned it is much more intense and time consuming than expected. It consumed parts of the last two evenings, enough of them that I had no time for anything else; or at least the time chunks left over were not long enough to entice me to pick up my pen, or read for research.

This will last for the next six months, possibly longer. I don’t foresee being able to give more than a couple of hours a week to writing before that’s over, i.e. before April 2015. That means I probably won’t have any new items published much before June-July 2015.  That’s an unfortunate side effect, one I’m not real happy with, but, as they say now a days, it is what it is.

I’ll still try to post here twice a week, but for sure a minimum of once a week. I don’t know what I’ll have to report, but I’ll figure something out.

Carlyle, Health, Writing

Work on my two Carlyle Projects

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Saturday I woke up with my knee hurting more than it has been lately. Friday evening it felt good, and I wanted to walk to the highway and back, a 1.3 mile round trip. However, I was barely out of the driveway when the pain told me I wasn’t going that far. I walked a total of 15 minutes, more or less hobbling back.

Yet, Saturday morning I was determined to work in the yard rather than baby my knee. So I went outside early and began sawing logs, along with bringing a large tree cutting up from halfway down the yard. I cut for over an hour, adding about 25 logs to the pile. I didn’t finish the big one, but I made a start on it, cutting two or three logs off of it. After that I raked for a while, then went up to the front of the house and swept and did other minor work. I had hoped to go for two hours, but after an hour and forty-five minutes I was done, heading back inside for some rest. In fact, I laid on the couch and slept for an hour or two. My knee hurt, but probably no worse than Friday evening.

Later in the day I vacuumed the basement, including The Dungeon portion of it; changed batteries in a couple of key technology pieces; washed out the furnace screens; put the recyclables into the van for delivery on Sunday; and made the weekly Wal-Mart grocery run. All in all, it was a busy and active day. I didn’t try walking in the evening.

What does that have to do with writing, you ask, which is, after all, the supposed subject of this blog? The activity, the busyness of the day, left my brain in no condition to work on my writing. I had two chapters to read to prepare to teach Life Group on Sunday, and barely had the brainpower to read them and prepare. In an unheard of event for a weekend night, we were in bed by 10:30 p.m.

Sunday afternoon found me ready for a nap, but I think I only slept 30 minutes at most, and was at my computer. Logic told me I should work on my Civil War book, still standing at 40 or so percent complete. Instead, still being somewhat below par in brainpower, I decided to format my book on Carlyle’s Chartism. I haven’t worked on this since March or April, when I downloaded most of the source documents into it and planned the purpose, contents, and order of the book. I decided to work on the formatting. I had pulled in things from at least 15 different websites, and had over 50 different text styles, all of which needed to be regularized.

I worked on this for about an hour and a half (after writing and posting at my other blog). I’m a long, long way from finishing the formatting, but it’s certainly in much better shape. I need to do some more searching for related out-of-copyright documents: contemporaneous reviews, historical reviews, and even some predecessor documents. I’ve also identified three copyrighted reviews from 1990 onwards that I’d like to include in it. I contacted one copyright holder about a different matter, so know where and how to reach them. I need to determine the other two copyright holders and contact all three to see if I can get permission to republish their articles.

So, I made progress on Sunday. It’s nothing that I can say, “Oh, three more hours and I’ll be done with that.” I don’t know how long the formatting will take me. If I were forced to guess, I’d say two more days like Sunday and the formatting of what I have in hand would be done. I need to find other documents and include them. And I need to write my own essay, or perhaps a couple, about Carlyle’s Chartism, but those are down the line. I think, if I concentrated on this only, I’d be a year or so away from having it done.

In my next post, possibly I’ll explain exactly what this book is, and its purpose.

Engineering, Writing

A Different Kind of Writing

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Last week at work I found myself in a position I’d waited for for a long time: All major tasks caught up, all training planned and in motion for the next few weeks, and the ability to look for things I’d left hanging or set aside but could not pick up again.

The last of my major tasks was a project audit. I finished that early last week, and shot off e-mails to the Dept. Head, requesting a meeting to discuss the results. I knew his key man on the project was out last week, so the meeting about the audit results would be delayed. With that done (on Tuesday, I think), and with me not having to teach a class all week, I sat back and said, “What to do next?” Almost immediately I answered, “Work on the spec for stormwater underground detention.”

One of my jobs at CEI is “keeper of the standards”. It’s up to me, working with our corporate CADD trainer, to make sure whatever standards we have for engineering work are up to date and being followed. The project audits are to see how well the standards were followed on a project. Construction specifications are part of that. I maintain our database of guide specification sections. Construction specs has been a passion of mine through the years. I enjoy that part of a project more than any other.

I guess I enjoy them because it’s word-smithing. You try, in a few pages, to tell the contractor in words what you can’t easily show in pictures. When lines on a drawing fail you, you use words. But the language is different. You are terse. You don’t worry about complete sentences. You use lists when you can. You leave out many definite and indefinite articles. You talk directly to the contractor, so can leave off a lot of unnecessary words. I love it. So different from creative writing, but I love it. When I teach classes on spec writing, I always say “You aren’t writing literature.”

An example of best practice in specifications language can be seen in the following three ways to say a thing.

  • The Contractor shall construct a underground detention basin.
  • An underground detention basin shall be construction.
  • Construct an underground detention basin.

Eight words, seven word, and five words in those three examples. The third one is considered best practice, and the way I do it.

In this particular spec section, I had set it aside almost a year ago because I couldn’t pull it all together. We have a choice between many available systems: plastic, metal, concrete, manufactured, built-in-place, half concrete half earthen, arch structures, pipe structures, etc. Each one has advantages. Our office tends to use one specific type more than others, though others can be considered. I started out writing a spec section that would include all types of systems, but found it impossible to do so in less than 10 to 14 pages. A spec section that size is too long. So I decided to break it into two of three sections, and concentrate first on the plastic structures. Once I did that, it started to come together quickly.

But, when I laid it aside, it still wasn’t quite done. I had taken out all the extraneous language on concrete and metal systems, but hadn’t really described the different plastic systems available. It was Wednesday last week, I think, that time became available. I picked up the spec section and began properly describing the different plastic systems available. I had to name a couple of categories of systems. I had to research ASTM standards (mostly done before). I had to fit everything into the pigeonholes established by the construction specifications standard-setting organization.

One big thing I had to do was write a section on the actual construction. This was difficult because the differing systems available require different construction sequences. We generally don’t like to give the contractor a lot of restrictions on the “how” part of construction, or the sequence. But we do have to say a few things. I managed to put something together, and I had a completed spec. That was mid-day on Friday.

The next thing I did was e-mail it to each of the manufacturers mentioned, to make sure I have it right for their system. I did so on Friday, with one straggler going out yesterday. Slowly, responses are coming in. Today I’ll start taking a look at those, and tweaking the spec based on the comments.

Spec writing is as far away from creative writing as you can get. Except for making every word count. And using active voice as much as possible. And making sure you are communicating to your intended audience in a way that will be understood. I hope the next few months provide me with much more time to work on specs. It will make me a better writer.

Daddy Daughter Day, self-publishing, Writing

Do I Write? Do I Publish? Do I Market?

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For the last week I’ve done no writing. Not a word. For more than a week, actually. Nor have I done anything about marketing my writing. Instead, I’ve read; I’ve rested; I’ve watched television; I’ve worked a little on genealogy. Oh, and this past weekend I spent a few hours filing and culling my writing papers.

So when do I start writing again? I’m not sure I’m ready yet. I’m still reeling from the lack of sales. Sales looked so promising in April through July. After months of selling two or three copies a month, I was up to 10 to 12 copies per month. Then Amazon started the Kindle Unlimited book borrowing service in July. None of my books are in that. Coincidentally, about that time, my book sales dried up to nothing. I went from July 30 to August 28 selling not one book on Kindle. On August 28 I dropped the price of my first baseball/Mafia novel to $0.99, and sold seven copies in two days. I hoped this would spur sales of the sequel, but unfortunately it did not. I sold one copy of that.

In the face of those sales results, it’s difficult to carry on. I don’t know that Kindle Unlimited caused people to quit buying my books because they can borrow books less expensively elsewhere. I don’t particularly want to pull my books from all other sales channels so that they can be exclusive to Amazon and thus in KU. But the timing of my sales drop and the launch of KU are, if not effect and cause, quite coincidental. This past weekend I had my first two sales in September, on back-to-back days. It’s a welcome development, which I hope will continue. Alas, my pessimistic side says it won’t.

So, I need to decide what to do. Do I write? Do I promote and see what happens? Do I publish what I have ready? Do I finish what’s in the pipeline and publish those? All of those things require work and sacrifice. Publishing means creating covers, the thought of which makes me ill. I either need to buck up and do it or hire it done with money I don’t have. I could also opt for ugly, generic covers that don’t attract readers. Since my fancier covers aren’t attracting readers, maybe it won’t make a difference.

The book that’s closest to being done and ready to publish is my poetry book, Father Daughter Day. It’s done, just needing e-book and print book formatting and a cover. I say it’s done. I had hoped to add one more poem to it. I’ve worked on that poem, but nothing has come to me that seems good. The book could go out without it. Maybe this week I’ll take the drafts of the poem and work on it, see if I can finish it. Then next week I could do the formatting. As for a cover, I have an idea of exactly what I want, but I can’t produce it. It would take an artist, or at least a graphic artist to combine elements into an attractive cover.

I’m mainly thinking out loud here. Possibly finishing FDD is the way I’ll go, though maybe not. Stay tuned.

Writing

Dreaming

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The problem with not writing is my mind fills the hours with dreaming instead. Dreaming about completing books that I’ve set aside for the moment. Dreaming about sales that never come. Dreaming about future books in the queue.

Dreaming is not a good practice, IMHO, because dreams tend to grow out of proportion to what reality can deliver. I don’t discount how big God is, and that He can certainly work results that can exceed even our wildest dreams. But my experience is we have to make our best efforts and work out our dreams.

So this is going to be a rough period. Dreaming but not doing. I don’t know how long it’s going to last. I suppose this weekend I’ll at least do some research in the Civil War book. Although, with all the filing I have to do, maybe not.

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Headshots, Writing

Rethinking

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Book sales in April through August are significantly better than they were in January through March. So why am I so depressed about book sales?

Because, except for a couple of special circumstances, I’ve had close to zero sales of late. Last month I put In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People on sale for $0.99; the regular price is $3.99. I did this, intending for it to last a week, because the sequel, Headshots, was to be released August 28, and I hoped a sale on the first might spark sales on the second. That’s what the conventional wisdom is, at least.

Well, the sale resulted in 7 sales of FTSP and exactly 1 sale of Headshots. I had two pre-orders of Headshots, but when I asked Amazon why only one sale they said the other pre-order was never paid, so they never shipped the book.  One sale of a novel that included a pre-order time and some notifications on Facebook is pathetic, to say the least.

The other special circumstance was the release of the paperback copy of The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 1 in June. I sold 23 copies of that in the office and to a couple of clients. Since then none. Except for these two circumstances, I’ve sold 47 books this year. That’s for 17 items published. It’s true, I don’t do a lot of promotion. I’m sure my FB friends get tired of what promotional posts I do make. My two blogs have almost no readers, so the promotion I do on them probably results in no sales. So, any sales I have are the occasional drive-by sale. I don’t know that I have any/many from relatives, acquaintances, or on-line friends. I know that a couple of co-workers bought electronic copies of The Gutter Chronicles earlier in the year.

I have several works-in-progress. I’ll probably finish and publish them, but beyond that I have no vision and no plan. I’ll write more about this on Friday.

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.

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.

Engineering, Writing

Different Writing: A Professional Paper

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I continue with my creative writing endeavors. Last night I made good progress on Documenting America: Civil War Edition. I typed some writing from manuscript, and added to it on the computer to complete a chapter. Then I continued research into the next chapter to be written. Today I completed reading the source document, and read some background material. Tomorrow I’ll excerpt the material and write the chapter. Good stuff, good progress.

But my main writing work yesterday and today was working on my technical paper for the EC15 conference. The paper was due today to the International Erosion Control Association. I still haven’t finished and submitted it. The presentation will be in Portland, OR next February. Long lead time, I know.

The idea for this paper came to me over a year ago, and gelled into an outline at the EC14 conference in Nashville last February. The concept was: gather data from the bid forms from a number of projects about how erosion control work is bid out. Analyze the data, as well as qualitative information from the projects, to see if one method of contracting seems to be better. My hopes, and soft expectation, was that unit price contracting, as opposed to lump sum contracting, would be better for erosion and sediment control work. Hence the name of my paper: “Unit Price Contracting for Erosion and Sediment Control Work: Does it Improve Our Practice?”

I gathered the data (i.e. the bid forms) from ten projects several months ago, and talked with our employee who handled the field work on several of those projects. I’m a big fan of unit price contracting because it is a risk-sharing approach to construction contracting. Explaining what I mean with that would be way too long for a blog post. I teach a 90 minute class on that topic. I felt that going with this risk-sharing approach for erosion and sediment control work would result in better prices, better implementation  of devices and practices, better maintenance of these devices, and less pollution to the environment. It was the ultimate win-win situation to me.

But that’s my intuitive analysis, based on my own biases and qualitative analysis. What would the data say? As I said above, I gathered the data some time ago, and had aggregated it into one spreadsheet. I created my outline about a month ago, and wrote a tentative introductory sentence. There the paper stood until yesterday just afternoon.

At that time I started with the real writing. I had much more introduction to write, then get into an explanation of what I mean by “improved practice.” I also had a little more outline to think over, and dusting off and re-looking at the data. I did all this, and by the end of the day I had a little over 900 words. I anticipate the paper will run somewhere around 3,000 words, so this seemed like reasonable progress. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to finish the paper today, but I might get close.

The morning was full of meetings, site visits, and a little personal stuff. I got back to the paper around 1:30 p.m., ready to write the part about the hard data I collected and draw some conclusions out of it. I started writing, but when I got to the part where I should show what the data said, I realized I had never gone the next step and done a few calculations to see what the data actually said. Did it support my hope and anticipation that unit price contracting would result in less expensive erosion control measures that were equally effective as were those of a project that’s where the erosion control work is bid as a lump sum?

So I stopped writing and went back to the data. I quickly saw that I had too much data. I wasn’t going to be able to present all the data I had intended; it would overwhelm the paper. Including it in an appendix was a possibility, but for the moment I had to concentrate on what was in the paper.

I dug into it, and after an hour figured out what I had to do. I ran the calculations needed, from the data already in the spreadsheet, then ranked the projects according to which had the least expensive erosion control, then penciled in the type of bidding used (unit price, lump sum, mixed). To my great pleasure the five lowest cost projects (on a unit basis) for erosion control work were the five that were bid as unit prices! The most expensive three were the ones that trended most to lump sum, using fewer unit prices. My hope and expectation had been realized. On two projects I didn’t have enough data to do the full calculations and rank by unit cost.

I e-mailed the IECA education coordinator, telling her I wouldn’t have the paper in until Tuesday and hoped that would still be alright. I believe it will be. I printed the paper and have it here. I’ll work on it some, or maybe a lot, this weekend. Hopefully by Monday it will be written. All I’ll have to do is see if I can find the rest of the data for those two projects, and interview the field man to get his further opinion on the non-qualitative criteria.

I wish I had it done by the deadline, but I feel good about it. The end is in sight, and it will be a good paper.