Category Archives: Writing

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.

The Gutter Chronicles, Writing

Almost a Book Signing

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One of the things a self-published author is likely to not have, which a trade published author will have, is a book signing. That’s not an awful problem, as writers on both sides report that book signings really don’t bring a lot of people or sales to the writer. Still, there’s something magical about book signings. Just having one will, I would think, cause you to dream of long lines, piles of books flying off the table, and many fans saying nice things to you.

Yesterday my order of 25 copies of The Gutter Chronicles arrived at the office. I had pre-sold 19 of these (15 in the office; 4 offsite). I immediately began signing them, distributing, and collecting $8 per copy. I sat at my desk and signed. Then I took the copy across the building and delivered it. Then I went back to my desk and repeated the process with the next one. As I did this, two other people bought  the book and I signed the copies.

No, it wasn’t a book signing. But it was the first time I signed books in quantities and gave them to readers. It was a good feeling, even if it wasn’t a book signing. Perhaps, some day, I’ll have one of those too.

Short Stories, Writing

New Short Story: Saturday Haircuts, Tuesday Funeral

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SHTF Cover - trial 4 1601x2400Some time ago I decided to add two more short stories to my series on teen age grief at the loss of a parent. I’ve spoken of this series before. Originally it was a single short story. Then I decided to add another, and another. At that point I actually decided to plan out the series, thinking of what additional things I could write about concerning the topic.

About three or four months ago I wrote out the start of the short story in manuscript. I covered two pages of what I call “conference note pad” sized paper. Then it sat while I worked on getting the Thomas Carlyle book out, finishing a novel, and writing and publishing my other recent short story, “It Happened At The Burger Joint”. Once all that was put to bed, I knuckled down and wrote this one. The writing went fairly easy, as I had played the scenes out in my mind. I think it took only two days before I had the full story done, it coming in at about 2,700 words.

At that point I let it sit, for about a week, while I messed around with some other writing tasks. Two days ago I picked it up again, read it and did some edits. Printed it and read it again yesterday. Found a few more edits to make. It seemed to me as good as it was going to get. I created the two files for Kindle and Smashwords, and went ahead and published. Here are the links:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L8GDT2G

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/451366

This puts me up to 16 published items, three of them this year. I’m hoping to add three or four more before saying goodbye to 2014.

It Happened At The Burger Joint, Short Stories, Writing

It Happened At The Burger Joint

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burgerjoint_cover_FINALOn Friday just passed I completed the work of publishing my latest short story. Titled “It Happened At The Burger Joint”, it is all about the reconnection of a man and woman who had worked together decades before at a hamburger fast food restaurant. Both went their separate ways, marrying other and having families. Eventually they meet again, though not under the best of circumstances. Yet, the meeting proves to be mutually beneficial.

It’s available on Amazon and Smashwords, and distributed to other e-book retailers via the Smashwords premium catalog. Here are the links:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KTW1JAE

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/445922

The cover proved to be difficult. I worked and worked on one, finding some applicable public domain photos to use. I tried working on it in both PowerPoint and G.I.M.P., and had something workable, but it didn’t look professional. It looked very much as if someone without graphic skills or artistic talent threw it together. I was about to go with what I had, when my Internet writing friend, Veronica Jones-Brown, who has done a couple of other covers for me, said to hang on, that she would work on something. She’s the one who did the cover you see in the post and in the sales links. Thank you, Veronica. I’ll get a check in the mail. Possibly, in a comment, I’ll put up the cover I had, just to show what I can’t do.

I sold one copy so far, to a high school classmate. That’s my first sale of anything in June.

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.

 

Carlyle, self-publishing, The Gutter Chronicles, Writing

More On Creating Book Covers

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I now know enough about using G.I.M.P. to create book covers to be considered dangerous. Last night, on coming home from the office, since the wife was resting and there was no immediate need on either of our parts for supper, I went straight to The Dungeon and began tweaking my two latest book covers. The one for Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles about killed me to have to do, since it had been accepted on first submission. But the glaring typo right on the front cover had to be fixed. I also decided to add some quotation marks to the back cover.

I made the tweaks, saved it in three different file formats, and resubmitted it to CreateSpace. At the same time I resubmitted the interior of the book, which needed two typos corrected and a minor tweak to the margins. So here’s the final cover for TCEEA.

TCEEA print cover 01

After that, I went back to the cover for The Gutter Chronicles. Even though it’s an e-book cover (at this point, at least) and thus should be easier than a print book cover, I’m finding it harder. The problem is the text I’m pasting over the photo of the computer monitor needs to be put in a double perspective view. It’s tilted back from bottom to top and from right to left. This looks like it should be easy with G.I.M.P. You just select the text layer, call for Transform Tools > Perspective from the menu, grab the four corners of the layers one at time, layer by layer, and click Transform.

The problem is, my text is in several layers. This is because the normal spacing between lines of text in a word processor (and the G.I.M.P. text entering window is a simple word processor) is too great for them to look good. Printers call this “leading,” and so I put each major line of text into separate layers (text boxes) and move them closer together than a word processor will allow. But then, in doing the double perspective work, I need to do that with each layer of text.

That wouldn’t be a problem, I imagine, if I understood what I’m doing. when I grab the corners and move them, a table of six numbers changes, the numbers going from zeroes to other numbers, some positive, some negative. The numbers are to five significant digits, and control of the mouse is such that getting the edges of the text in the right place is difficult. Fortunately you can undo and re-do to your heart’s content.

Of the five text layers, only one seems to be in exactly the right spot. So I wrote down the six numbers for that one, and went to work on the others, but the mouse control to get the numbers on those other layers to be perfect is impossible. And you can’t just click on the table and enter the perspective numbers you want. Thus, I have five layers of text, one at a perfect perspective and four at odd perspectives. Here’s where the cover stands now.

TGC-Vol 1 Cover

You can see how the lines of text aren’t all at the right perspective. My name on the “nameplate” is good, but the others are all askew. I’m sure G.I.M.P. has a way to handle that. There are Path commands, which perhaps allows one layer to have the same attributes of another layer. Maybe there’s a way to get into that table of perspective numbers and enter them, and—poof—the layer will go to exactly the right perspective. I’m still learning, and have much, much more to learn.

But, for now, this is the cover. And, I just sold a copy! I posted the new cover and link to the Kindle version on Facebook, and one of the women in our Accounting Department bought one. We’ll see where it goes from here. I must get back to doing some writing, and set covers aside for a while, but more work in G.I.M.P. is not far away.

self-publishing, Writing

Hindrances to Writing

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I had great plans to have my baseball novel done and published in time for the start of baseball season, or at least at the end of the first month of the season. Alas, I’m not going to make it. In fact, at this point I’d say I’ll be lucky to have it done by the first of August. So many interruptions, so many demands on my time. I have a new appreciation for young moms and dads who try to write when they have young children at home. I don’t know how they do it.

Here are the things that have prevented me from doing much writing on my novel this year. Some of these are writing or writing related.

  • Reading with my wife. She has wanted us to read aloud together in the evenings. So on about five evenings a week, sometimes more, we’ve been reading aloud from the Harry Potter series. Now, I know, I know, I need to spend time with her. But being gone for work for 11 1/2 hours, including commuting, fighting traffic, coming home and having to pull something together for supper, I’m not really in a mood to take an hour out of the few evening hours for reading aloud. [/rant]
  • Income taxes take a lot of time. Between our stock trading business, my writing business, and my mother-in-law’s taxes, it seems like weeks of my evening time between Jan 31 and April 15 are consumed by these d—— governments of ours. Even now, on tax deadline day, I get to the office with the m-i-l’s forms having been e-mailed here for printing, and I find one of the forms is blank. I also forgot to bring with me the copies of income statements I’m supposed to attach. So what do I do: drive 15 miles home and get the things I need, or file a quick extension? Either way I’ll have to go my my m-i-l’s place and have her sign something, then take it by the P.O. Last weekend lost tax documents that came in the mail couldn’t be found, so I had to generate the information from bank statements, taking hours for what should have taken 2 minutes. But, going home may be in the cards, because…
  • The wife is sick, and we have our 3-year-old grandson staying with us. Yesterday I received an urgent call shortly after 1:00 p.m. She felt really bad, and could I come home and help watch Ezra. So I did, getting home around 2. Had I realized I hadn’t filled out that one tax form properly, or that I had never stuck those other documents in my portfolio to take to work, I could have used the time for that, but I didn’t realize it. And, just now, the urgent call has come in for today. It looks as if I have to leave work again. She was interrupted by another call, so I need to wait until she calls back to know for sure if I have to head home.
  • Various publishing tasks have taken my time, mainly learning how to make my own book covers because hiring it done is too expensive, given how few sales I have, and one can only beg and borrow so many from people before you demean yourself. That includes a talented family member who could easily do them, but seems uninterested in my writing career. At least that’s writing related. Last night, in the few minutes I had to myself, I made another tweak to the cover for The Gutter Chronicles and uploaded it. Hopefully this time it will pass muster and the book will be added to the Smashwords premium catalog.
  • Tomorrow I conduct a live webinar for the International Erosion Control Association. I’ll have an audience paying to hear what I have to say about erosion control. That is taking a lot of my time, and gives me no flexibility during the working hours. If I go home today, I’ll have to work on it from there, getting my last presentations done.

I could say a few more things, but it will come off as worse of a rant than it is. Maybe the second half of April will be better than January, February, March, and the first half of April. And, while this rant mentions family members, since none of them ever read my blog, I’m going to let it publish as is.

Carlyle, Writing

Beware the Introduction

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Every non-fiction book needs one: an Introduction. A section that tells what the author’s purposes are with the book, what they hope to accomplish, what the reader will take away from it. Sometimes the Introduction is labeled as Chapter 1, but it’s still an Introduction.

I’ve read many books that have introductions, some short, some lengthy; some interesting, some boring. Sometimes the Introduction is the best part of the book. Sometimes the Introduction is so long it constitutes a book in its own right. I have a book on Old Testament pseudopigrapha, and the Introduction is about as long and as interesting as Leviticus. Then there’s the Introduction to Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, which is the first chapter. It’s fairly long, but perhaps not in relation to this three-volume book. For sure it is dry reading, a hindrance to me getting into the book.

Introductions have proven difficult for many writers. I recall reading in one of Charles Lamb’s letters about his friend, George Dyer, who had written and published a book of his poetry. He had a long Introduction—80 pages sticks in my mind. When reading the proofs off the press, before actually releasing the book, Dyer found an error in the Introduction. Lamb doesn’t say what the error was, but since the type had been set, the Introduction couldn’t be changes. All Dyer could do was eliminate the Introduction and let the poems stand on their own. This he did, at his own cost, probably as much as the profits he hoped to gain from the book. Yes, writer, Beware the Introduction!

In my book Documenting America I had an Introduction. I did exactly what I described in the first paragraph. I included a quote from C.S. Lewis, even though the book was about USA historical documents. I thought it was pretty good: fairly short, describing why I was writing the book. For The Candy Store Generation the first chapter served as the Introduction. In this I gave the record of how the idea for the book came to me. The chapter was about the same length as chapters forming the main contents of the book. Again, I was pleased with it.

For my current non-fiction book, Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles, I took a long time to decide what to do about an introduction. First I uploaded the printer’s notice and editor’s Introduction from the 1897 book that included about half the total material in the book. That was a given activity. I knew I needed to do something more, but what? After considerable thought, I decided to pull in some apt quotes from a handful of Carlyle’s letters from the time when he began to write these articles. I also pulled in an important footnote from The Carlyle Letters Online. Those things gave me the ideas I needed to flesh out an Introduction, and I did so.

It’s not terribly long: about five pages for a 220 or so page book. It gives my reason for having published the book and the methodology I used. I avoided using the royal “we” in it, or avoiding first person all together and going with totally passive voice. So from that standpoint it doesn’t meet the criteria of a scholarly Introduction. But it’s mine; it does what I want it to; and the few people who I’ve shown it to have had few comments.

I have one more night of editing tasks on the e-book, and it’s ready then to upload to Amazon. It could be live and for sale a day and a half from when I post this. Then it will be on to other things, things that don’t need an Introduction.

Carlyle, critique group, poetry, self-publishing, Writing

Acquiring an Editor’s Eye

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MEditing Illustration 03y time in the poetry wars, as I call the days I spent at Poem Kingdom, was my first time to begin to acquire what I recently termed an “editor’s eye”. At that site I critiqued hundreds of poems, first as a participant, later as a moderator and still later as an administrator. That actually wasn’t my first time and place to do that. I had already been critiquing at Sonnet Central for a few months, and had been in a writing critique group for a couple of years.

After Poem Kingdom there was Poem Train (with it’s critique forum Café Poetica), Poem 911 (which died in the whole EZ Boards hacking fiasco), and Absolute Write’s Poetry Critique Forum. In all of these I’d estimate that I critiqued somewhere around 1,000 poems. No, I don’t think I’m exaggerating. I copied off a bunch of them, but not all I’m sure, and have them in notebooks, preserved for posterity and research, should I become a famous author who someone ever wants to research.

Editing Illustration 02A thousand critiques at an average of perhaps 300 words each is 300,000 words. If anything I’m probably short with that. That’s a lot of time and effort given to critiquing. What I did was analyze the poem as a work-in-progress. Literary criticism—whatever that is exactly—was not the goal, but rather helping the poet bring the poem to a state of completion as the best poem possible for the subject matter and desires of the poet. In short, it was to be an editor. Not a cheerleader. Not a critic. But an editor.

During the years, ever since around 1998, I’ve also been in writers critique groups in real life, and one time on-line. It was the same thing: look at works in progress and consider how they might be made better in the writer’s quest for publication. These weren’t written, or at least not type-written and posted for all the world to see. A handful of us sat around a table and marked manuscripts in pen/pencil and gave oral crits. Still, it was the same type of editing, it seems to me. Sometimes I was most concerned with what is essentially proofreading. At other times it was line edits: looking at grammar and sentence structure to see how the writer’s intent can be better communicated. Still other times it was structural edits. I remember critiquing one piece at an e-mail critique group where the woman described a character as timid. Then she had the girl go up to a fellow student she knew of but didn’t know and offer help to her. It was completely out of character. I pointed that out; I’d call it a structural edit. Still other times I’d do a big picture edit, such as is the plot interesting? Are there holes or conflicts in the plot? Those kinds of things. Different types of edits as the situation arose.

Now I’m editing my next publishing project, a book titled Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles. These are public domain articles that I found in five different places, plus a few notes that others have written about them (explanatory notes, not critique). I know I’ve written about this project before. These twenty-one articles have never been gathered before, so I decided to do so and add it to the Carlyle bibliography. I pulled the publisher’s note and editor’s introduction from the 1897 re-printing of sixteen of them, and pulled some references to them that Carlyle made in his own letters. But I knew I needed to write an introduction of my own. So I did. Last night I sent the much-critiqued Intro to my critique group, which meets next Tuesday. We’ll see what they say.

Editing Illustration 01But I’ve had other things to do as well, things that an editor would do. Such trivial things as deciding how much info to give about each article. How the text should appear on the page. Whether to break up long paragraphs (I didn’t), whether to modernize archaic punctuation techniques (I did). How to make lists and tables work best in modern typesetting and e-book formats. I suppose some of this is book production, but it feels like editing to me.

So through all of this I’ve been acquiring my editor’s eye. They (that is, various experts and claimed-to-be experts) advise that one who self publishes should hire an editor before ever publishing their works. I think that’s good advice, in general, but a very expensive practice. Simple line editing for an average length probably costs $300 dollars. Add proofreading, structural edit, and big picture edit, and you will have a large editing bill. I don’t know about others, but I don’t have $500 or $1000 to pay for editing. Therefore I just have to do the best job of producing the book with the skills I have.

So maybe all my editing work through the years, even that from before I realized I was editing, is helping me with my self publishing. I’d like to think so.

poetry, Writing

Haiku and me

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Poetry has escaped me for some time. When I post about it at a place like Absolute Write I’ll say that poetry no longer comes to by either by inspiration or perspiration. However, that’s not completely true. To some extent I’m avoiding poetry so that I can concentrate on my prose works. I think I could write poetry again if I put my mind to it.

The only type of poetry that currently comes to me is haiku. You know what I mean: those pesky, three-line poems of certain syllable count and subject, including nature and a season of the year. We worked on them, I remember, in 8th grade English. I even remember one I wrote, and it being criticized in class, not for how it agreed with the form requirements, but rather that people didn’t like the conclusions the haiku drew. I even remember the main critic: Linda B——. I know nowadays they have students write them at an even earlier age. After all, it should be easy to do. Three lines, 5-7-5 syllables. What could be simpler.

Well, to some extent it is simple, as far as the mechanics go. But to have a haiku transcend being mere prose broken into lines takes some doing. I don’t know that I’m really there yet.

Part of the problem is trying to force a form that worked in Japanese to work in English. What we call syllables is different than how the Japanese language works. Their sounds are called “ohns”, and they are shorter than syllables. So while they may have a 5-7-5 structure, that would would be shorter than our 5-7-5 syllables. So the syllable count for English haiku should be seen as a maximum, not a fixed requirement.

Then there’s the issue of subject matter. Is it just simply about nature and a season, or is there more to it? Lee Gurga thinks there’s more, much more. He was once president (or maybe it was executive director) of one of the main haiku societies in America and editor of a haiku magazine. In a series of posts a number of years ago at eratosphere.com, he explained what it is the Japanese try to do with their haiku. Along with the length requirement, the subject matter is critical.

– It must include something about nature.

– It must include something about a season of the year.

– It should be two images, separate, and yet linked together simply by the words. He calls this the “syntactical cut”. Syntax should both link and divide the two images.

These are fairly exacting requirements. And, these are not requirements necessarily followed by most people who write haiku. To most people, the seasonal and/or nature reference is sufficient. A similar poem, the senryu, is the same length as the haiku, but can be about almost anything.

For myself, I took up the challenge of the two images divided by the syntactical cut. Only I decided to take it a step further. I decided make the images be in the first and third lines, and make the middle line able to apply to either image. Each image should be complete and natural when read with the middle line or read by itself. As a result, the middle line will have to include a preposition or conjunction.

My normal place to “write” haiku is on my weekday noon walks, or when commuting to work in the morning. Cloud patterns often inspire me, or other conditions of weather. For some reason my evening and weekend walks in our neighborhood don’t provide me with inspiration, nor does the commute home at the end of the workday.

Driving to work Friday morning in the pre-dawn, I saw a particularly large star in the east. Except then I remembered someone said that the planet Venus was rising ahead of the sun these days. That caused me to think of a haiku that would begin “Venus rising”. This stuck with me as I drove the last six miles to work. By the time I arrived I had the haiku finished. However, on the walk from my truck to the office I forgot that I had to write it down quickly. Thankfully by mid-morning it came back to me. Here it is.

Venus rising
ahead of a cloudy dawn
cold office beckons

The middle line will go with either of the others as a complete image, and the first and last lines stand alone as images of their own. I don’t know that that’s the final version yet, but I think it’s close.

So today, as I’m writing this to post tomorrow, I’m in The Dungeon.  Outside a mid-March snow storm is raging. The temperature is now in the 20s, the wind is howling, and snow is about at 2 inches accumulated and still coming down. This is the latest it has snowed in the 23 years I’ve lived in the Bentonville-Bella Vista area. It has inspired another haiku.

wind, cold, snow
five days before equinox
no spring in sight

Again, I don’t know if that’s any good, nor if it’s the final version. But it fits the rules I use, based on Gurga’s teaching. I’ll keep it, I think, and add it to the mix of my poetic works.

Two poems in one week. I don’t think I’ve done that for two years. They’re only haiku, but…what am I saying? Only haiku? No, haiku aren’t simple, and shouldn’t be labeled as only anything.