Category Archives: Writing

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.

Headshots, Writing

The Sagging Middle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

self-publishing, Writing

Why go on writing?

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They say never to compare yourself to someone else, but it’s difficult not to. Consider the following excerpt from a post to a blog made in the last couple of days.

With only 3 indie titles in the last 2 years, I’ve been able to leave my day job and support my family with my writing income—as our sole provider.

I have put up thirteen items in the last three years, and have had 257 sales and am so far away from doing anything except buy a cup of coffee now and then that I struggle to decide why to go on. I’m not quitting, not yet, just venting frustrations. Short of sinking a bunch of money in advertising, I really don’t know what to do.

In January 2014, so far I’ve had one sale, a paperback copy of the homeschool edition of Documenting America. Not one e-book sale. But let me go check. Maybe I’ve had one since I last looked five hours ago…nope, no sales. In most of 2013 I thought five sales a month was a low number. At this point that seems positively high compared to Nov-Dec-Jan.

I’m forging ahead. I recently completed a one-off short story and decided to submit it to a magazine before self-publishing it. I’m 3/8 through Headshots, and will continue with that through finishing and publication. I’ll work through other things on my 2014 publishing plan, all of which (well, almost all) are follow-ups to things already published.

Friends tell me my writing is good and my books and stories deserve to be read. Here’s hoping the world discovers that some time before I assume room temperature.

Headshots, Short Stories, The Gutter Chronicles, Writing

And the Words Keep Coming

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As explained in other posts, I’m working on several writing projects at once. I recently completed a short story, which is now simmering as I figure out what to do about it. I’m working on Headshots, a sequel to my baseball novel. And I’m working on volume 2 of The Gutter Chronicles. I’m doing this last one in off moments at work.

Tuesday I finished the first chapter of The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 2. I proofed it Wednesday and added one small item. It’s 2850 words, which is about right for a chapter in this book. This is meant to be a humorous book, taking workplace situations in an engineering company and turning them into funny stories. Yes, things that have happened to me over the years are finding their way into the book.

Humor may not be my writing strength. In fact I’d say almost assuredly it isn’t. Yet everyone who’s read volume 1 of TGC say it’s very funny. So maybe I’m  not too bad at that. But how can that be? I’m a serious novelist.

So as I was writing this first chapter, beginning a month or more ago, I came to realize it was more dramatic than funny. I needed to “funny-it-up” somehow. I put it aside for almost a month, trying to think of how I could do that. It wasn’t devoid of funny moments, but it just wasn’t as funny as I wanted it to be. As I walked on noon hours, or as I commuted, it was on my mind.

So Tuesday I was at my computer at noon, not being able to take a walk due to the weather, and decided to pull the story up and work on it. I re-read what I had in the chapter, and an idea of what to do came to me. What if I had Norman Gutter, the main character, hallucinate. He was very sick from a tick bite, though he didn’t know that’s what caused it. I had him go to the hospital and, in his painful and energy-less state, I had him begin hallucinating about the people and things he saw. I had him see the different people he worked with in not very flattering ways. Finally, as the doctor begins to examine him at the hospital, he has a hallucination about her just before he passes out.

Is it funny enough? That, of course, is the question. I proofread it quickly, saved the chapter out as a PDF, and e-mailed it to our HR assistant in the office. She read all of the first volume and enjoyed it. I figured if she saw this chapter as good, and funny, then it was okay. She e-mailed me back that afternoon: “Laughing out loud. Definitely a good read.” So I think I nailed it.

Now this morning, in the time I had before work, I decided to work on Chapter 2. I knew exactly where to start, because of where I left Norman at the end of chapter 1. So I began typing and soon found it was 8:00 a.m., time to begin work, and that I had 650 words typed in just a little more than half an hour. Wow, that’s more than I usually get in that little time. I’m not into humorous parts right now. That will have to come later in the chapter, maybe on my noon hour today. Or, if that doesn’t work, then next week. It would be nice to have two chapters finished by the end of next week. I’d feel good about the book at that point.

How interesting I find it that the words just come when I need them. I suppose it’s not really the words, but the ideas. I’ve found this to be true for quite a while now. In Headshots I’m at the sagging middle, that point in the book where a writer struggles to keep the action going as the hero works toward the climax. As I reported in another post, last weekend I added 3,800 words to the sagging middle. Things I hadn’t much thought about gelled into ideas, those ideas found expression in words, and I was writing, pushing the story forward.

I don’t know that it will always be this way. I might find myself at times where I have absolutely no idea what to write next, so I re-read where I am in the story, and the ideas just come and the words quickly follow. So I suppose this mean, I am a writer.