Category Archives: Writing

Operation Lotus Sunday, Writing

The Story Behind “Operation Lotus Sunday” – From Trip to Plot

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We returned to the United States in December 1983, our time in Saudi cut short by a growing shortage of work. This was just two months after we returned from our Asia trip. Into a box went our trip diary, our tour books, our photos, along with everything else we shipped home, and we left Saudi on December 2, 1983, planning to spend almost four weeks in Austria. It was so cold, however, we cut our trip to about ten days and headed home to Rhode Island. We left the kids with my dad and flew to North Carolina to house hunt, returning to RI just before Christmas.

Eventually our shipment caught up with us in North Carolina. The box (or boxes) with our tour souvenirs arrived. Those boxes went in storage in the basement. A few years later they went into storage when we went to Kuwait. Then they came out of storage when we returned to the States again in 1990 and moved to Arkansas in 1991. Those boxes moved from storage warehouse to outside shed to garage and eventually to the basement of the house we moved to in 2002, where we still live.

At some point I opened the box, found the day timer and tour books, and put them on shelves somewhere in the house. I think I took a quick look through the diary, but didn’t yet read it in detail.

So now it’s June 2004. I’m in Wheaton, IL at the Write To Publish Conference, having down time in the evenings and trying to decide if I was a writer or if I had just written a novel. Also I was thinking about the grand tour I had taken more than a decade before writing ever crossed my mind, and if my experiences from that could feed into writing. I realized that China was the most exotic place in our travels, and wondered if I could work up a book plot from it.

At some point during the four days of the conference it hit me: the trip diary from our Asia trip was somewhere on a shelf back in Arkansas. So was our 1983 Fodor’s Guide. So were the tour books we picked up on the trip. So was the propaganda that we kept receiving in our hotels in China. Could I build all of this into a novel?

James Scott Bell’s advice on conflict came to mind. He didn’t say it this exact way, but basically a novel must be built on conflict. Introduce your protagonist, plunge him/her into conflict, keep the conflict and stakes rising, and eventually have him/her rise above it all. How could I work conflict into our China trip?

Over two to three days a plot gelled. All conflict doesn’t have to be physical danger. You can have emotional conflict, marital conflict, parents vs. children conflict, financial conflict. Conflict comes in lots of forms. How about, I thought, having an American couple touring China who are in the midst of marital conflict? Then, how about if they become involved in a CIA operation while there? Double conflict.

By the last day of the conflict I had it fairly well worked out. Not all the details, not the name of the main characters, not the number of minor characters, but the basic plot with its lines of conflict were there—and I’ll relate them in the next installment.

Operation Lotus Sunday, Writing

The Story Behind “Operation Lotus Sunday” – New Ideas Begin

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So I’m on the Wheaton Campus, attending the Write To Publish Conference in June 2004, trying to decide if I was a writer or if I had written a novel.

I took the continuing class on fiction writing taught by James Scott Bell. I took good notes. I still remember a lot of what Bell said, especially his thoughts on dialog. Sitting in that class, as well as in some others, ideas began to come to me for other writing projects.

The first was some more ideas for In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. The second editor I met with was not interested in Doctor Luke’s Assistant. Bible-era novels don’t sell very well, he said, with there being a limited audience for the genre. His publishing house already had its “stable” of writers for the genre, with no openings for new ones. He asked, “What else do you have?” I told him about a political novel that had crossed through my mind, but which wasn’t well developed. He said no, he wasn’t interested, but added, “What else are you working on?” I told him about FTSP; he said he was interested and that I should send him the first three chapters whenever I had them done.

So I began to more seriously think about this baseball novel, and how to work Mafia influence into it. Bell spoke a lot about conflict in his class, so I was thinking about how to develop more conflict.

At the same time, I had been thinking about my overseas travels and how to work them into books. Through the years I’ve read about people—politicians, writers, royalty—who had made the “grand tour” around the world to gain perspective for their life work. I was disappointed that I couldn’t make such a grand tour to enhance my writing. Then I realized: I did make the grand tour. I lived overseas for five years and visited more than 30 countries. I just did it before I ever thought of being a writer, and so needed to pull from memory those things I needed to enhance my writing.

In my dorm room in the evenings, after putting down some ideas or some actual words for FTSP, I began work on a mental sketch of a novel. Or, I should say of a plot. Or, I should say, of going through our expatriate life and travels, and trying to decide if there was anything in those times that could form the nucleus of a novel.

There were years of living in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Would American readers care about that? Based on the total lack of interest by Americans we interacted with in the years after returning to the States, I thought not. We had some good travels in Europe in 1982, our first real travel adventure after moving to Saudi Arabia. But except for one train mix-up nothing really came to mind.

Our second long trip out of Saudi Arabia was our round-the-world trip to Asia in 1983. Hong Kong, China, the Philippines, and Thailand, for a total of 30 days. Surely something from that trip would be good at the nucleus of a plot. And it came to me. I began to focus on China, as I’ll explain in the next post.

Operation Lotus Sunday, Writing

The Story Behind “Operation Lotus Sunday” – Where I Was

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I can trace the genesis of Operation Lotus Sunday to June 2004. However, before I get to that, I want to set the stage of where I was in my writing career at that time.

The place was the Write To Publish Conference in Wheaton, IL. This was my first national conference to attend, having been to one regional conference in early 2003. I came there to pitch my first novel, Doctor Luke’s Assistant, to editors and agents. It was completed and polished with several rounds of edits. I had another idea in my back pocket, the start of my second novel, In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, which I was ready to share if the opportunity arose. Other than this, I was planning on attending classes, meeting other writers, and generally enjoying myself.

The first day I was able to pitch DLA to an editor, who passed on it. I had an appointment with a second editor the next day, and hoped for the best. The classes were turning out quite good (though I took a couple that probably weren’t the best for me). As we talked about each others’ books and writing “careers” I got to thinking about what my next steps would be.

For me, I was in the process of deciding if I was a writer, or if I was someone who had written a novel. DLA was done; FTSP was outlined but not started, and whether it would ever be written was an unknown. Did I have more books in me? I was working on my poetry book at the time, but I knew that was almost certainly not for commercial publishing. So where was I going?

Construction on the campus of Wheaton College, the venue for the conference, meant difficulty of moving around. There was no evening coffee shop on campus, and I didn’t want to walk off campus to find one. So after the evening sessions I went to the computer room in the dorm and updated on e-mail and a few web sites (no laptop in the family back then). And thought about what I could write. An hour later I was alone in my dorm room, and thought some more. Slowly over those four days, ideas for more writing projects came to mind.

I’ll tell about the two main ideas in the next segment.

self-publishing, Writing

June 2013 Sales

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As slow as February through May were for sales, and with two new titles appearing in June, I was really hoping for sales to pick up. And they did. I sold a total of 20 books in June. While that’s not exactly bestseller status, it’s enough to give me an upbeat outlook. Here’s my sales table.

So that’s seven different titles selling. I was surprised when Barnes & Noble reported through June 27 to see three sales of Operation Lotus Sunday s0ld on June 25, which was the first day it appeared in their catalog. I was also surprise and please to see a few sales of The Gutter Chronicles, which has sat without sales for some time. Even had a review of it posted.

For linking at a writers’ site I’m on, I’m pasting in a smaller copy of the sales table.

letters, reading, Writing

A Conan Doyle about to break-through

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This past Sunday, the weather being pleasant and our getting home from church with fair promptness, I fixed a cottage cheese and lunchmeat lunch and took it to the sun porch to read. Or maybe this is more of a Florida room, except it’s elevated—an appendage to the house fitted with some expensive heating units (that we never use) and without air conditioning. I decided I would get back to reading in the letters of A. Conan Doyle (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/359482.Arthur_Conan_Doyle).

It probably helped that the last time I went to Barnes & Noble I bought, from the discount table, a two-volume set of the Sherlock Holmes stories, arranged chronologically. The first, A Study in Scarlett, was published in 1887. When last I read in this book I was somewhere around 1885 or 1886, so I knew I was getting close to that momentous occasion.

Unfortunately, the editor wrote that not many of Doyle’s letters between 1885 and 1890 survived. For some reason his correspondents didn’t keep them, I guess. So in the book I moved into this period with mainly editorial comments and brief, and sometimes unattributed, references to the various autobiographical works of Doyle.

At this time he had three novels circulating among publishers, with one of them A Study in Scarlett. He stated he had high hopes for the novel, but he also thought another was better. But all of his novels received rejections, and went off to another place. Doyle bemoaned that sometimes they weren’t even read. If only the editors would read them they would like them.

Finally a publisher offered him £25 for the copyright, with no royalties. Doyle held out; he wanted royalties. The publisher didn’t budge. Nothing else was selling. His medical practice was paying most of the bills, but literature was where he really wanted to be. Finally he took the offer, and Scarlett was published in December 1887, not as a stand-alone book first but in an annual.

Reviews initially weren’t great. The normal number of copies of that annual were printed. That’s as far as I got with my reading on Sunday. Sherlock Holmes had seen the light of day, but was still mostly unknown. This coming Sunday, hopefully, I’ll move into the period of 1888 and beyond when Holmes became the most famous fictional detective, and Doyle practically a household name.

Is this encouraging me to at all while I’m in a very dry period of my publishing career, dry in terms of sales, not of ideas and production. Not really. If publishers and initial readers can’t see genius in the work of A Conan Doyle, what hope is there for me? Twenty years later a copy of that annual sold at auction for more than £150,000. That offers some encouragement.

Though in twenty years I’ll be 81. Alas.

Harmony of the gospels, Operation Lotus Sunday, Writing

Change of Writing Plans for the next Two Weeks

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I had a meeting to go to this morning at the City of Bentonville Planning Office. As expected it lasted about 45 minutes. The City library is pretty close, and since my colleagues and I took separate vehicles (because they both had other meetings to go to afterwards), I went to the library.

A library is almost as good as a used book store. In some ways it’s better, because it will be better organized. Rarely do I visit a library and wind up disappointed. Today was no exception.

I had two purposes I wanted to accomplish there: 1) see if my inter-library loan books had arrived; and 2) see if they had the index to National Geographic magazine that included the 1970s and 1980s. I went straight to the reference desk, where the lady was alternating her gaze between books and her computer. On her desk were several books that looked like inter-library loan books, and, though most of the covers were obscured by the paperwork wrapper on each book, one looked like the cover of a book I was expecting.

They were indeed both of my books. She had just processed them and only needed to scan the bar code before she could give them to me. It took less than a minute. The books are harmonies of the gospels published in 1988 and 1996. I haven’t done much research into modern harmonies, relying instead on harmonies from the 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s that I could access on-line. These two will help to flesh out my research.

At the reference desk I also learned they had the exact NG Index I was looking for. One more minute and I was at a table, with the index open, looking at the entries for China. Perhaps I should explain more.

We have a ton of NG mags in our basement storage room. When we moved to this house in 2002 I tied them up for transport, and haven’t looked at them since. From time to time I’ve bought a few newer ones, or had them given to me, and put them loose on the shelf. I have a recollection of one or two articles in NG in the late 1970s or early 1980s about the terracotta soldiers buried in Xian, China. We visited those in 1983, and I have a fairly vivid memory of them. One of the characters in China Tour, the tourist husband Roger Brownwell, mentions this NG article and has it with him. I figured, as some last minute research, I should re-read the article. It’s been thirty or so years since I first read it.

Last night I went to the shelves with the mags. Kn0wing only that it would be somewhere between 1974 and 1983, I began looking. What I found was that: many of the strings I tied them with eleven years ago had come loose, making handling difficult; they were stacked two-deep on two shelves, making for 10 feet worth of shelves to go through; the lighting was so bad I couldn’t read the words on the binder (except for the date); and the bundles of mags, such as they were, were not necessarily all of one year—except I found duplicates, so maybe other bundles were all of one year, and I just couldn’t find them in the poor light on the ten feet of shelves. I gave up.

Thirty minutes of on-line searching revealed that the National Geographic Society does not have an on-line index, and it seems no one else had created one. Hence, knowing I would be near the library today, I decided I would see if they had the index I needed. I knew if I could just find the month and year of the magazine I needed I could find it in the storeroom.

Sure enough, I found it in the index: April 1978, with an earlier, briefer article in December 1974 that I should also look at. As well, I found articles in 1982 and 1983 for two of the cities we visited and which are scenes in the book. Tonight, God willing, I should be able to find them and set them aside for reading.

I may not learn anything new in these articles, but it’s absolutely essential that I not include in the book anything that wasn’t true in 1983, which is when the events in China Tour took place. Plus, in these articles I may find a few ideas I can use to enhance the authenticity of the book.

So, since I have a way to find specific NG issues needed, and since I have these two books for only two weeks from inter-library loan, I figure my reading and writing priorities have changed. Tonight I will:

  1. first find the NG issues on the storeroom shelves and bring them upstairs.
  2. second begin reading in one of the two harmonies.
  3. edit at least 40 pages of China Tour. I’m currently through 78 pages of the 250 page book.
  4. if time allows, begin reading the key NG article.

This may be too much for one night, even with leftovers needing only a generous dose of micro-waves before eating, and even dessert prepared. But we’ll see. For sure most other writing projects, either in the works or on the mental to-do list, will be shoved aside for the two weeks that I have these two books.

How great is a library?

self-publishing, Writing

March 2013 Sales

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March was just as dismal as February in terms of sales. I don’t know that I officially posted February’s sales. I sold two whole books in February. In March I again sold two books. That actually made March more dismal than February, since it had three more days in it. That gives me 13 sales for the year, which is three less than I had at this time last year with only three publications out instead of nine.

Here’s my sales table. I’m not going to post a graph. Interestingly those two sales were of my first two self-published works.

So, I guess I need to re-think going with the Dean Wesley Smith strategy of ignoring promotion and putting all my effort into adding new titles. It seems I can’t get my new titles out fast enough to keep the interest of readers. That, plus my Genre Identity Disorder, seem to be working against sales.

But I don’t really like promotion, so for now I’ll keep writing and trying to bring new works to the market. China Tour is probably two months away at the rate I’m editing (which is very slow). I have nothing else in the works, though I’m thinking of taking some items I’ve written for work and turning them into generic professional engineering publications and putting them out there. It won’t help much with those who have bought my other works, but maybe it will bring in a few sales.

And, adding a smaller version of the table to upload to Absolute Write.

Writing

Not Enough Time for the Books

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Lately I’ve fallen into a little better routine, at least as far as my reading is concerned. I have a small book in the pick-up that I read a little in at traffic lights, or just before I get out to go somewhere. Or it’s there when I head into the doctor’s office, like yesterday.

In the evening at home, around 10 p.m., after whatever writing I’ve accomplished or chores I finished, after I tend to family finances and the paperwork that produces, I take up my current book and read. It could be any one of a number of books, though for the last five or six nights I’ve read in my primary book, Letters from an American Farmer, about the status of colonial life right around the American Revolution. I suppose you could call this research for a future volume of Documenting America.

As I sit in my reading chair, I look around the living room. To my right is the built-in bookcase, holding a couple of hundred books, mostly still to be read. Many of them are antique books, handed down through my family. Others are contemporary, mostly Christian topics. To my left, behind the couch, is an antique table with about twenty books on it. These are mainly smaller ones, all modern. Some are devotional, some are small group studies, others similar.

In the bedroom, on the dresser, is another batch of perhaps thirty books of a similar mix to the last described batch. In the secretary in our bedroom are another four shelves of books. Almost all of these are to be read.

Should I describe the lower floor? With it’s twelve book cases, it’s six-foot table with forty books waiting to be shelved? Or the store-room with boxes of books on the utility shelves, and boxes more on the floor, waiting to be donated. For the books downstairs, some have been read, but then kept for our library. Lynda’s read more of her novels than I have of my classics, novels, and non-fiction.

This morning the moon was large in the west, just above the horizon as I pulled away from the house for the 15.6 mile drive to the office. Admiring the moon made me think of the universe, which got me to thinking about science fiction. So far I haven’t written any science fiction—not because I don’t want to, but because the demands of it are so different from what I write now. Plus I don’t need to expand my Genre Identity Disorder any more than it already is.

Years ago, I suppose before I began writing creatively, I thought about the first steps our species would have to take if we were going to leave earth. I actually thought through a couple of series of sci-fi books. I never wrote anything about them, because I didn’t consider myself a writer at the time, and had no ambition to be one. I suppose that was the earliest appearance of those desires.

But the beautiful moon made me once again think of writing sci-fi. That, if it ever happens, would be after the sequel to In Front of Fifty Thousands Screaming People, after the sequel to Doctor Luke’s Assistant. It would be after my series of cozy mysteries, The Alfred Cottage Mysteries. And after the series of books I have brainstormed and somewhat captured on stock trading. And after I turned DLA and its sequel into a series of early church history books. For sure it will be after I edit and publish China Tour.

It would probably be after the six Christian non-fiction books I’ve programmed to write in future years, after the few more books I’ve thought of for the Documenting America series. And certainly after I somehow get my poetry book, Father Daughter Day, illustrated and published. And I’m not even sure about the short story series I’ve started. Or the professional essays I’d like to publish.

So where am I the worse basket-case? In my accumulated books reading or my dreamed-of books for writing? Between the two I’m for sure quite busy.

self-publishing, Writing

No Sale

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It’s been a long dry spell without a sale. My last one was February 13. So right now it’s 41 days without a sale. This has been a difficult time. A large part of the prevailing wisdom about promoting your published works is to not promote them. Rather, write more things and get them up for sale.

That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing—not promoting, that is. About once a month, on the self-promotion days of a couple of Facebook writer groups I’m in, I promote something. On even rarer occasions I post a reminder on my Facebook that I have books for sale. I did that last night.

On of the things Amazon has, something that’s still in beta mode, is an author ranking. As of last night I was #343,269. That means 343,268 authors within the Amazon system are more popular than I am. Here’s a graph of my ranking.

Sobering, isn’t it? You can see from this graph how, at these lower levels, a single book sale can propel you upward by a couple of hundred thousand places. That tells me that somewhere between 100,000 to 150,000 authors will have a sale at Amazon on any given day. By the way, the big, one-day drop I circled on the chart was Thanksgiving Day. Amazon seemed to have a glitch in their system, and that does not look like a valid ranking. That one day excepted, I’m at my lowest ranking since Amazon instituted the system.

I suppose the sales will come. At other places at Amazon’s Author Central site they say they are having to reconstruct some things, and that sales haven’t posted since maybe February 1. However, my stats show at least two sales after that, so I don’t think I can hope that a bunch of sales are happening and they just aren’t posting.

We’ll see what happens. I’m at least a month away from publishing China Tour, with nothing in between them. I have a couple of professional essays I could put up fairly quickly, and they wouldn’t need fancy covers, so I could do them myself. But would even that small amount of work divert me from my creative writing and delay my overall progress? It’s a decision I need to make over the next few days.

Engineering, Writing

I’d Like Another Gig

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This time last year I was writing two columns per month at the e-zine Buildipedia.com. It was good work, $100 for a 500 word column, topics that flowed naturally from my work, minimal research. I received good feedback from the editors, and they rarely changed anything I turned in, not even a word.

But in May they cut it back to one column per month, and after June they stopped it all together. Not enough ad revenue to support it, or maybe not enough visitors to the pages; not sure which. $200 went to nothing real fast. That may not seem like a lot of money, but it really helped with the budget.

I sure would like to find something similar. On Wednesday I began the process of looking. I found an on-line blog-like magazine that was perfect for replacing Buildipedia. I started filling out the on-line application. Then I realized the last post was sometime last summer. It appears it’s no longer an active site.

I estimate there are about 50 other sites I need to check out. I’m not optimistic about finding something. But maybe, maybe.