I guess it was at my other blog that I wrote about reading Eudora Welty’s book The Eye of the Story. I’m having a lot of difficulty understanding the eminent American novelist. The problem—that is, if the problem isn’t the inferior mental abilities of the reader—is Welty’s writing style. She seems to have channeled the complicated prose of the Victorian non-fiction writers. I’d say that she channeled the complicated sentence structures of William Faulkner, but I haven’t really read enough of Faulkner to know that for sure. Other’s say Faulkner is complicated, but I don’t want to simply echo that without knowing it for myself.

But back to Welty’s advice on writing. The second of the book, titled “On Writing,” includes these chapters.

– Looking at Short Stories
– Writing and Analyzing a Story
– Place in Fiction
– Words into Fiction
– Must the Novelist Crusade?
– “Is Phoenix Jackson’s Grandson Really Dead?”
– Some Notes on Time in Fiction

I’m currently reading “Words into Fiction,” and finding it hard going, as were the first two chapters in this section. The third chapter, however, I found a few things to latch on to. Now, I believe she said it with complicated sentence structure that was totally unnecessary. Here’s a few key statements from this chapter.

Place is one of the lesser angels that watch over the racing hand of fiction, perhaps the one that gazes benignly enough from off to one side, which others, like character, plot, symbolic meaning, and so on, are doing a good deal of wing-beating about her chair, and feeling, who in my eyes carries the crown, soars highest of them all and rightly relegates place into the shade.

…the novel from the start has been bound up in the local , the “real,” the present, the ordinary day-to-day of human experience.

No art ever came out of not risking your neck. And risk—experiment—is a considerable part of the joy of doing, which is the lone, simple reason all writers of serious fiction are willing to work as hard as they do.

I have much more to say about this, but unfortunately my mind is spent tonight. More later, I hope.

I’m not working on any book-length project right now. I finished the spy short story, “Whiskey, Zebra, Tango”, and am waiting on cover tweaks before I publish it. Maybe that will lead to a series of stories, maybe not. I finished an article for Decoded Science, and have planned a series of articles for that publication. Last night I spent a little time outlining the next one.

I’m only two chapters away from completing a novella, The Gutter Chronicles. This is really more of a lark. I wrote most of this years ago, mainly to bring a little comic relief in the office. However, I can fairly easily finish it out as a short book and publish it, so probably will before the end of September. The two missing chapters are brainstormed, though not outlined.

So it’s time to think about what to write next. By that I mean what full-length book to write next. I have six possible ways to go. Three of these, however, I see as belonging to a future year, not now, so I won’t describe them here. That leaves me with three viable options.

1. The next book in my Documenting America series, which would be a Civil War edition. Yes, I always planned to have that as a series of books tying US history to the present day. They are fairly easy to write, the research is light and enjoyable, the subject fascinates me, and I think the books would fill a real need. The downside? My first one hasn’t caught on. I used to think there were millions of people like me in this country, who would like the kind of books I like. I’m starting to think that’s not true. Since Documenting America is selling below expectations, does it make sense to make it into a series?
2. The next book in my church history series. I could go two ways with this: write a planned prequel or write a sequel. I’ve brainstormed both books, the sequel more than the prequel. The first in the series, Doctor Luke’s Assistant, isn’t making any best seller lists, but it’s my best seller. Maybe I need to write the story about Augustus of Caesarea and his two sons, and how they help John the apostle write his gospel and Revelation. I hadn’t planned that for next, but for the sake of a few sales, maybe that’s the way to go.
3. Or I could write the sequel to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. A book I never planned on, but which was suggested to me based on the number of plot lines I left dangling, this would be easiest to write. The characters are fresh on my mind. I’ve brainstormed it and even outlined it a little. The penultimate scene has occupied my mind a couple of dozen times, working backwards into longer and longer vignettes. The opening has done the same, moving from a snowy TV picture to focused movie. The problem with writing this: FTSP is a bust so far. Only 1 sale in about of month of availability. I offered it for free via a coupon system to a writers group with a hundred active members: no takers, not even for free. I realize it’s still early in the book’s shelf life, but still, why bother to write a sequel to a book that isn’t selling?

What to do? Write based on what is having tepid sales or on what is having no sales at all? What will be easiest and quickest to write, or what will take more research and more writing time but seems to have slightly better sales potential? Write about something I’m passionately interested in, but which must seem like operation manuals to others? At this point I really don’t know.

I won’t subject you to a lot of these kinds of posts. It’s going to take me the better part of month to make this decision. Once I do I’ll announce it here, then get to work.

The temperature outside right now is about 11o F. I’m not making that up. It was almost that hot yesterday and Saturday, and should be the same for the next two days. I have some yard work to do. I need to get some walking in. But you know what? I’m staying inside until the high temps get back below 100.

So it’s a good time to have lots of writing and publishing tasks to do. I have all kinds of inside time to get them done. Unfortunately, I’m having trouble prioritizing and remembering all that I have to do.

For example, Friday I saw that Smashwords found something in the home school edition of Documenting America that prevented it from being added to the premium catalog. It’s a simple change I need to make to the MS Word file and re-upload it. I saw that at work, but I’m keeping all my official submittal files at home. This was a simple 10 minute task, including the uploading. Unfortunately, all weekend I forgot to do it, and never checked in to my Smashwords dashboard and saw that I needed to do it. I saw it today, at work, which is not where my files are. So this is a to-do item for tonight, if I can remember it.

So what did I do this weekend? Here’s the rundown.

• Read through the last third of In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People on Friday night and Saturday morning, looking for an inconsistency in the days of the week during the playoffs. I first edited and reprinted the season/playoff schedule I had created, to make sure of what the right days were. I found the inconsistency and did a mark-up. Then I typed the corrections. That took me up to about 1:30 p.m. on Saturday.
• Scanned the proof copy of The Candy Store Generation, which arrived in the mail on Friday. I found no formatting problems, so it’s just a matter of getting any errors corrected. Lynda found one on the back cover copy, so I need to get that to the cover designer. I didn’t actually proof-read it at all over the weekend, leaving that for today and the next couple of days.
• Wrote/typed about 15 chapters of instructor material for the home school edition of Documenting America. I now have only four to go.
• Wrote and published two blog posts for my other blog, An Arrow Through the Air.
• Wrote my Goodreads review of Trial by Ordeal by Craig Parshall.
• Began reading The Eye of the Story by Eudora Welty. I consider this a book dealing with writing art and craft.

This sounds like a lot. Unfortunately I had much, much more I needed to accomplish. I should have done some proof-reading of TCSG. I should have completed all of the instructor material for DA-HS Ed. I should have worked on my next short story, or typed some plotting issues on the sequel to FTSP. Or done some formatting for the print version of DLA. Or done those changes to my writer’s website.

Well, it’s not unusual to have a larger to do list, written or unwritten, than can be accomplished in a limited time.

With my two book projects near the end, with only tweaking and publishing left to do, it’s almost time to move on to other writing projects. The publishing schedule I established in early 2012, only slightly modified since, had two short stories next. I’m going to stick with that.

The first will be an espionage story; or rather a crime story. It’s the first of what may become a series. I’ve explained this before, but will give it again here, in case I get a reader or two who hasn’t read it yet.

There was a night time police action in Cranston, RI, my hometown, sometime in the last six months. A friend of mine from junior high and senior high had gone out of her home to walk her dog, and encountered policemen on foot in her neighborhood. They didn’t tell her why they were there. The next morning they learned someone crashed their car into a business on Reservoir Avenue then fled on foot into that neighborhood.

The idea for a short story came to mind. I’ll make this woman a CIA agent. The man who crashed was an Arab double agent she was handling. He was stopped by a cop for some reason, panicked and fled. He crashed near her house and manages to make it there before the cops catch-up. The cops investigate, and while the don’t find the man, they do figure out that the woman helped him. They soon figure out she’s a CIA agent, and they can’t touch her without damaging various international operations.

I’m thinking of titling it “Whiskey, Zebra, Tango”, the words that go with WZT. The correct word for Z is Zulu. That will be her code name, but the fleeing man used Zebra as part of a coded message indicating he needed urgent help from her.

I’m thinking of that as a title because maybe it could be the first of many three-letter titles for follow-up short stories. I can put this woman at different places around the world, places I’ve been. Her CIA career could follow my travels, and I can at least write about these foreign venues accurately.

I still have a lot to work out. I’m thinking of 4,000 to 8,000 words for the first story, maybe the same for any others I generate.

The second project will be the third in my Danny Tompkins stories, about a teenage boy whose mother dies, recording the grief he encounters afterward. These are not action packed, shoot ’em up type of stories. Reviewers have called them more like memoirs. This will be the last one, I think. I have no thoughts on how to make them action stories. This will be titled “Kicking Stones”, after a poem I’ve already written that will be part of the story. I’m thinking 3,000 to 4,000 words for this one, substantially longer than the first two.

That’s it for immediate projects. In a future post I’ll talk about my options for the next book-length project.