Category Archives: Writing

Documenting America, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Sharon Williams short stories, The Candy Store Generation, Writing

Stewardship of my writing time

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Every now and then I make a post like this, so my loyal fan(s) will know that I’m not a slacker. Well, at least not a big slacker; maybe just a little slacker. Over the last month I have been much engaged in publishing tasks, less so in writing.

As I’ve reported previously, I’ve been working with the graphics in the print version of my book The Candy Store Generation. This took up a lot of my time over the last two weeks. That’s now behind me, however, as our company’s graphic arts gal, Lee Ann Gray, volunteered to do the work needed. I worked with her. She had them all done, until I realized I had given her the wrong size for the book. So she re-did them.

But when I uploaded them, I realized I still had them a half-inch narrower than they could be. I didn’t have the heart to ask her to do them over, so I left them like that. I inserted them in the Word document, uploaded it to CreateSpace, did all the formatting stuff including on-line proofing, and ordered the proof copy. A few graph that were website captures are still at a low resolution, but I don’t care. I just want to get it published.

I also ordered a copy of the home school edition of Documenting America. I actually finished the edits to this a couple of weeks ago, but hadn’t decided if I’d bother with another proof copy or not. This book has also been frustrating in that I can’t seem to contact any local home school people for marketing purposes. I go to the websites of the groups, get contact information, send out e-mails, and either get no response or an auto-response that the e-mail address is invalid. I have no sales of it in electronic format, so have few hopes I can sell it in paper format. Oh, well, it will be available should I ever figure out how to market it.

I had conversations with two different cover designers for In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. My son had said he would do it, but his life as a young professional and new homeowner is incredibly busy. Thinking he wouldn’t come through, I contacted another man. I told my son about it, and he came through with a draft cover. It’s a good start, and actually good enough if I never got another one. But he’s going to tweak it some. So I’m getting very close to publishing this, at least in e-book formatting. I have one mini-scene to add to the text, which I’ll complete today.

I have done some writing this week, on two different thing. I wrote a short story titled “Whiskey, Zebra, Tango”. I began it last Monday and finished it yesterday at about 6,400 words (perhaps 25 printed pages). My intention is to publish this as an e-book only, and attempt to do a simple cover myself. I want to get FTSP out first, then this.

The other thing I worked on is my spoof of the civil engineering industry. Titled The Gutter Chronicles: The Continuing Saga of Norman D. Gutter, E.I., I use situations from my career and put them in the life of the unfortunate Mr. Gutter. I had 11 episodes (i.e. chapters) written as of a few years ago. I never planned on publishing it, but lately I’ve been circulating copies of it to a new batch of CEI employees. That made me realize I had a bunch of words written that could easily be transformed into an e-book. I’m adding four new chapters, one of which is done and another of which is 500 words from being done. The other two are outlined, so completion isn’t far away, maybe three weeks or so.

So that’s where I stand. I hope the next four weeks can be as productive as the last four. If they are, my list of titles for sale will climb from six to nine.

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, The Candy Store Generation, Writing

Mixing Publishing and Writing

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Three days and no blog post. Experts in the publishing industry suggest keeping a blog updated more frequently than that. I’ve been very busy, mostly with publishing activities. The graphics for The Candy Store Generation continue to haunt me, sapping my time and energy. I can’t remember specifics of all I’ve written here, so I won’t say much; just that in the attempt to improve the graphics myself, I clicked on a disguised link and downloaded a particularly nasty virus. I think that is now all behind, and the computer restored with the help of on-line technicians.

But the bad graphics are still with me. Over the last couple of days a woman in my office is helping me. She’s our graphic arts person, the one who does the detailed work on our marketing materials. I had thought about asking her, but that would have meant asking her to use company computers and software for personal use. I can do that myself within corporate guidelines for that behavior, but didn’t want to ask another to do that.

She took my Excel graphs and went through the process: create the PDF at 300 dpi or better; load it in Photoshop to crop, resize, and save as a jpeg (rather than as a TIFF); shoot it back to me to insert in the drawings. Except when I printed them at book size, in both black & white and color, the grid lines of the graph had disappeared.

She and I looked at it and decided I needed to thicken the grid lines in Excel. They could be thickened in Photoshop, but that would put the work on her, not me. So I did that to one graph, send it to her, and in less than three minutes she sent me the jpeg, but without the resizing. It’s critical to do the resizing in the graphic arts program because any resizing in Word destroys the dpi settings.

So today I’ll have her resize that one graph and print it. If it seems to be okay, I’ll fix the grid lines in the other graphs on my noon hour and get them to her. By the end of the day I’ll have those nine or so graphics at print quality. Three are already there. That will leave the things I received from CBO or captured from websites. I think only two or three of those are what I would consider poor quality. I’ll have to make a decision at that point.

In all of this I haven’t really felt like writing—until last night. I find the tasks of writing and publishing don’t mix well for me. Kind of like when I was doing construction observation half-days. I found I couldn’t concentrate on office things the other parts of the day; my work suffered. I’ve found the same is true with writing and publishing.

But last night I put all publishing tasks aside and decided just to write. I went back to the short story I started a few weeks ago, left hanging at 1,050 words, at the end of the first scene. I re-read that and made some good corrections. Then I tackled the next scene. In not too much more than an hour of writing, that was done and the story stands at 1,950 words. I may re-read it tonight and think it’s junk, but I’m pleased with that.

Tonight I may switch back to some publishing things. Or maybe I’ll add one small scene to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. Either way, I feel much, much better about my writing life after the last two days. Maybe I’ll make it.

 

Writing

So Many Writing & Publishing Tasks

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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.

Doctor Luke's Assistant, Documenting America, The Candy Store Generation, Writing

A Day of Accomplishment

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It’s 6:09 p.m. as I begin to write this, on Saturday afternoon. While there are still hours left in the day, I can look back on what I have done so far and say this was a day of accomplishment.

I should have written down what I did. I’m very sleepy right now, and the list of things done would help me recount them. Maybe I can work backwards. I spent the afternoon working on layout of the print version of Documenting America – the Homeschool Edition. That is done, sitting on my computer. I’ll want to give it one more go, and maybe play with the margins a little. It’s up to 234 pages long, a little longer than I expected. I think I indented some quoted items too much, but can easily play with that and finalize it in less than an hour. I’m still waiting on the cover, so I’m ahead of where I need to be on this one.

Earlier I formatted the same book for Smashwords and uploaded it. It seems I did everything right, because it generated no error messages. It’s already listed for sale on Smashwords, though I have to wait and see how it does with premium catalog distributions.

Before that I re-did some of the interior of the print version of The Candy Store Generation, and uploaded it to CreateSpace. Or maybe I did that last night. Whatever. I received back an error message saying that the cover didn’t work because it didn’t have any bleed around the edges. I contacted the cover designer and she said she’d make that correction this weekend.

Before that, maybe last night, I completed a look through Doctor Luke’s Assistant to see what kind of marks Lynda made on her recent read-through/edit. They aren’t too bad, requiring less than one evening of typing. I may do that in a couple of days, then re-upload it to Kindle and add it to Smashwords. I’ll even look at a print version, but I’m afraid it’s too long to be economical at POD book costs.

I started the day reading in a couple of psalms and praying, then reading 15 pages in a novel I’m reading for pleasure. I’m only 1/3 of the way through it, so I need to be reading more.

For tonight, I have a Sunday School lesson to preview for tomorrow, and will have to fix my own supper with Lynda gone. Then I may do the first typing on the short story I’ve been playing around with on paper. It will be good to be doing the work or a writer for a couple of hours, rather than of a publisher.

Writing

Two Short Stories are Next

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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.

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, The Candy Store Generation, Writing

Status of Writing Projects

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As of last Thursday or Friday, I finished the bulk of the text on my non-fiction book, The Candy Store Generation. I still have three chapters to tweak a little, where I’ve thought of something to add but haven’t done it yet. I started on one of those places yesterday. These will be enhancements or completion of thoughts I left hanging. After that, it’s print and re-read. My main fear is I have repeated myself extensively, and a 40,500 word book only needs to be 35,000. It will take several nights reading almost continuously to know that.

At that point I hope to improve some of the graphics. Several are copied from Congressional Budget Office reports available on-line. Most of them turned out well, but a couple are blurry because they are of poor quality in the original. I contacted CBO last week about getting some clearer copies. Six days later and no word yet. If I don’t get better graphs, I can go with those I have. And, I can always contact my congressman. His local office is only three or four miles from my office.

Yesterday I sent the manuscript for TCSG to a book designer, to let him assess whether the graphics will give problems for an e-book, as well as to give me a cost for the internal design/formatting. I formatted the four items myself that I currently have listed, but don’t think I want to tackle this one. I have the e-book cover in-hand, but not the print book cover yet.

In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People is done, and is with an editor right now. Today is day fourteen of the wait. Although this micro-press is considering it, I’m assuming I’ll end up self-publishing it (my inner pessimist being what he is). If so, I’ll do one more read-through, then all I’ll need is the covers for e-book and print book. I’ll wait until about July 1 for the editor, then forge ahead.

My regular column for Buildipedia.com is being cut from twice a month to once a month beginning in July. Bummer. I’ve been enjoying the money from it. I’m actually thinking of pulling some of those thoughts together and writing a construction administration book, maybe in 2013 or 2014. The columns I did are considered work-for-hire, so I can’t use them verbatim.

And, I prepared and uploaded my first article for Decoded Science, a re-work of an article I did for Suite101.com. But the DecSci policy has changed since I was approved to write there, and they no longer accept previously published articles. So, back to the drawing board—or the writing board I should say. I have an idea for a short series of articles there. I wasn’t planning on doing the research and writing quite so soon as this, but will think about it.

With my two main projects coming to an end, I’ll soon be moving on to the next one. More on that in the next post.

self-publishing, Writing

Works-in-Progress

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As I’ve reported before, I almost always have several writing projects on-going at any given time. No doubt too many. I thought I’d use a post to tell what I’m working on, anywhere from “finished and waiting” to “actively brainstorming” to “tweaking.” Here’s what I’ve got working.

– In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People is complete, and I submitted the full manuscript to the editor of a small press who requested it (a very small press). Today is day 10 for it to be in his hands. I’ll let it go at least 30 days before doing anything. Well, I want to re-read a couple of sections of it and perhaps do a few edits. I’m not optimistic it will be picked up by this press, or if it is that they will present me an acceptable contract.

– The Candy Store Generation: How the Baby Boomers Are Screwing-Up America is so close to being finished I can taste it. Each chapter is complete, though for several chapters I’ve thought of an item or two I’d like to add. Had one of those come to mind yesterday evening, didn’t write it down, and this morning it was gone. Hopefully I can get that back. I made an inquiry to the Congressional Budget Office about getting better quality graphs directly from them instead of pulling them from CBO publication PDFs; so far no response. I suppose I’ll have to contact my congressman’s office to get them.

– Documenting America: Homeschool Edition is a new project, begun less than two weeks ago. I already have DA done and for sale. A member of my writers group said she wanted to use it for homeschooling her high school freshman. I’d thought about that as another market for it. It’s not a history text, but could be a history elective for a student more interested in history than the average student. I completed the student sections of the first seven chapters, then put out a call for beta readers at a Facebook Christian autor’s group I belong to. So far no takers. My problem is my history classes were so long ago I’m not sure the questions/comments I’m writing are the right ones for high school students.

– Doctor Luke’s Assistant, my church history novel, needs some tweaking. The table of contents for the e-book didn’t format right, and I finally figured out how to fix it. That’s a tonight project. Since I enrolled this book in the Kindle Select Program, I get to list it for free for five days out of the 90 days in the enrollment. Those 90 days end the 28th of June, so I need to use my five days, but I don’t want to till I get the TOC properly formatted and linked. Hopefully I can have if for free next Wednesday through Sunday.

– Buildipedia.com published my latest article today. I have one more under contract, due June 15 for publishing on June 22. The editor said they will cut back to one per month in July, as the ad revenue isn’t what they want for that “channel,” plus they aren’t getting participation from contractors as much as they’d hoped. However, she said she was hearing good things about the articles.

– I’m approved to write for Decoded Science, and had an article ready but lost it. I began recreating it yesterday, which isn’t really a big process since it’s an adaptation of one of my Suite 101 articles. I hope to finish and upload it sometime this weekend.

– I have begun brainstorming a short story, based on a night-time police action in my hometown of Cranston, Rhode Island a few months ago. At first it was sort of a joke with a former classmate who observed the action, but I saw how I could make it work as a stand-alone story, as well as in a series of short stories. I wrote two paragraphs a couple of months ago, but since then have been just brainstorming. I don’t know that I want to take on a series of short stories that could turn into another major project. But then, if I spread it out over a few years….

– I have also begun brainstorming the sequel to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. This was suggested to me by classmate and good friend Gary. He said I had a lot of loose ends that would make good plot lines for a sequel. I’ve worked those plot lines through in my head, and even typed and printed them. I have a penultimate scene mostly outlined. I’ve worked through a couple of different ways of how to start it, and think I’ve decided on a start. The middle hasn’t come to me yet, but it will once I start writing. I haven’t quite committed to this being a real writing project, but I’m 95% there.

That’s enough, don’t you think?

Writing

Finish What I Start

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I visited Terry Whalin’s blog today, and saw this post: Stop the Cycle of Unfinished Projects. And I immediately thought that’s what I need.

I have a lot of unfinished projects in the air, mainly for writing, but also for things around the house, mainly financial type things.

I guess for the next couple of weeks I will concentrate on finishing something.

I don’t have any additional commentary; just posting for information.

Writing

How Well Do Publishers Edit?

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Talk to people who are involved with traditional publishing about the role of editors, and you hear mixed messages. Some say publishers no long provide significant editing services. The author submits a “camera ready” manuscript, and it gets published. Any errors are the fault of the author, not the publisher.

Still others insist that the editing provided by the publisher doesn’t change. They content edit. They line edit. They proofread. The put out good books, just as they always have.

Probably a lot of both is going on. The alleged lack of editing by publishers is something I’ve been concerned with, and is one of the factors that pushed me toward self-publishing. I figured if I had to do all the editing, why seek a publisher?

I recently read a review on Amazon of a traditionally published book that included the following comment.

“…the editing/proofreading was terrible. Inexplicable changes in font size. Missing words. Wrong words. Mispelled words. Clearly a hurry-up, shoddy job of publishing.”

This book briefly hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and is by a multipublished bestselling author. It is the only review out of 163 (or at least out of the 50 of those that I read) that mentions this. I haven’t read the book, but will be soon.

So it seems that, to some extent, those who say publishers no longer edit are correct.

 

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, The Candy Store Generation, Writing

My Upcoming Writing Schedule

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Saturday afternoon I finished reading through In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, marking locations to improve the text. Most of the edits were for typos, improving odd sentence structure, and fixing name problems. By that I mean where I used people’s names too much in dialogue. Also, I found one embarrassing error in a name, where I changed it very early on in the writing but somehow missed one place. The MS Word search and replace feature tells me that was the only straggler.

I finished typing the edits yesterday afternoon. I’ll print it today and set it aside for a couple of weeks. Actually, I’m not sure how long that will be. The editor I e-mailed three chapters and a synopsis to said he was sending the chapters to “readers,” and they would “get back to me in a few weeks.” While I’m reconciled that I will probably self-publish this, I’m willing to delay a little to let that run its course.

Meanwhile, I have to be writing. So yesterday I switched back to my non-fiction work-in-progress, The Candy Store Generation”. I added 400 words to it last night, coming close to finishing Chapter 5, Boomer Corporations. I still have research to do on that, to plug a hole reserved for it about 1/4 of the way into the chapter. But the words are almost done.

I haven’t been thinking of TCSG for over a month, and I’ve actually forgotten where I was in it. I know I’m shooting for 40,000 words, and that I’m at 32,800 now, implying another 7,200 to go. But that word count is a target only. I’m thinking the book may fall short of that and be at a logical concluding point.

I’d really like to get this done and published in time to perhaps ride the coattails of the current election cycle. Not that I think it will be a huge seller or have an impact on the election, but while people’s attention is on politics, it probably has a better chance at success.

Depending on how the research goes, I should be able to have it done in a month or less. I can then take up to a month to edit it, and try to have it published by mid-July. That’s later than I hoped, but it’s doable. I would then try to have FTSP out a couple of weeks later, still well within baseball season.

My plans are then to work on two short stories. One will be in my Danny Tompkins series, on teenage grief. It will probably be the last one. The other will be the first of what could become a series, but which might be a singleton. It will be an espionage story set in Cranston, RI (my hometown), with the heroine having the name of a classmate of mine, with her permission. I’ve written the first two paragraphs of this, and have been plotting it in my mind.

I don’t know where this will lead. If I like the way it turns out, I could turn it into a series, having this female CIA operative go to various places I have been overseas. That would be a way to use these experiences in my writing, something I’ve been wondering how to do.

After that, assuming I’m not brain-dead, I have a choice between three or four projects. I had been thinking about working on another novel, an espionage one, tentatively titled China Tour. I also see a possibility of working on more volumes in the Documenting America brand. I started a little research on what could be a Civil War edition of that. Given that we are at the sesquicentennial of that conflict, the timing is good.

However, I may just go ahead and write a sequel to FTSP. My friend Gary, who was a beta reader, said, “The ending says a lot but leaves much unsaid as well.  That’s a perfect setup for a sequel.” As I wrote in the past, I hadn’t really thought about that, and didn’t consciously write the end to launch a sequel. But I’ve looked at it, and he’s right. When I wrote out, in manuscript, all the loose ends, I came up with more than enough to make a similar length novel. The penultimate scene near the end has come to mine—indeed, I’ve had trouble getting it out of my mind. Even a potential title has reared up.

So that’s where I may be going. No shortage of work. And to think, back in 2000, I just wanted to tell a single story. Now it’s a snowball running downhill.