Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t figure on being a writer from the start. He studied to be a doctor. It was a different system in England in the 1870s and 1880s than it is in present day America. A doctor studied, a combination of class work and internship with a doctor in private practice. Eventually the young doc had to strike out on his own. Finding employment was not all that easy, not like it is today.

Doyle graduated his studies and had trouble finding work. He was writing stories for a couple of magazines, getting fairly good money for them, and sending most of it home to his mother. To try to make a little extra, he left a temporary job and took another—on a ship bound for Africa. Apparently ships at that time took a doctor along, to treat the passengers, and perhaps to treat those in African ports-of-call. He had been on a ship previously, and he would again.

However, this time the journey didn’t turn out as planned. He didn’t like Africa. He didn’t make the money he’d hoped for. A fire broke out on the return voyage and they almost had to abandon ship. He arrived in Liverpool in January 1882, and wrote this to his mother.

I don’t intend to go to africa again. The pay is less than I could make by my pen in the same time, and the climate is attrocious. The only inducement to go to sea is that you may make some fees out of passengers, but these boats have hardly any passengers—we had only one coming back. You can’t write at sea, either, and particularly you can’t write in the topics. If I can’t get a S. American boat, I will apply for a house surgeoncy I think. I want to improve myself in my profession and get more practical experience before I launch out for myself. I have written a couple of articles which will do, I think, and I have the germs of several in my head, which only need a literary atmosphere to make them hatch. [Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life In Letters, p. 147]

I see here a man who is torn between two worlds, two careers: medicine and writing. It turns out they are somewhat incompatible in that time and place. He has ideas for writing, and is producing some works, but can’t seem to make his money as a doctor and at the same time pursue writing as a sideline.

That seems to be the situation with many writers. A career in something else puts bread on the table, and writing happens in odd hours, stealing time away from something else that needs to be done. At some point we find a little success in writing, and the career seems old hat. Yet, the writing doesn’t support us, while the whatever career does.

So in A.C. Doyle’s circumstances at this point in his career, I find some inspiration and encouragement. Sure, he was a young man whereas I’m on the old side of middle age now. He had a long time ahead of him to write; I’ve got much less. But if I have to keep on doing civil engineering and corporate training therein for the next 5 years, 9 months, and 6 days, all the while carving out time to write, I guess that won’t be so bad.

Yesterday I had great plans for my evening. I was hoping to add between 1,000 and 1,500 words to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, as well as write several blog posts and do a little research reading.

However, yesterday was not the best day for work. I had a couple of hits against my ego and professional practices. They festered all day long, and even almost continuous rain couldn’t pull me out of my developing funk. After work I ate supper with my mother-in-law, got home by 7:00 PM and was in The Dungeon ready to work before 7:30 PM.

But I just didn’t feel like writing. Not anything. Not in the book, not blog posts. Nor did I feel like reading for research. I played a string of mindless computer games, read a few writing related blogs (and made a post on one), but got little done.

At some point I began working on TCSG, re-reading some recent additions, completing previously uncompleted thoughts, adding a little here, deleting some there, improving the wording in a few other spots. Eventually I began adding some new material to one chapter that was barely started. Throughout all this, I’d write for two minutes, read a blog for five, and play games for fifteen, then cycle back.

By the end of the evening I had just short of 600 words added. I was surprised at the amount. The total stands somewhere around 22,800 (I think; hard to remember after a sound sleep). The chapter I’m working on needs another thousand to be complete, but I’m not sure exactly what the direction I’m taking it in.

By the time this morning came around I came to a decision: I’ll back off writing for a little while and concentrate on other things, such as income taxes, filing, clean-up piles of stuff, etc. Perhaps by then I’ll have worked through some things, and will be better able to focus on the writing stuff. I’ll keep making blog posts, here and at An Arrow Through the Air. I might even work a little on editing In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. But TCSG is shelved for the moment.

In a newsletter I receive on-line from a writing industry professional, I found this.

If you have read [book name] could you go over to the Amazon page [page link] and write several sentences along with a Five Star review? The Five Stars are important because they are averaged so please make sure to do Five Stars. Or maybe you have read my [book name]. If so, I’m asking you to please go over to the Amazon page [page link] and write a couple of sentences along with a Five Star review. Even if you read the book several years ago, I would appreciate your support with the review.

I don’t know how others feel, but I’m totally against this kind of request. Sure, a writer would like nothing better than to have a bunch of five star reviews and nothing below that. But to ask someone to give you a five star review? I don’t know, to me is seems rather crass. How about a request something like, “I’d sure like a few reviews for my book, Book Title, over at Amazon. Here’s the link to it. If you’ve read it, please consider going to that page and leaving a review. Be honest. I’d love a five star review, but if you don’t think the book deserved a five star review, rate it what you think it deserves.” That might be an acceptable way to solicit reviews.

Because of what that writer/agent/publisher wrote, I will not be giving him any reviews. I’ve read one of the two books he mentioned, and like it a lot and find it useful in my writing. But he killed it for me with that comment. He prefers praise to honesty. Well, he’ll get neither from me.

I think it would be alright to ask someone to review your book at Amazon. After all, that’s what traditional publishers and authors do all the time when they send out advance reader’s copies to reviewers. They hope for favorable treatment, but I seriously doubt they tell the reviewers how to do their job.

This newsletter guy irks me. “so please make sure to do Five Stars.” I hope I never sink to that level. Would one of you chew me out if I do?

As I mentioned in my last post, in my formative years we attended a church that did not offer hope for the dead. It was a liturgical church. We were into ritual, not hope. Duty to the sacraments was paramount, along with regular church attendance.

But we somehow missed 2 Corinthians 5:1 “Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not made by human hands.” But then, we didn’t read or know scripture back then.

If I write another short story in the Danny Tompkins series, it might be on this idea of hope for the dead. It’s something I didn’t even think about until I was maybe 22 years old. I was recently born again, was just about to move to Kansas City to take my first job after college. I had a talk with the new priest at our parish, a man I barely knew but with whom I felt some friendship. I don’t really remember what we spoke of, but I came away from that conversation suddenly thinking, “Oh, no, I never prayed for Mom during her long illness!”

We listened weekly as the priest intoned the prays for the sick, but the congregation didn’t join in. Dad never gathered us together as a family to pray for her healing, or for relief from her pain. He didn’t know any of that, because our parish priest didn’t know any of that and so couldn’t teach it to us. There was no hope for the dead, and so no real hope for healing. What good were prayers, then?

What would be the childhood memory, and the link to the adult memory? Maybe I’ll give too much away here, but I’m not sure I’ll write the short story, so I might as well go ahead. In 1961 we drove one Saturday from Cranston RI to Northfield Massachusetts to attend Mom’s 25th reunion at Northfield School for Girls. This was a boarding school that Mom attended, in proper British tradition. The trip was memorable for several things. It rained that day, putting a damper on everything. Mom was the only one from her class who showed up. And on the trip home, after dark, when we were passing through Worcester MA, the brakes failed on our old clunker (maybe a Studebaker?). Dad had to get us home using the emergency brake.

The adult memory tieing back to that is the biography I read of Dwight L. Moody. In that biography it said that Moody founded Northfield School for Girls, along with the nearby Mount Hermon School for Boys. They were Christian schools! The gospel was preached and taught. Sure, they were schools for the uppity, the ones who thought a boarding school education was superior to a public education.

The result of learning that was a smidgen of hope. What if Mom, fading away on that Thursday night, remembered the chapels she sat through, and the words preached? What if she read that biography of D.L. Moody—it had been her book. Might she have had enough wits about her sometime during that last week to remember why God lets people into heaven, and to have said the prayer, to have meant it, to repent of her sins?

It’s thin hope, I know, but it’s hope none the less. I’m going to think about this one a while. I see some potential, but am not sure I have enough for the story here. One thing, though: I already have the poem written to insert into this one.

One of the comments made by an agent who considered In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People was that the book has too much dialog, not enough narrative. She had (and presumably read all of) a partial manuscript, about the first 80 pages plus three pages containing two disconnected scenes that I had written ahead. Too much dialog? I certainly want to consider her comments, as she is a publishing industry professional who sees many books and many manuscripts.

I re-read the book in November-December-January for editing purposes. My goals were: fix the many typos I knew it had, take care of a few items identified by beta readers as unclear or not the best, and add/fix a few plot items I realized were weak. A couple of these plot items I discovered only while reading. I said something late in the book that conflicted with something early in the book. A change was needed either late or early.

To fix all these things, in consideration of the agent’s comment, I used narrative. I considered reducing the dialog in a few places, but found I liked the dialog and didn’t reduce any.

This dialog vs. narrative, or maybe scenes vs. exposition, is the subject of a recent blog post by editor Victoria Mixon. Her example author is Dashiell Hammatt, author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. I haven’t read either of those, so I’m a bit hampered in understanding her arguments. She compares the two books, written many years apart, and mentions how Hammatt adapted to reader preferences changing around him.

Mixon says that exposition has become big in the last twenty or thirty years, at the expense of dialog. But, she says, dialog isn’t dead. I suppose I’m not quite sure what she means by “exposition” and “scenes”. Are these the same things I’m calling “dialog” and “narrative”? It seems to me that my novels are all scenes. No where do I have the type of intercalary chapters that Steinbeck used in The Grapes of Wrath. Everything in both my novels involves the characters of the story doing something or having something happen to them. How is that not scenes, even if there is no dialog?

Sigh, I have much to learn about this business of writing. And much to figure out on how to write the best books possible. Hopefully I’m not over-analyzing here.