Category Archives: Writing

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, freelance writing, Harmony of the gospels, Writing

Progress By Inches

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Last night, as promised in yesterday’s post, I went to the Bentonville library after work. They forgave me the fine and renewed the book. I spent a little time in a genealogy magazine, checking to see if I could write for that one, then went to the coffee shop, bought a large house blend, and sat and wrote my article on The Notebooks of Robert Frost. I didn’t quite finish it, but I came close.

This was my first time to sit in a coffee shop and write. My son writes or studies in coffee shops all the time. Somehow he shuts out the noise to background and then effectively uses his time. He says he can do certain work there better than he can in the quiet of his lodgings. I’ve tried reading in coffee shops before, but never writing. I was surprised to make as much progress as I did. The TV mounted up high behind my back kept blaring a sitcom re-run, then a CNN program. I looked its way on occasion. Still, in about an hour I wrote 500 or so words in a steno notebook. Having previously studied the key words for this article for search engine optimization, I felt I had incorporated most of what I wanted to. I headed to the house with the article needing only a closing paragraph and editing.

At home, after a simple supper, I keyed in the article, added a photo, and published. This was my first Suite 101 article in a week, and it felt good to be back in the saddle. I then shifted gears to working on my Harmony of the Gospels. I’m pretty much done with the appendix covering the trial before Pilate, so I went next to the passage notes required for passages in that chapter. I actually finished notes for two passages! I think I have two more passages and I’m done with this chapter. Except…

..as I consulted my workbooks, from which I pulled the passage notes, I noticed that what I wrote in the workbooks did not match what I had previously typed in the Harmony. One of the differences was significant, incorporating something in the gospels I had missed in the workbooks. Had I made the changes while typing, or did I have other notes in the workbooks? I searched a little for other notes, but didn’t find any. I never got around to indexing the workbooks, so I have no way of knowing if I have supplemental notes in another book (I have three all together for this project, the last one being only 2/3 used). So I spent fifteen minutes indexing that workbook.

The hour was such that I could still afford more computer time, so I spent a little time on Facebook, still trying to learn how to navigate on that site and to use it for a combination of promotion, friendship, and networking. Found two high school friends who didn’t show up on the alumni list and invited them to be friends. Last, before leaving the Dungeon for the Upper Realms, I e-mailed a friend a copy of my incomplete novel, In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. He’s a huge baseball fan, and when he visited us in April and we discussed this he said he’d like to read it. Only took me three months to comply.

I concluded my productive evening by reading in Robertson’s Harmony of the Gospels (the book at the top of my reading pile), and read one article in a 2008 issue of Writers Digest magazine. Then I went to bed on time.

So, I’m making progress on most fronts. The checkbook is up to date. The budget is up to date. Papers are being filed. Dishes and kitchen are being handled (batching it again). Writing progressing on several fronts. Reading moseys along. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t play computer games.

flood studies, Suite 101, Writing

Progress in Tasks, but not Much in Learning

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Well, the Planning Commission meeting last night was not as long as was expected by the City. One or two items were pulled from the agenda, and I was up to the podium about 7:20 PM, done at 7:40 PM, home just after 8:00 PM. I now get to pull together the FEMA submittal. I’ll set a goal of one week from today for sending that in to the City. I can’t remember if the legal advertisement goes in the newspaper before or after the submittal to FEMA.

Last night I really didn’t feel like writing. Not sure what was going on. I had eaten before the meeting (half-price night at Sonic), so gathered up my financial records to enter in my budgeting/planning spreadsheet. But I didn’t feel like doing that task. Got on my user page at Suite101.com and had a pleasant surprise: I had a record revenue day: $0.72! Whoopee! That brings my average per 1000 page views up to work out to about $90 a year if I don’t post anything else. Two or three tanks of gas is nothing to sneeze at.

That should have spurred me on to writing. But instead I began climbing up the learning curve at Flickr. I think I understand that, and will begin using some of the photos there. I have two articles for Suite in the writing stage, and about six others somewhat planned. Hopefully I’ll get back to these tonight.

What I decided to do next was join Facebook. Everyone says you have to be on a social network. You have to promote yourself (but don’t abuse your friends on the network; be a friend first and a self-promoter second). So I went ahead and did it. I had a fair amount of difficulty registering. My screen partially locked up and I wound up putting in my high school and employer three times each. I managed to delete the two bogus ones, and began looking for friends. I published one short item, but did so before I had any friends. Hopefully it shows up on my “wall”.

One more learning curve to climb. I’m determined not to let this become a time sink. I’m not even going to try to log on to Facebook from the office; I imagine it’s blocked anyway. Tonight I’ll set a time limit, say 15 minutes to learn a little more about it, then I’ll need to write an article, wash it through an SEO tool, lace it with apt images, post it, and wait for the revenue to roll in.

Right.

Health, Writing

The Emotional Roller Coaster

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Life is an emotional roller coaster for me, maybe for most people to a certain degree. Rare, I think, and probably drug-induced, is the person who doesn’t have emotional highs and lows. For some the track tops and bottoms are higher, the run-ups and -downs steeper, and the twists sharper than for others. But I think it is all there for most people.

Seasons in life are another factor. When we lived in Saudi Arabia the roller coaster was particularly pronounced. A lot had to do with our time in life (children ages 3 and 1). A lot had to do with the harshness of the country and culture. A lot had to do with being at the whim of the company for everything from drinking water to rides to spending money. Back in the good old USA was the merry-go-round to Saudi’s roller coaster.

I find the writing life to generate those roller coaster type swings. They can be quite wild at a writers conference, where you’re at the peak one minute and 15 minutes later, after a meeting with an editor, at the bottom of the trough. Other aspects of writing can do the same, almost as quickly.

Take Suite101.com for instance. I’m now up to 26 articles posted, in 31 days. Several of those articles rank high on a couple of search engines for key words I included in the articles. I had one article selected as an Editor’s Choice. I’m starting to generate a little revenue–emphasis on “little,” but that’s better than none. Everything was humming along.

Then, Suite101 adds the requirement, previously a recommendation, that every article include an image. No exceptions. So I quickly had to ramp up on how to find copyright-free images, how to download them to my computer, how to save them to the right type of image, how to upload them into Suite101’s image uploading system, complete with caption, file name, source reference, and available link. I got several uploaded on new articles, and even went back to some earlier articles and added some photos and map excerpts.

Then I captured an image of Ben Franklin to illustrate my latest article. Poof. The image wouldn’t upload. Not from my computer at work. Not from my computer at home. No reason why. It took a couple of days to get help from an editor, as the site trouble-shooting guide and the editor’s e-mails contain many terms I don’t understand. And I find I can’t really do things I don’t understand. I have to understand what I’m doing. Save the image as a jpeg or png file? What do those mean? Why, or when, should I use one instead of the other? Make sure the dpi is 72 or less? Okay, never done that before. How do I do that? And why is that necessary? Make sure the size is not more than y by z? That I think I can handle, but I’m not real sure. Use shorter file names? Okay, but how do I keep them straight on my hard drive?

All these are going to take weeks to come up to speed on. Meantime, all my creative writing time has gone into writing for Suite101. Now suddenly all my creative writing time is going to go to learning photos and images and how to manipulate them for the Internet. Doggone it. I want to write. I don’t want to be a photo manipulator, or a layout artist. The bloom has certainly come off the Suite101 rose. Whether it will bloom again remains to be seen. I’m not a happy camper.

Oh, I also was out of commission a couple of days this week, having a colonoscopy. Not the world’s greatest experience, but at least all seems well (one “small polyp” removed). Bad week to have that in terms of emotions.

freelance writing, Good King-Bad King, King Asa, Writing

A Bit Under the Weather

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I intended to post something yesterday, but found myself with a touch of illness. It hit me about 9:00 AM, a queasy feeling in the stomach, a bit of pressure behind the eyes, and a blah feeling physically. I thought of flue or a summer cold.

Despite this, my mind was engaged at work. I’m writing the technical report on the flood study I’ve been working on forever, and for which I finally a week or two ago finished the computer analyses. The report is writing, which is enjoyable, and I look at this technical writing as a new challenge, to be a little more creative than I used to be, to avoid passive voice as much as possible, and to learn to say in seven words what used to take me ten words. My mind seemed sharp and I was getting some good stuff written, so although my body screamed “go home” I decided to stick it out. I did not walk my laps at noon, however.

In the evening I didn’t feel like trying to learn more about search engine optimization (SEO), which I really need to do to begin earning some money at Suite101.com. However, study seemed too tiring, so instead I wrote a Bible study article for Suite 101, on the timeline discrepancy in the life of King Asa of Judah. I had studied this a few months ago and had come up with some thoughts I thought would be worthy of an article, so I wrote it in about 90 minutes, including looking for some elusive sources I had electronically misplaced. It’s now up and live, my 18th article at Suite.

After posting the article, I continued in my study of Asa. In three weeks I will teach the first two lessons in my series Good King, Bad King to our life group. Both of these will be on Asa, who was very good in his early years then turned bad in his later years, an unfortunately too common problem with Jewish kings. I was able to make progress on the lesson plan for both lessons. I think I could teach them both right now. All I lack is finishing the student handouts I want to have.

Not sure what today will bring. I’m feeling better for sure, but not 100 percent. The flood study report still awaits my words, tables, and figure. And the electronic files still want me to pick through them and get rid of all the extraneous stuff. So I’ll have a full day. I hope also to get an engineering article posted at Suite 101.

Harmony of the gospels, Writing

The No Service Conspiracy

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I planned on posting a book review yesterday—not a major review, but just writing a little bit about a book I checked out from the library. I went down to the Dungeon after church, life groups, taking recyclables, and a quick visit to Wal-Mart to be parted with some of my money. Book in hand, I called forth the Internet to bring up this blog, but the Internet didn’t answer. No service. I rebooted the computer. No service. I tried the other computer, the nice new and powerful one that neither of us uses. No service, so it seemed it wasn’t my computer. I piddled around a little, reading some things at hand, checking back and still finding no Internet. We frequently have Internet service lapses of a second or two, sometimes stretching out to a minute.

When this came to 30 minutes, I decided to do something I hadn’t done on a Sunday for a while: take a nap. I should have gone out to the nearby blackberry patch and see what was ripe. The temperature was okay, and this should be the peak season, but my heart and legs weren’t in it. I had an hour of restful sleep. Or was it restless? I can’t remember now, but I then got up and came back to the computer. Still no Internet service on either computer.

Now for some reason it never dawned on me to write my book review in Word and save it until service was restored. I looked at various writing project sitting on the computer desk and work table, and decided to pull out the Harmony of the Gospels I laid aside a couple of months ago. I found it easy to get back into, first writing the passage notes for the post-resurrection day events.

I then began writing the appendix on how I harmonized the resurrection, and found that easy to do, even though I hadn’t thought about this for at least three months. I found the right place in my workbook, re-read a portion of my notes, then started typing the appendix. I never did go back to my notes. The words flowed, as I explained how I reconciled the way the four different gospels described Easter morning. An hour and a half later I had a good start on this appendix, maybe as much as half done.

At 5 PM we still had no service. I went upstairs, found Lynda up, and her not able to get on the Internet on the wireless laptop. So I called Cox and learned we had a service outage in our area (duh) and that technicians had been dispatched to restore service. After supper I went back to the Dungeon, and service was restored. However, by that time I had lost interest in posting to this blog, lost interest in writing an article for Suite 101, and so just spent the time working through a backlog of e-mails and catching up on the two message boards I read.

For the rest of the evening I set aside library books and went to my regular reading pile, now almost a year old, and pulled out the next one. It’s a harmony of the gospels, originally written in 1891 and updated for several decades as new research and manuscript finds came up. I read it through the time Jesus was in the temple as a twelve year old, and was gratified to find their conclusions were the same as mine, or since they were first I should say my conclusions were the same as theirs. It’s good to know that you worked independently and came to the same conclusions as an expert.

I got to work today intending to write this blog post, and found our Internet down. It must be a conspiracy. So I did what I didn’t do last night: I typed this in Word for later posting. Actually our service came back about twenty minutes ago, but I decided to complete this in Word, as practice for the next outage at home. This evening I’ll come back with the book review. I know you all can’t wait.

Independence Day, Writing

Irked by the "Fourth of July"

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No, I’m not anti-patriotic.

What irks me is that we almost never hear the words “Independence Day”. We are not celebrating the fact that a specific day on the calendar happened to come up again. We are celebrating that on that day, 233 years ago, a certain event took place. The thirteen colonies, after a month of wrangling and delaying tactics, finally agreed to a resolution in favor of independence from Great Britain, and then to a statement of the reasons for taking that step.

Yet, in newspapers across the country, on radio and television, you see, read, or hear such things as “4th of July Events”; “Come early for the 4th of July parade”; “Sale on the 4th”; “Celebrations of the 4th”; ad nauseum. It seems we have barely remembered what we celebrate on this day and why.

Oh, I know that “4th of July” takes a whole lot less characters than “Independence Day” in a headline, and one less syllable when spoken. That allows print and broadcast media to have a smidgen more space or air time to print or write something else.

But doggone it, I don’t celebrate the 4th of July. I celebrate Independence Day. I look forward to a time when our country does so again.

Oh, I wrote an article at Suite101.com about the debates leading up to the original Independence Day. Check it out here.

Engineering, freelance writing, Writing

A Scary First on a Successful Day

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It’s rather late on a Friday evening, not a time when I normally make a blog post. But I just did a first for me. When I went to the blog of a fellow Suite101.com writer, I noticed they had a box on their site that showed their most recent Suite 101 posts, with links. I thought that would be rather nice to have on mine, so I went to the forums at Suite 101 and found two threads about this. Neither one told me how to do it. Then I noticed the link, over on the left among the writers tools: Add Suite101.com articles to my web site.

Now, this brought an immediate wave of panic over my still-overstuffed frame and in my somewhat tired mind. Should I do this? What if I mess it up and my blog goes “poof” into the vastness of the Internet forest, never again to find open land? I figured I should at least try, so I clicked the link.

The instructions were easy, so it seemed. A screen popped up with my name and a few default items selected (category of the articles are in and “widget” size). A button said “Generate Widget”, and I clicked it. A text window came up beneath that with the html code in it. Pretty cool, I thought. So I came to this blog to see what I had generated, and soon found out: nothing.

Back to Suite 101, I actually read the directions: You had to copy the html text and paste it in the right place on the web page you were editing. Now the panic had reached a point the New England colonists were in when the earthquake of 1638 hit. I had never in my life done anything with html code, other than to stare at it in amazement and have a deja vu moment of mainframes and FORTRAN code that remained in gray cells not accessed since 1972. Oh well, I pulled up the Blogger editing screen and learned they had an easy way to add widgets. Who knew? So I added it, and went back to the blog, and nothing showed. I had a sneaky suspicion I had to refresh.

I did that, and there was the widget, in the upper right hand corner, above my pic and profile. It was too wide, cutting off some of the text, but the links worked! I went back to the forums at Suite 101 and learned another writer had the problem of the text being too wide, but never received any help on how to fix it. So I went back to the widget generation thingy, and saw where one of my choices was size of the widget. I picked a smaller setting, copied the code (much easier the second time around), pasted it into this blog’s editing screen, checked the blog, and the widget had…disappeared.

The panic I now felt as if I was in the middle of a flood plain, the base flood coming at me in a wave. Then I remembered: refresh. There it was, but unchanged. I went back and forth, playing with two other settings, and finally got it to the size it should be. I even figured out how to move it to the position I wanted it, all my moving a mouse.

But, the widget was now a little too narrow, and had a pesky ad for Suite 101 within it, something about hiring freelance writers and a link. I didn’t want that, and I wanted it a little wider. But the width options in the widget generation thingy didn’t have the right width. However, feeling somewhat confident now, such as someone who has stolen away into an endless forest and has no intention of turning back, I actually went into the html code, found which line had the text for that ad and deleted it, and found which line had the width and increased it from 160 to 175. I clicked save and refresh. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

It’s better now, as you can see to the right. I will probably increase the width a little more, but I’ll give it a day. Too much excitement for one evening. I have edited my first html code. Can twittering and Facebook-ing be far behind?

Oh, and the successes of the day:

  1. My sixth post is up at Suite 101 (still no revenue yet)
  2. My flood plain is mapped! Finally! The full project isn’t quite done, but I feel a huge weight having been lifted from getting this far.
  3. I have gone the entire evening without playing a computer game.
  4. Spent a pleasant hour at Barnes and Noble this evening, drinking the largest house blend, reviewing magazines, and taking notes (yes, I’m batching it again).
  5. My writing productivity has been good this week, especially today.
  6. I got in my noon parking lot laps on a 95 degree day (1 mile instead of 1.33 miles).
  7. I killed two miniature bugs here in the dungeon, the flying kind which you are not sure if they are fleas or chiggers or what they are. Come and get me, PETA!
  8. And, for the first time in over a year, bits and snatches of two poems are rattling around and starting to come out.

Sleep may be a little late coming to me tonight.

Engineering, flood studies, freelance writing, poetry, reading, Writing

Progress as Promised: a shameless commercial plug

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I had intended tonight to post the first part of a two-part review of Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Yes, I finished it last night, well ahead of the schedule I thought I could achieve. The book is long, and deserves a thorough review. On my noon hour, after walking 1.33 miles, I did an outline of my review. Of course, I left the outline on my desk when I left the office.

So tonight I’ll post something else. I’m making progress on a number of fronts.

  • Health: After a few weeks of barely watching what I ate (while continuing a good level of exercise), this is shaping up to be a good week. For the last two days I’ve barely snacked, and have upped my exercise level slightly. Despite 90+ temperatures at noon, I walked 12 laps each day (a mile and a third).
  • Flood study: At the end of the workday, I had pretty much completed the last analysis of the flood study that has been a sword dangling over my head for two years. I still have to get the tech going on the mapping (promised for tomorrow), and must write a technical report (already started) and fill out the FEMA forms (one day’s work). The end is in sight.
  • Reading: As stated, I got more reading done than anticipated over the last month. Perhaps I’m reading more efficiently, because I had great comprehension as I read; I didn’t skim any of it.
  • Freelancing: Last night I spent time preparing a query for another article in Internet Genealogy. No word on it yet.
  • Suite 101.com: Here’s the shameless plug: I have three articles up on Suite 101: two on flood plain issues, and one an overview of Robert Frost’s “Into My Own”, one of his early poems. These three articles don’t have many page views yet and no revenue earned, but that will come in time. What business, you ask, does a civil engineer have reviewing a Frost poem? You’ll have to go to my profile page at Suite 101 and click on the article.

Tomorrow hopefully I’ll begin the book review. Right now, I’m exiting the Dungeon for the upper levels, from the coolness of the basement to the heat of the street level, and will spend a little time reading. The next two books on my reading pile are A Harmony of the Gospels (I forget the author) and East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I’ve never read that, but it’s rather long and I’m not sure I want to read a long book right now. So, for the few minutes of reading tonight, I’ll get back into my son’s philosophy paper “The New Problem of Akratic Action”. This forms a chapter in his dissertation, and is not really a difficult read. At least I think I understood the first five pages.

Doctor Luke's Assistant, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, freelance writing, poetry, Writing

The Kicking and Screaming Part

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Yesterday I completed my first article for Suite101.com and posted it for editor’s review. Your first article after signing on must be approved by an editor before it is viewable on the site. After that you post directly and an editor reviews it after it “goes live”. This morning an e-mail was waiting for me, from the editor for this area of the site, saying some changes were recommended.

I checked in at the site and looked at the editor’s suggestions. Turns out it’s just to add some more white space by breaking things into smaller paragraphs, and maybe making a bulleted list of a couple of items. No change asked for in the text itself. After completing this post I’ll make those formatting changes, resubmit, and the article should go live today. I’ll come back either today or tomorrow and post a link.

Then I will have to go to PayPal and see if my long-dormant account is still there. That’s the only way Suite 101 pays. Not that I expect a windfall any time soon. I have about thirty days to give them payment provisions.

But as I said in my previous post, I’m doing this freelance thing kicking and screaming, holding on to my novels, Bible studies, poetry, and even non-fiction books dream. I’m afraid every writing hour for a while will be devoted to freelancing, both Suite101 and other markets. So I’ll have to carve out time for other writing. Doing it while driving doesn’t work. I’ve tried it and I can’t seem to concentrate, and I don’t really want the distraction. Better to spend driving multi-tasking time with the radio and either music or talk.

My walking time on the noon hour provides opportunites for poetry. I’m usually working on a haiku, or a cinquain, or something else short, something I can remember and write down when I get back in the office. Most of these are not good and I do nothing else with them. although I’ve got two from the last month that are on Post-it notes on my desk, waiting for me to decide whether they are good enough work on some more.

TV time obviously isn’t a good time. Although, I find I can write with the TV on whereas I can’t read. But this time is better for editing something rather than writing new stuff.

But the time that has seemed effective at pursuing my “dream” is when I go to bed and turn out the light. I generally fall asleep almost right away. But lately I’ve been fighting sleep to think through scenes in my novels. I have at most ten minutes before whatever substance my body makes in excess sends me into la la land. Lately I’ve visualized the last few scenes in Doctor Luke’s Assistant. I’ve played and re-played the scene of In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People where Ronny Thompson learns his girlfriend is a fraud and he hurls his cell phone off the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River. And I’ve ridden again on the Star Ferry across Hong Kong harbor, where the vanilla American family moves unbeknownst into an espionage adventure in China Tour.

Eventually I’ll move on to other scenes. And I won’t let this overcome me to the point where I can’t fall asleep easily. Perhaps these last thoughts will lead to dreams that will enhance these books, and perhaps I’ll begin remembering my dreams.

freelance writing, Writing

What do they call that big change thing?

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Back in the mid-90s it seems everyone was talking about paradigm shifts. I can’t tell you how many business meetings I sat in and hear someone say, “We have to make a paradigm shift here,” or “We’re undergoing a paradigm shift.” I wasn’t quite sure what that meant other than a change in outlook, or maybe a change in philosophy. I made a mental to-do entry to look up “paradigm”, but never got to that part of the “list.”

Then, in the mid-00s, it seems everyone was talking about a “sea change”. I’m not actually sure how to spell sea, since I’ve never seen this term written. I heard this more from television, from pundits on the 24 hour news outlets. “We are about to experience a sea change in this county,” or some such drivel as that. I have never bothered to look up that phrase in one of the instantly available Internet resources, but I’m sure I could enter it in a toolbar blank and get all sorts of definitions. I suppose it is another euphemism for a big change.

Whatever a paradigm shift is exactly, and whatever sea change really is (or how it is spelled), I’m pretty sure I’m going through one right now in my writing life. The shift from writing novels and Bible studies has resulted in a big change in what I do in those few hours I have in a day to devote to writing. Yesterday noon and last night were devoted mainly to freelance activities. Oh, I managed to type some on the next two Bible studies I’m going to teach, all of 20 minutes or so. But otherwise I was freelancing both evenings.

Wednesday evening after church I worked on query letters for new magazine articles. I completed two, but decided to let them sit overnight before looking at them again then sending them off. Last night, however, I forgot about them and worked on getting my Suite101.com account set up. That was actually quite simple, so I went to the new member’s tutorials and managed to get through two of them (interrupted by a phone call) before I left the Dungeon and went upstairs.

This would normally be my reading time, from 10 to 11 PM, but I had noticed, or rather remembered, when typing in one of those Bible studies that I had already done a bunch of work on it that wasn’t with the papers I was typing. So instead of reading I began going through piles of papers–in my closet, beside my nightstand, next to my reading chair, in my portfolio–to find that earlier work. I found it, fifteen minutes later, carefully filed and indexed in a notebook I had failed to mark on the outside. That left me some time to read, and Team of Rivals is a little bit closer to being completed.

I want you all to know that I am not embracing this freelance thing. I’m pursuing it, dragging my feet, clinging to novels and Bible studies till my knuckles are white, all the time saying, “I’m doing this to build a platform so I can publish novels; I’m doing this to accumulate clips so I can publish novels.” I don’t yet know how this sea change, or paradigm shift, or whatever they now call a big change, will set with me. Two roads diverged in a wood. And I’m on the one I never intended to be on. I’m just afraid that knowing how way leads on to way, I shall never get back. Off to do another tutorial before starting my day job.