I have great hopes that this will be one of my better sellers. Two of my grandchildren, Ezra and Elise, think it will be a best seller. We’ll see.
I interrupt the review of The Control of Nature to just talk. Last weekend we were in Big Spring, Texas, doing the grandparent thing. We drove up on Thursday, had a grandson’s birthday party on Friday with many 6-year-olds and their parents, a grandson’s cross country meet on Saturday, taking or picking up grandkids from school or activities. It was quite enjoyable.
Then, on Saturday, the family drove to western Oklahoma for our son-in-law’s parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. They boarded the dog, which left Lynda and I alone in the house with the three cats. That lasted only about 30 hours, but it was a good time.
During the days, when the kids were at school, Richard was at work, and Sara was either working at home of going to the office, we had lots of solitude. This was quite enjoyable.
For me, it was like being on a writers’ retreat. I had no special projects to work on, no household chores, no yardwork, just peaceful time. So what did I spend my time on? I got back to work on the sequel to There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel. Titled The Key To Time Travel, I had written a prolog, chapter 1, and most of chapter 2, consisting of around 3,650 words. But I hadn’t done any work on it for close to a month—other than re-read it and edit. I had just been too busy with those special projects and things around the house.
But from the first day, I found time to write in it. About a thousand words a day. The plot flowed easily, the words found their way to pixels on screen. By the end of four days, I had 5,500 words added to the novel, pushing it to 9,200 words, or just under 25 percent of where I think the word count will end up.
I asked our granddaughter, Elise, to read it, which she did (all but the last 500 words or so), and she loved it. She mentioned certain things that made it good, things she liked to see in a book. So I think I’m on the right track.
We drove home on Wednesday. I’m writing this on Sunday. How many words do you think I’ve added since I got home? None, that’s how many. I made progress with my special projects. I finished one book I was working on both before and during our trip. I did a major amount of yardwork on Saturday. Then I had to prepare to teach our adult Sunday school class, a new series that I developed. That took a fair amount of time on Saturday.
Here it is Sunday evening. I’m brain dead. The microwave quit this morning, only a little over three years old. Lynda has a medical appointment tomorrow. Let me rephrase that. She may have a medical appointment tomorrow. She thinks she cancelled it and we’ll have to check first thing Monday.
So I don’t expect to get lots written either tonight or tomorrow. Maybe Tuesday.
Henry and Izzy knew they were going to meet me that day, but not that I was giving them copies of the book.
In my last post, I talked about the author events I had last week. I mentioned that on Wednesday, I went to John Tyson Elementary School in Springdale, Arkansas. The purpose of the trip was for me to meet and give copies of my book There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel (Book 1 in The Forest Throne series) to my two beta readers, Henry and Izzy, and their E.A.S.T. facilitator, Mrs. Jennifer Boogaart. I wanted to write about that more in my last post, but I was waiting on photos. I didn’t take any myself, so I had to wait until they were posted on the school’s site. Those finally were posted, so I’ll say a little more about that event.
I think Henry and Izzy’s EAST facilitator, Jennifer Boogaart, was as happy to receive a copy of the book as they were.
In Nov. 2021, Mrs. Boogaart reached out to a Facebook group I’m a member of, Arkansas Authors. This is a group for the purpose of putting writers and educators together. Mrs. Boogaart said she had two students in her E.A.S.T. class who were writing a book about JTE’s school recycling program. She was hoping to find an author who would discuss the writing and publishing process with them. I volunteered, and last year we had two or three Zoom meetings (the pandemic still keeping us apart). One of these meetings I suggested, since I was about to publish a short story and I thought they could watch the process as I shared my screen with them.
I hope to do some writing on the sequel to this this week.
In one of the Zoom meetings, we discussed if they would want to be beta readers for TNSTATT. I explained what this was, and they both answered yes. I sent it to them in January of this year. I did all this mostly e-mailing their teacher, who I asked to get permission of their parents first. They were the first people other than members of my family who read the book. As a result, I mentioned Henry, Izzy, and Mrs. Boogaart in the acknowledgment section of the book—again, with their parent’s approval.
So Wednesday I arrived at 9:00 a.m. The school district communication department was there, as was Izzy’s mom. Mrs. Boogaart took me down to the E.A.S.T. classroom. Henry and Izzy came in soon thereafter, and we sat and talked. I gave them signed copies and showed them where their names were in it. I talked with them about how the idea for the book came to me, and how my oldest grandson helped with the ideas and the plot. I also asked them more about their book, including where they stand in the writing process.
The communications people got some of this on video. They then asked each of us for a statement about how the work on this book felt to us. Meanwhile, others were also taking photos, including the teacher, the mom, and the assistant principal. The whole thing has been posted on the JTE E.A.S.T. Facebook page. It’s at the top of the page now; later you might have to scroll down.
This is not the typical author event. I didn’t sell any books. I didn’t bring any to sell. But it was a joy to work with the kids, and to be able to meet them and give them the book. My life was enriched, and I hope they and their teacher’s lives were as well.
Oh, wait, I figured out how to get the link to the E.A.S.T. post itself. Here it is.
I said on Monday this would be a busy week, and it was, even busier than I thought it would be.
Tuesday, I made my presentation to the NW Arkansas Letter Writers Society. This was a repeat of my presentation “The Universal Postal Union: The Letter Writer’s Friend”. We were eight in number at the meeting, and attenders seemed interested. At the end of the presentation, we brainstormed other things I might talk about in future meetings.
Wednesday, I went to John Tyson Elementary School in Springdale, AR, and presented copies of There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel to my beta readers, Heny and Izzy, and to their E.A.S.T. facilitator, Jennifer Bogart. It was good to meet these two students and chat with them a while. The school had the school district media people there. There was a post about it on the school district’s website, but I can’t find the link now.
Then Thursday was the semi-monthly meeting of our critique group, the Scribblers & Scribes. We had five in attendance, one who was a new member and another I hadn’t met before. All five of us had some writing to share, and we went from 6 p.m. to a little after 8:30 p.m. It was quite a variety of writing to review.
I had a good time making the last-minute presentation to the homeschool group—and I sold a few books as well.
That’s what I had on the writer/author schedule at the beginning of the week. But Thursday I received a message from a woman I’d sold some books to (both used books and some of mine), saying I should look for a text. It was already there, asking me if I would make a presentation to a homeschool group at their Constitution Day, which was the next day, Friday morning—this morning. I said yes, of course, knowing I had only 24 hours to prepare. The meeting was at a park in Bentonville. The students were from ages 5-17, including a good group of teenagers, and all had a parent or grandparent with them. I made what I think was a good presentation, though mostly at the level of the older kids there rather than the younger. The parents all seemed to like it, based on comments I received afterwards. I sold a good number of books in my Documenting America series. And I got a few orders for books that people will want around November.
So now I have an easing in my schedule. Time to take care of car maintenance and yardwork and grocery shopping. And, perhaps, squeezing in a little writing.
I hope to do some writing on the sequel to this this week.
It’s Sunday evening as I write this, multi-tasking as we watch the specials about 9/11. I’m looking ahead to tomorrow, and realize I don’t have time to write the type of post I’d hoped to have for Monday. Even Friday is a little iffy for a post that takes a lot of time.
This is a killer week. Not so Monday and Friday, but the other days have a lot of activities and appointments.
First, I have two “gigs” this week. On Tuesday, I will repeat my presentation on the Universal Postal Union to the NW Arkansas Letter Writers Society. I made this presentation in May, but almost everyone who normally attends was gone that day. So I’ll do it again. Fortunately, all I have to do is dust off my PowerPoint and run through it once or twice.
Then, Wednesday morning, I am to be at John Tyson Elementary School in Springdale (40 mile drive), where I will make a presentation of There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel to Henry and Izzy, the two students I had Zoom meetings with about a writing project they were doing, then had them be beta readers for my book. They don’t know I’ll be there and giving them the finished book. This will be at 9:00 a.m.
I have several hundred more of these WW2 newspapers to inventory.
Then, at 12:00 noon, I have an appointment with my cardiologist’s P.A. Hopefully I’ll learn how well the cardio rehab program went. Between those two appointments, I’m hoping to meet someone for coffee. We’ll see if that happens.
Then, Wednesday afternoon, Lynda and I have dental appointments. I’ll barely have time to get home after seeing the cardiologist to leave for the dentist. But, unless we head to church that night, that will end appointments on Wednesday.
At noon on Thursday, Lynda will have her MRI to find out what, exactly, caused her sciatica attach in July. That has been twice delayed, not because of us, but because of insurance and provider problems. Then, that evening, is a semi-monthly meeting of the Scribblers & Scribes critique group. I’ll have some preparation time required for that.
In addition to this, I have my normal activities, which at the moment include:
morning 2-mile walks
digitizing a minimum of 10 printed letters a day
inventorying a minimum of 30 issues of the Stars and Stripes
whatever writing I can squeeze in, most likely on The Key To TimeTravel, though I have other projects to work on as well, if I want to do so.
A little bit of yard work, although the work I got done on Saturday puts me a little ahead of where I normally am.
reading for research as well as for pleasure, including a couple of C.S. Lewis writings.
At some point, I need to begin the strength exercise program recommended in the cardio rehab program. I hope to begin that on Monday.
So yes, it will be a busy week. Hopefully I’ll be able to see progress on all my tasks.
A period of intense research is what led to this book. What will come of this new time of research?
Somewhere, in the back pages of this blog, I’ve said that I love research. I find that it motivates me. But research, I have also found, has a dark side—at least for me it does—in that it can all too easily become all consuming.
Two research opportunities came up recently, and I am trying very hard to resist the urge to dive in fully.
One has to do with genealogy. This month, one of my few book sales is of my genealogy book, Stephen Cross and Elizabeth Cheney of Ipswich. That’s the second of these books sold since I published it in July 2020. Then, a day or so after that sale, I was browsing through my Google Books library, looking for a new download, and saw a copy of a two-years volume of The Essex Antiquarian, a genealogy and history magazine. The volume I downloaded and started reading years ago was from 1898. Of course I had to open it.
But rather than read on, I decided to search the book for “Cheney”, my wife’s maiden name. The family was in Essex County, Massachusetts for a while, some in Ipswich, including Stephen and Elizabeth Cross. I found several hits for Cheney, four of which were for John Cheney of Newbury, the immigrant ancestor of the family.
I’ve done a lot of research on John Cheney, and possibly he and his wife Martha will be the subjects of my next genealogy book. That book, however, is so far down the line that I don’t have dates for writing it. But, I had this opportunity: four items related to him published in a 1898 magazine were at my fingertips on my screen. I pulled up my John Cheney research document, and learned that two of those hits were new information. I dutifully made the new entries and did comprehensive source documentation. Beautiful. A pleasant 30 minutes spent.
That wasn’t good enough. I searched for other editions of that magazine, and found several more, available for full viewing. I did the Cheney search over several volumes, and found additional information about John Cheney that was new. Repeated the entries and documentation. A pleasant 2 hours spent.
The next day I repeated and expanded this, looking for information, not only for Cheney, but for other family names, including Cross. I also found a longer article about a Newbury man that John Cheney supported in a controversy with the government. Rather than take time to read that (six pages), I made a note of where to find it again. Two more hours spent.
Within a year, these will be going to the University of Rhode Island library. While it will be sad to see them go, it will also be a joy knowing they will be well cared for and properly preserved and available for study.
The other research opportunity came with the many copies of the Stars and Stripes newspaper that I have. As noted in previous posts, these were newspapers that Dad worked on in Africa and Europe during WW2, copies of which he sent home to his parents, to be stored in an old steamer trunk to this day. As I reported earlier, I’m donating them to the University of Rhode Island. I decided to inventory them first, and began that process on Labor Day.
With every Bill Mauldin cartoon I see, I wonder if Dad modeled for that one.
Tuesday, I continued. My inventory method consists of recording the day, date, and edition—also whether the copy has any damage or not. By the end of my dedicated time on Tuesday, I had a total of 70 listed. Only 700 to go. I’m purposely not taking time to look at the newspapers. I will make a couple of exceptions to that as I get further into this.
But, on Tuesday, I saw a headline, “U.S. Woman Writer Held by Russia as Spy”. That sounded interesting, and I read the article. The writer was Anna Louise Strong (1885-1970). She was an American who became a socialist, then found sympathy with the Soviet Union and Communist China. Much of her writing was promoting the economic systems in those two countries. Why the Russians kicked her out is a mystery, but it seems some think it was her cozy relationship with China that was the problem.
Much of that I learned from the article about her at Wikipedia, not in the newspaper.
Anna Strong is a new person to me. I’ve never heard of her before. Thirty minutes of reading gave me the gist of what her views were, views very different from mine. A few quotes of hers made me think of things that need to be said about the capitalist and communist systems. I could easily write something about that, given a little more research.
When I first got Dad’s Stars and Stripes, in 1997, I had dreams of doing war research in them, thinking about the fog of war. How much of what the newspaper reported would prove to be true or untrue? How much does journalism get wrong, requiring history to set the record straight? Alas, after 25 years, the newspapers remained untouched. My research project null and void. I suppose I could pick it up again, but I can see that would require years of research and then some writing. No, I just can’t dedicate that time to that project. So off the papers go to URI. Perhaps students, faculty, or outside researchers will someday use them to good purposes.
More research? No! In the last three days I’ve spent over five hours on research and almost none on writing. That can’t be. I’ve got to find a way to pull away from it and concentrate on the tasks at hand. I have three books in the pipeline, started and unfinished. I need to choose one and get it done.
As an exercise, I gathered all my 2011 outgoing and incoming letters (most were via e-mail) into a correspondence book and “published” it to Amazon. Here’s a photo of it. 559 pages. Of course, it can never be truly published like this because I don’t own the copyright of the incoming letters.
It’s Friday, my normal blog posting day. I try to write my blog posts the day before and schedule them to post on Friday and Monday at 7:30 a.m. Yet here it is, 10:45 a.m., and I just realized I hadn’t yet done a blog post. This one was to have been another in the climate change series, but I’m not ready for it. So I’ll have to settle with a fill-in post.
Today, my time has been taken up by busyness. I was up around 6:30 a.m. and out working in the woodlot by 6:45. I began moving cut branches and deadfall down the hill to a brush pile closer to the back of the lot. I also did more work on breaking down the brush pile near the front of the lot and moving it to the two piles near the rear. Lynda asked me to do this since the front pile was an eyesore from the street. She is right. Working on and off on it since spring, a 7-foot pile is now down to a foot and a half. The end is in sight.
After the brush pile, I did a little trimming of blackberry bushes and removal of weeds I sprayed a couple of days ago.
Back in the house, I took coffee and computer to The Dungeon. Devotionals complete, I was ready to begin my work shortly before 8:00 a.m. Friday is my biggest day for stock trading, so I had work to do to get ready for the market open at 8:30. I made seven trades and updated my spreadsheet and charts to reflect the trades.
Then it was on to writing, except my writing is somewhat shoved aside of late. Instead, I’m scanning old letters, converting them into Word files, then discarding the originals. Perhaps I need to explain.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I got into the habit of printing off e-mails and discarding the originals. What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking ahead to the day when I would want to reduce the amount of my physical possessions, looking further ahead to the need to downsize as age took hold. Now here I am, with notebooks of printed e-mails (and a few handwritten or typed letters received in snail mail). Since I want to keep a record of my correspondence, I don’t want to throw them out.
I was transcribing some letters, mainly those in my genealogy research notebooks. I save each letter as a Word document in a nice and neat filing system with consistent document names. Then I throw away the printout.
My current goal is to get rid of 10 letters a day. I’m making progress at that rate. One more day and I’m done with 2002. Only three days more and I’ll be done with 2003. Most of what I’m doing now is with the scanner function on my printer. Scan the doc, pull it into Word, save it as a .docx file in the right place with the right name, correct formatting and scanner errors, and move on to the next one.
At this rate, I have no idea how long this will take. And I’m not sure I can sustain this rate and write too. The scanning and formatting of 10 printouts takes close to an hour. By that time, my mind is not on writing, and I’ve not been able to do much of that. Perhaps I need to reverse the order: get an hour or two of writing in then switch to scanning/transcribing. I’ll have to think about that.
I also did this with e-mails on my computer. I had emails saved going back to 2005, ever since I switched to Yahoo as my e-mail program. In the evening, while watching TV, I multi-tasked by saving the emails to Word files in the right place. At first I didn’t name them as well as I should have, and may have to go back—also as an evening, multi-tasking activity—and rename a number of files. All in good time.
Why this obsession with my correspondence? My love of reading letters has, I supposed, caused me to have the illusion that someone, someday, will want to read my correspondence. I realize the chances of that happening are pretty slim. But, if anyone ever wants to collect my correspondence and read it, they will find I’ve done most of the work for them.
How long will I do this? I don’t know. The notebook I’m currently working on covered 2001-2004. I finished 2001, and in less than a week will be done with the next two years. 2004 will take a little longer, probably to the end of August or even into September. After that, I may take a break from this work and get back to productive writing. The letter notebooks will be there for a later time.
Now, maybe I can keep track of the weekend days ahead, and have a better blog post on Monday.
First of the month. Time to review progress last month and set some goals for August. That means return to my environmental series will be delayed one more post.
First, the goals I set at the beginning of the month. They were not ambitious goals.
Get back on the two Bible studies I’ve set aside to complete other things. I’d love to set a goal of finishing them by the end of the month, but I think that’s too ambitious. Let me instead say to work on them in at least 10 writing sessions. I believe I worked on the Bible studies only one day. Life circumstances and changed writing interests resulted in my not being able to focus on this.
Attend three writers meetings, all in-person. Did this. They were three good meetings.
Blog twice a week on Monday and Friday. Might be a challenge with the grandkids here. Did this. Maybe a couple of posts weren’t the best.
Work on the programming of the next Bible study. I’ll post about it at some point. I did manage to have a couple of good sessions on this. I’m not as far along as I wanted to be, but at least I made progress.
Not originally a goal, but something I worked on was the next book in The Forest Throne series, tentatively titled The Key To Time Travel. I did this because the grandkids were here, and they were interested in getting started on it.
What about this month? I’m still dealing with some health issue for me and my wife. We were going to take a long road trip this month, but that’s up in the air right now due to health. I will decide on that sometime this week. I’m going to establish goals as if we won’t be making the trip.
Attend three writing group meetings in person. This includes making the presentation at one on Aug 9.
Blog twice a week, Monday and Friday.
Write at least two more chapters in The Key To Time Travel. I hope to work on that some today.
Write at least two more episodes of Tales Of A Vagabond. I still don’t know what I will do with this. I need to get a little more into it before I can assess if this is a viable item for Kindle Vella.
Continue to program the next Bible study. The tentative title is Death Kindly Stopped For Me.
Do some marketing of There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel. Also need to close a couple of sales of this.
I’ll leave it at that. This is really a tough month to plan anything, given uncertain health issues.
At the moment, I feel like I’m running between different projects. Projects started but not finished. Projects wanting to get started. Projects developing in my mind. Rather than list all of them, I’ll just mention what today’s work on projects is shaping up to be.
First thing this morning, I sent in the order for a proof copy of a new paperback book. I won’t say what it is right now. It’s not a book for sale, but rather one for private purposes. The proof will arrive June 29; I’ll show it to one intended recipient on July 8; and I’ll make a presentation about it to a club I’m a member of on August 13.
Next, I transcribed two letters from 2008. That was after going through a notebook of letters from that year and culling all those already in electronic format. This is part of a decluttering project. It’s totally unnecessary to spend time on this at this stage of my writing career, but it’s something I feel I must do if we are ever going to downsize.
Now, I will work on the memoir I started earlier this month. I want to present a few pages of it to my critique group, the Scribblers & Scribes, tonight. It’s now 15 typed pages long. I don’t know that I’ll actually write a full memoir at this time. It’s a fill-in project of sorts, to be able to have something to share with the group, as I don’t figure they’ll want to see my Bible studies. That’s not really the type of stuff critique groups were made for. Concerning the memoir, I don’t have a lot to do to be ready for this evening.
The amount I plan to do on these projects today won’t take much time, so I will likely shift to another project. This is another letters collection. Letters between me and a friend who died a couple of years ago. I have pulled them into a book and done the majority of the formatting. All that remains is to insert some photos, figure out the book size, and go through the publishing process. This is another unnecessary project; it’s something I want to do, something I can give to his wife and daughter that they might want to read.
Also today, I hope to find 30 minutes to an hour to make those last changes to my website. It would be nice to check that one thing off the list.
Oh yes, one last small project was to write this blog post and schedule it for posting tomorrow. That one is done!
So, that’s the life of a distracted, unfocused writer—at least this one. I’m anxious to get these loose ends finished so I can get on with my next book.
Folks, sorry to say but I will not have a real post today. While it’s a new holiday and I should have time, we have company here. As the chief cook and bottle washer, I’ve been busy with that. Plus, I have three—no four—writing projects in progress that I need to work on, at least two of them today.
So see you Friday with a real post. As I right now, I’m not sure what it will be.
It’s now 7:13 a.m. on Monday, my posting day, and I’m just getting to this post. I had intended on doing a book review, but the time has gotten away from me. So, instead, you’ll have to settle for a mish-mash, oh I’m-so-busy post.
Since last Monday, we have been watching a friend’s dog, Rocky. He’s a good dog. Small, white, curly fur. Not terribly demanding. But oh how he interrupts life’s normal rhythms. When I get up in the morning, after weighing, checking my blood sugar, dressing, and taking my pills, instead of going to The Dungeon and having devotions and begin my work day, I walk Rocky. Just up to the stop sign and back, about .34 miles. Then there’s a walk at 9-ish, then noon, then 5, then 7, then 10 at night just before bed. Some of those walks are shorter. One, at 7 or 8 p.m., is about a mile or a little longer. I’m getting my steps in and losing a little weight.
Rocky goes home tomorrow. We will miss him, but it will be good to resume normal daily rhythms.
Which, unfortunately, are being interrupted by my heart rehab program. Based on the heart cath in April, which showed one artery 50% blocked and a tear in one artery, my cardiologist wants me to undergo heart rehab. I did the work-up last Tuesday, and I start today. One hour, three times a week, 20 miles away. Exercise and education to start, and I take it just exercise by the end. 36 sessions, though they say some people “graduate” out after about 12.
I won’t lie: I’m already resenting the time and gas money I’m going to have to spend on this. I know it’s for my good. But the angina has essentially gone away. All these walks with the dog and I don’t think I’ve experienced any angina. I’m wondering if that tear in my artery has already healed itself (as they say it does in 75 to 95% of the cases). I doubt that artery has opened up in such a short time, but who knows?
As to the other things, I have writing, stock trading (looks like a bad day today), household chores, outside work, and trying to keep up a good reading schedule. All in a day of retirement.
