Harry Potter, reading

Reading Harry Potter

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Having seen all the Harry Potter movies, I have always had in mind to read the books. However, they never seemed to get any closer to the top of my reading pile. Indeed, they never really made it into my reading pile, but rather remained on the shelves, gathering dust, wondering if I would ever get to them.

Well, I finally did, at the wife’s insistence. More of a suggestion, really. She said, “Why don’t we read the Harry Potter books out loud?” We don’t do a lot together, the wife and me, except eat meals and watch television. And I’m fairly sick of television these days. This would give us a chance to do something together. So even though it would cut into my writing time, I said okay.

I believe it was after the first of the year that we began with The Sorcerer’s Stone. That’s a fairly short book, I think around 300 pages. Lynda has read them all before, but at least ten years ago, and she really didn’t remember the details of the books. We’ve seen the movies multiple times over the last year, as we watched them in rounds. But finally, I was reading Harry Potter.

At first we read around five pages, then passed the book to the other and they read five pages. Back and forth. Eventually we read longer sections, around a chapter each. I’m sure we were done with The Sorcerer’s Stone in less than a week. One of the main things I noticed was the different beginning in the book than in the movie. The basics were there in both: one-year-old Harry is taken to the Dursley’s to grow up away from the wizarding world. In the movie it’s a fairly short scene with only Dumbledore, McGonagal, and Hagred, told from Dumbledore’s point of view. It serves as a nice prologue to the story. In the book it is much more elaborate, and is told from either Vernon Dursley’s point of view or by an omniscient narrator. I don’t know that either is better.

The it was on to The Chamber of Secrets. A little bit longer book, it begins to flesh out some of Harry’s back story. At least it tells how he comes to be a prisoner in the Privet Drive house. His rescue by the Weasley brothers is much less dramatic in the book than it is in the movie. I think, on the whole, I’m going to remember this one less than the others.

Next was The Prisoner of Azkaban. Longer still, it was good to see Harry, Ron, and Hermione start to grow up. In this book we learn something more about their schoolwork. The book does a better job of explaining things such as the Marauder’s Map, and the secret passageway to the Shrieking Shack. The friendship of Moody, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs is explained much better in the book, as it to be expected. On the other hand, the dramatic scene in the movie where Harry goes into the corridors at night in search of Peter Pettigrew, who he saw on the map, is much better in the movie.

The Goblet of Fire is the one, so far, where the book and the movie diverge the greatest. The interaction between the students of the three schools is significantly different between the two. The movie excels in showing the Yule Ball, with the women in all their finery. The book does a better job of explaining what becomes of Rita Skeeter, what Fleur is like, how the tasks take place, and many more things.

Which brings us to The Order of the Phoenix, which we finished on Saturday. This is the longest of the books (so I understand); thus the movie is much condensed. It’s hard to know whether the movie is better or the book is better. The book explains a lot that the movie doesn’t. The book tells more about the Order of the Phoenix, whereas the movie seems to focus more on Dumbledore’s Army. My only negative comment is that the book seems over-long. It probably needed to be to flesh out the remaining back story on the encounter of baby Harry and Voldemort, but it seemed to take forever to get through it. By the end, had I been reading silently instead of aloud with Lynda, I would have found myself skipping or skimming sections.

The Half-Blood Prince and The Deathly Hallows remain. I need to take a break from this reading every evening. It’s taking an hour or two every night away from my writing. It’s not bad time spent, but I need to make progress on my novel if I’m ever going to get it published. So I’m not sure when we’ll finish the last two.

In my next post, however, I’m going to make some comments on the story line of the Harry Potter books, and what has made them a success.

self-publishing

Book Sales, Jan-Feb 2014

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I didn’t report my book sales in January. There wasn’t much to report. Nor is there much more to report in February. But I don’t want to hide this information, so here I’ll post it, and comment after.

2014-02 Book Sales Table 989x368

 

Yes, that’s right. Two sales in January and another two sales in February, four all together. The best news is they are of four different books. One was a print book, the other three e-books.

I still don’t do much by way of marketing. Occasionally I make a post on FB, or tell someone individually (online or in real life) that I have books for sale. At some point, perhaps next year, I’ll have to quite taking all of my writing life time for writing and instead use some of it for marketing.

Below is a smaller size of the table, for linking to from the Absolute Write forums.

2014-02 Book Sales Table 396x147

 

 

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Headshots

Progress on Headshots

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Last week I was in Nashville for most of the week, attending the IECA annual conference and presenting a paper there, “Who Pays the Fine?” It was a great trip, and I’m writing a detailed trip diary about it. It’s not something that I’ll publish, though possibly I might take some of it for a blog post. It’s just something I want to do, something I have to get out of my system before returning to work on Headshots.

And, that’s the subject of this blog post. I last worked on Headshots on February 23. I left for the trip on February 25 and came back just before midnight on the 28th. March 1 was moving day for my mother-in-law, with tiredness overcoming me and having no mind or energy to write, little enough to read.

Today is the day I planned to have a blog post here, but my blog post planning record is at work, and I’m at home on a snow day. Having shoveled the drive this morning, I came down here, uncertain of what to write. I just finished a travel log of my trip to Nashville, running on to seven typed pages. Next is this post, which I have decided will be on Headshots.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m slogging through the sagging middle. The idea came to me to make this mostly about baseball, since I had very little baseball action in the early chapters. The timeframe has moved into during the season, so I’ve written about Ronny’s comeback attempt. This has taken me through Chapter 18, and 56,222 words. Since I’m heading for around 80,000, and I think the ending action will take close to 20,000 words, that means I’m almost through the sagging middle.

But, I have other things to add to it. I have to add that Sarah gets kind of stir-crazy, hiding out at the farm, not being able to go anywhere without Federal protective agents going with her. I need for her to do something stupid to make her situation worse. I also haven’t touched on any Mafia/gang actions for a while. I can’t forget them in the midst of the baseball action. Some ideas have come to me for both of these problems. One is to give back story on the four main mobsters: Mancini, Russo, Cerelli, and Washburn. In both books I’ve said very little about what motivates them. Washburn and Mancini got a paragraph each in FTSP, and I think I gave some of Mancini’s back story earlier in this book.

Once I add those things in to the sagging middle, I suspect I’ll be somewhere around 65,000 words. So either the book will be a little longer than I thought, or perhaps the end game will be shorter. Either way, I’ll try to get back to this in a few days, or perhaps next weekend.

The end is in sight.

Headshots, Writing

The Sagging Middle

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My blog has become impossible to use. For whatever reason, whether I access it using Internet Explorer from work or Chrome at home, the entering visual window doesn’t work, especially on the first paragraph, and I have to type in the html window. That works fine, except entering line breaks in the html window doesn’t work, so I have to switch back to the visual window to hit [enter] then back to the html window to type. As I’m at the end of a paragraph, I’ll do that now.

Back, with a code included in the html window that I assume is a line break code. Excuse me while I go back to visual and see what gives…. Well, something looks funny in the visual window, but it doesn’t appear when I preview the document, so I’ll keep going. Part of the problem is I installed this theme (or more precisely my son did) back in 2011 using the then-current Wordpress 3.1.3. The now-current version is 3.8.1. Maybe that’s the problem, that older versions of WordPress don’t work with current browsers. I’ve hesitated doing the upgrade because, being a technophobe, I’m scared of what will happen. Will my blog disappear? Or will everything from before the upgrade be messed up? Those who know more than I do say no, that won’t happen. Alas, when I finish this post, I’ll do the upgrade. If you never hear from me again….

But my post today is supposed to be about something different. There comes a point in the writing of just about every novel where the writer encounters and must overcome…the Sagging Middle. Most advice about novel writing is that there are three parts to a novel. The beginning is a period wherein the main characters are introduced, conflict is established, and the protagonist moves through a point where there is no going back.

The ending action begins with another point of no return, typically caused by the protagonist him or herself, something that causes the protagonist to have to save the day. From that point on is the rising action to the end and eventual denouement.

Between these two is the long middle part of the novel. It’s a place where, if the novelist isn’t careful enough or good enough, the action will sag, causing the middle and thus the novel to fail. It should be a series of actions that pit the protagonist against whatever evil he’s facing. But keeping the interest up during this time is difficult. How do you keep coming up with events that move the action along? How do you keep raising the stakes, getting the protagonist into new kinds of trouble, yet leaving room for the major conflict at the end?

This has proved difficult for me in Headshots. Ronny Thompson begins this book lying on the mound at Yankee Stadium, severely injured and bleeding. The possibility of him never pitching again is on everyone’s mind. He was just estranged from his girlfriend, Sarah, and had been barely speaking to his parents. Meanwhile two groups of Mafia figures have been crossed, and are out to get that person. I have a hard time saying much about it without revealing the plot, but it turns out that it’s Sarah that the Mafia is after.

The thing I turned to last week and weekend to prop up my sagging middle is baseball. That was lacking in the first part of the book, as the action then takes place in the off season, when there’s not much baseball going on. I need to see if there’s a way I can work more baseball into that, maybe have Ronny watch films of the World Series. But the last writing I’ve done is of baseball scenes: pitchers throwing bean balls, batters making outs or driving in runs, strategy with pitchers and pinch hitters. The baseball fans that read the book should, I hope, be pleased with this section.

I’m not through with the mid-book baseball action yet, but another plot line that’s helping prop up the sagging middle is the three Cubs who had been bribed to throw the World Series in the first book. The Mafia feels the three double crossed them, just as Sarah has, and they must pay the consequences. This has given me several scenes of good action.

At this point I’m almost through writing the middle section. I’m not sure how long the book will be, but I think around 80,000 words. This weekend I crossed 54,000 words. I’m thinking that the end action will take 20,000 words or so, so if my estimate is correct on how many words it will take to tell this story, I haven only 5000 to 6000 words left in the middle. I have enough action planned for the rest of that middle to finish it out in, hopefully, good shape.

So maybe my middle isn’t sagging too badly after all. I won’t know till the entire book is finished, I’ve let it sit for a while, and then come back and read it as a whole. But I’m reasonably pleased with it at this point. That’s better than the alternative.

Now, I’m off to upgrade. Hopefully I’ll be back….

Carlyle, self-publishing

3 Years of Self-Publishing

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Today is the third anniversary of when I put my first self-published item up for people to buy. It’s been a wild ride. Not exactly successful, nor can I say, I suppose, unsuccessful. I have another year to go on this experiment before I make some hard decisions.

Also, I’m going to insert here a small image of the draft cover of my Thomas Carlyle book, so that I can link it at the Absolute Write forums and get some critique on it.

 

Carlyle

Progress on the Carlyle Book

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Good heavens! The Internet is down at the office! How will anyone get anything done? Monday it was slow. Tuesday it was still slow, though seemed a little better than Monday. Now, Wednesday morning before the workday is to start, our intranet is working fine, but not the connection to the outside world.

Actually, most of our work is done off of our intranet, so most people should be good. Anyone planning to research something via the Internet is out of luck, for now.

Today I have scheduled to report on the progress I’m making on my Thomas Carlyle book. It is tentatively titled Carlyle Articles in the Edinburgh Encyclopedia. Except for the Introduction, it’s all public domain material. Carlyle wrote twenty articles for this work, from 1820 to 1823, plus translated one long article, for a total of twenty-one contributions. Sixteen of these were attributed to him in the encyclopedia. The others were identified by researchers over the years (the last in 1963) as belonging to him, based on references in his correspondence.

In 1897, seventeen of these were republished in Montaigne and Other Essays, Chiefly Biographical. The other four articles have never been republished, except in later editions of the Encyclopedia.

At the Absolute Write forums, one of the moderators has suggested that a way to gain knowledge and experience in formatting self-published books is to take some book in the public domain and republish it. She has encouraged people to do that on multiple occasions. While I’ve already formatted and published thirteen items as e-books, five of those also as print books, I’m not exactly inexperienced. But I can always improve, and the moderator’s suggestion seemed to be a good one.

I decided to throw a twist into it, however. Since all twenty-one of Carlyle’s encyclopedia articles do not seem to have ever been gathered into one volume, I decided to be the one to do it. They are all available on-line, so gathering them wasn’t too difficult. Text of the ones reprinted in 1897 was in good shape. Putting them into a word processing document was easy, and they formatted quite nicely.

The other four, however, turned out to be a major headache. These four include the two longest, “Persia” and “Political Economy” (the translation), which account for almost half of the total encyclopedia article material by Carlyle. The problems stemmed partly from having to bring the text into the word processor document in batches rather than as a whole. This was time consuming, and I made mistakes and had to do much over.

The other problem is that these four articles were optically scanned, not typeset as the other seventeen were. Optical scanning then converted to text is usually rife with errors: e becomes c, h becomes b, w becomes Av, etc. So all of this material, almost half of the total book, had to be proofread with great care. I finished the third round of proofreading about a week ago. I’m sure I didn’t catch everything, but I believe I did a good job.

Now I’m typing the corrections, taking about twenty to thirty minutes a night for it. After that will come a spell check of the entire document, just to see if I missed a “his” that became “bis” in the optical scan and conversion. That won’t catch a “are” that became “arc”, but to look for those I may do some search and replace and hope to catch the worst of them. Also I’m finding a few places where I entered a note that said something like [<<<<<>>>>>]. However, checking those places against the on-line documents I can access now, I find all those places have clear text. Whatever I saw originally that caused me to insert those notes is no longer a problem, and I was able to get rid of them. However, I’ll do a search for those characters and make sure I haven’t overlooked any.

That brings me down to the Introduction. I’m including the introduction from the 1897 book, along with the printer’s notice. However, the book needs an Introduction. Having read many books with introductions that seem endless, I’m determined to keep it short. The one I’ve written is four 8.5×11 pages, or maybe as many as eight pages in a print book. That’s plenty long in my opinion. I ran this by a reader-friend for an evaluation. He suggested some changes, which I’ve already made, but I’m not quite done. Some info on each article that I was going to prepend to the articles I’m now thinking about putting in a table in the Introduction. In fact, I’ll do that, then run it by my friend again to see how it reads. I expect to do that tomorrow evening.

So tonight’s work will be to finish typing the proofreading edits. Tomorrow’s work will be completing the Introduction and firing that off. Friday night will include tidying up the file to get rid of stray formats. Assuming I hear back from my friend on the Introduction, Saturday will be the day that I save the document out to e-book and print book files, and begin formatting each. The print book will be essentially already formatted and mainly require setting up a Table of Contents and whatever size page and margins I chose. The e-book formatting will be a matter of stripping headers and footers and creating an interactive TOC.

For both books I’ll have to add an about the author section and list of other works. For the e-books that goes at the end, for the print book at the beginning. Also for the e-book I’ll have to create some tables that I’ll import as graphic files, since most e-book readers don’t support tables based on cells and tab spacing.

Then it will be on to the covers. The e-book cover is done, unless I decide to tweak it a little. I may. The print book cover is another story. I’ve written the back cover copy (subject to edit), but creating a print book cover is something I haven’t learned to do yet. I have some software I can use to do it if I can just learn it. I’m not going for fancy on this one; utilitarian will do nicely.

So that’s the status. If I had to guess I’d say I’ll be publishing in mid-March. I have a business trip the end of February that will cause me to lose close to a week. Thus I’m within my publishing plan.
Sorry for the long, dryasdust post, but I wanted to get this all down.

self-publishing, Writing

Why go on writing?

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They say never to compare yourself to someone else, but it’s difficult not to. Consider the following excerpt from a post to a blog made in the last couple of days.

With only 3 indie titles in the last 2 years, I’ve been able to leave my day job and support my family with my writing income—as our sole provider.

I have put up thirteen items in the last three years, and have had 257 sales and am so far away from doing anything except buy a cup of coffee now and then that I struggle to decide why to go on. I’m not quitting, not yet, just venting frustrations. Short of sinking a bunch of money in advertising, I really don’t know what to do.

In January 2014, so far I’ve had one sale, a paperback copy of the homeschool edition of Documenting America. Not one e-book sale. But let me go check. Maybe I’ve had one since I last looked five hours ago…nope, no sales. In most of 2013 I thought five sales a month was a low number. At this point that seems positively high compared to Nov-Dec-Jan.

I’m forging ahead. I recently completed a one-off short story and decided to submit it to a magazine before self-publishing it. I’m 3/8 through Headshots, and will continue with that through finishing and publication. I’ll work through other things on my 2014 publishing plan, all of which (well, almost all) are follow-ups to things already published.

Friends tell me my writing is good and my books and stories deserve to be read. Here’s hoping the world discovers that some time before I assume room temperature.

Headshots, Short Stories, The Gutter Chronicles, Writing

And the Words Keep Coming

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As explained in other posts, I’m working on several writing projects at once. I recently completed a short story, which is now simmering as I figure out what to do about it. I’m working on Headshots, a sequel to my baseball novel. And I’m working on volume 2 of The Gutter Chronicles. I’m doing this last one in off moments at work.

Tuesday I finished the first chapter of The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 2. I proofed it Wednesday and added one small item. It’s 2850 words, which is about right for a chapter in this book. This is meant to be a humorous book, taking workplace situations in an engineering company and turning them into funny stories. Yes, things that have happened to me over the years are finding their way into the book.

Humor may not be my writing strength. In fact I’d say almost assuredly it isn’t. Yet everyone who’s read volume 1 of TGC say it’s very funny. So maybe I’m  not too bad at that. But how can that be? I’m a serious novelist.

So as I was writing this first chapter, beginning a month or more ago, I came to realize it was more dramatic than funny. I needed to “funny-it-up” somehow. I put it aside for almost a month, trying to think of how I could do that. It wasn’t devoid of funny moments, but it just wasn’t as funny as I wanted it to be. As I walked on noon hours, or as I commuted, it was on my mind.

So Tuesday I was at my computer at noon, not being able to take a walk due to the weather, and decided to pull the story up and work on it. I re-read what I had in the chapter, and an idea of what to do came to me. What if I had Norman Gutter, the main character, hallucinate. He was very sick from a tick bite, though he didn’t know that’s what caused it. I had him go to the hospital and, in his painful and energy-less state, I had him begin hallucinating about the people and things he saw. I had him see the different people he worked with in not very flattering ways. Finally, as the doctor begins to examine him at the hospital, he has a hallucination about her just before he passes out.

Is it funny enough? That, of course, is the question. I proofread it quickly, saved the chapter out as a PDF, and e-mailed it to our HR assistant in the office. She read all of the first volume and enjoyed it. I figured if she saw this chapter as good, and funny, then it was okay. She e-mailed me back that afternoon: “Laughing out loud. Definitely a good read.” So I think I nailed it.

Now this morning, in the time I had before work, I decided to work on Chapter 2. I knew exactly where to start, because of where I left Norman at the end of chapter 1. So I began typing and soon found it was 8:00 a.m., time to begin work, and that I had 650 words typed in just a little more than half an hour. Wow, that’s more than I usually get in that little time. I’m not into humorous parts right now. That will have to come later in the chapter, maybe on my noon hour today. Or, if that doesn’t work, then next week. It would be nice to have two chapters finished by the end of next week. I’d feel good about the book at that point.

How interesting I find it that the words just come when I need them. I suppose it’s not really the words, but the ideas. I’ve found this to be true for quite a while now. In Headshots I’m at the sagging middle, that point in the book where a writer struggles to keep the action going as the hero works toward the climax. As I reported in another post, last weekend I added 3,800 words to the sagging middle. Things I hadn’t much thought about gelled into ideas, those ideas found expression in words, and I was writing, pushing the story forward.

I don’t know that it will always be this way. I might find myself at times where I have absolutely no idea what to write next, so I re-read where I am in the story, and the ideas just come and the words quickly follow. So I suppose this mean, I am a writer.

self-publishing

How Hugh Howey would change publishing

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An interesting discussion is taking place at the Absolute Write forums about recent comments by Hugh Howey, author of Wool. Hugh is fairly confrontational and controversial. He’s said some things in the past concerning women that were vulgar. Because of that, some people won’t listen to a word he says. The discussion is here: http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=283374. But see his point 13:

What Hugh Howey wrote:
13. Monthly payments and speedy sales data. Authors enjoy money and they enjoy metrics, and right now they have to wait too long for both. At New Harper Collins, we pay royalties every 30 days. And whatever sales data we have, you have. Simple as that. If self-published authors can have this, then our authors should have this. No more waiting six months to pay people. That’s history. No more wondering how your book is doing; you have access to all the data we can cull. Share your results in the Harper Collins Author forums.

One of the moderators at AW, Medievalist, responded to Howey’s point 13 as follows:

13. This one is really silly. Bookstores order books but don’t pay for them until they sell them. This is, if you think about, fair. It’s not their fault if a book doesn’t sell. Bookselling is a business run on credit, and it’s not likely to change any time soon.

Libraries generally have 90 days, though some distributors and publishers allow less. Publishers aren’t sitting on piles of money, hoarding royalties. There’s a reason they pay an advance you know, an advance that the author keeps even if the book doesn’t do well. Mind, the P & L from an experienced publisher is generally fairly solid, so that the publisher isn’t losing money on a book, but the idea is to make money for the publisher and the author. That way the author will do another book with the publisher, and that one too will make money, and increase the sales of the first book.

I don’t think I’ll respond again at Absolute Write [Edit: They have now locked that thread there], but will instead do so here, and provide a little context for discussion of this point 13.

I must respectfully disagree with you, Medievalist. Surely publishers and booksellers work on an accrual accounting basis, not cash. Revenue and profits are “booked” the moment an item is shipped or an invoice sent, not when payment is made. That’s the same as our engineering business. We send out an invoice for October’s work on Nov 10. The client doesn’t pay us for seventy-two days (the industry average), which will be January 22. But that invoice accrues as income, and the profits represented in that invoice accrue as profits, from the invoice date. So we pay taxes on that profit (it’s still assumed profit, not realized) in the current year when we send in quarterly taxes on Jan 15 even though the cash doesn’t get to us till a week later. If it turns out the client stiffs us the invoice, we delete it in two stages from the next year’s accruals.

Sales accrued and royalties paid based on accruals can be taken away and deducted from future royalties. That happened to me recently when B&N over-reported sales on one day, a day I sold three copies of one e-book and accrued $6.00 of royalties. B&N later corrected the over-reporting and deducted $4.00 from my accrued revenue. That’s the equivalent of a return. And I’ve had e-books returned at Amazon after the close of the month in which it was bought. The royalty on the return is easily deducted. It’s all a software thing, very easy to accomplish.

But even if it were as you say, and trade publishers are so unsophisticated with accounting in this modern era that they can’t provide monthly sales statements.

In January:
We shipped X books to Bookseller A
We shipped Y books to Bookseller B
We shipped Z books to Bookseller C
We had W returns from prior shipments.

To fail to do even this small gesture, which will allow writers to judge the effectiveness of whatever promotion they might be involved in, is inexcusable. Yes, perhaps publishers aren’t set up to do that right now, but they surely have computerized records of what’s been shipped. If it’s been shipped it’s been billed. If it’s been billed then royalties are accrued. If you want to delay royalties until you’re certain of the returns situation, I could buy that. But give writers all the data you have. It’s their book. It’s not a trade secret.

So, that’s the end of my rant. Time to get back to work.

Christianity, Writing

A Mentoring Success

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Given the amount of difficulty I’ve had in my own writing career, in terms of breaking in with an established publisher, I decided a long time ago I would never encourage anyone else to take up writing. However, I violated that decision for Bessie. She is a retired lay missionary, along with her husband, to Papua New Guinea, with assignments also in Fiji and New Zealand. But let me start at the beginning.

Back in early 2011 I discovered other writers in our church. Some were seriously trying to publish, others were just toying with the idea. It looked like enough people to have a writing critique group. I discussed it with our pastor and volunteered to head it up. He said to go for it. We announced it in the church bulletin in March 2011, had a couple of brainstorming meetings in April, and began meeting in earnest every two weeks beginning in May 2011.

At one point we had eight or nine people on our mailing list. We had four or five who attended regularly, and eight who attended at one time or another. Bessie was one of the regulars, in fact the most frequent attender besides me as the leader.

She and her husband had their call to missions after the older two of their four children were already out of the house. They are laymen, so were unusual candidates for career missionaries. But God had a place for them. They did a few years of “apprentice-type” work with cultural missions situations in the States, then it was off to Papua New Guinea for seventeen years, and then a few more years at the other assignments. When the announcement about the writers group went out, Bessie told me she wanted to attend, because she wanted to record her missions stories for posterity.

She came to the organizational meetings and most of the regular sessions after that. I liked her writing style, which was pretty much how she talks. She didn’t understand some things, such as how to mix narrative and dialog, how dialog should be formatted, over-use of adjectives, adverbs, and passive voice, i.e. the typical things a rookie writer doesn’t automatically know or remember from school days English classes fifty years before. She wrote one of her missions stories, one that she had shared orally in church, and shared it with the critique group. Since the group included a couple of people who don’t attend our church, and some who hadn’t heard the story, most who read it (all except me, I guess) were seeing it with fresh eyes.

Bessie responded well to the critique. She made changes to the story and brought it back, till it was fairly well polished. Then she moved on to another story, and another. Over a year’s time she completed six or seven stories. One of the things I did as group leader was always ask everyone what their intentions were for any post they were sharing. Was it for a magazine? Part of a book? For publication? For family use, or for unknown use? Bessie said she really didn’t know, but that probably just for family use.

But, after about three stories, I realized these would make a great short book. Our denomination, the Church of the Nazarene, publishes six or seven missions books a year through the Nazarene Publishing House. Somewhere around 15,000 words each, these books are designed to inform the church about what is happening in their missions program, and to support that program with prayer, gifts, and other involvement. I could see that Bessie’s book would be about the right length (maybe 2,000 words longer), and would fill a unique gap. Most of these books, as with most of our missionaries, were written by or about ministerial or medical missionaries. Never had I seen one of these books about lay missionaries in a career position.

So, breaking my rule, I encouraged Bessie to begin thinking about how these stories would fit together for one of these denominational missions books. She said no, they were just lay missionaries, how would their book reach anyone, and similar words of unbelief. I said her book was interesting because they were lay missionaries and that our church needed to hear her and Bob’s story. Eventually I helped her to see that what I was saying was true. By this time she had written and shared five of her stories, with two more to go, including one about their retirement years.

Alas, the writing group didn’t make it. Slowly all members except Bessie and me were met by a series of reasons why they couldn’t continue. I folded the group in early September 2012. We really should have done it six months earlier, but the dream dies hard. Bessie and I, however, continued to meet. We would go to the Bentonville library two or three Wednesday evenings before a month, before Wednesday night service. Bob would browse while Bessie and I worked on her manuscript. In addition she e-mailed me her stories, which we now called chapters, and I printed and critiqued them.

She did all the manuscript typing, but didn’t really want to tackle the formatting, so I did that. We tried different arrangement of the chapters until we had it in the most logical order. Then I told her how unsolicited books normally get published through a publisher: query, proposal, then complete manuscript, but that most publishers would want a new author to have the manuscript complete before they turned in a query.

Round and round we went, Wednesday after Wednesday, polishing the manuscript, the proposal, and the query. Bessie had an ex-missionary friend who had written several of these books, to whom she sent the proposal for review and critique. Somehow we learned that we could probably forego the query process—or rather that we could actually submit the proposal with the query, given that from her time as a missionary Bessie knew the person who would head up the selection process. It was early January 2013 that both of us felt that everything was ready. The query was drafted as an e-mail with the proposal (including three sample chapters) attached. I told Bessie to push send.

But she wouldn’t. She said “You’re the one who pushed me into this. You push send.” That gave me a short pause. If I pushed send I had a degree of unintentional ownership in the query, proposal, and sample chapters. I read or skimmed them through again, looking for obvious errors and formatting problems. It looked perfect to me. I pushed send, and told Bessie she was sure to have this accepted for publication. It was a niche book submitted to a niche publisher giving a unique perspective that only she could write.

But the months wore on. Nothing. She saw the man she knew at our quadrennial general assembly, and it was as if she had never submitted it. I had given her typical times for expecting a response, and what to do if you didn’t get one, how to respectfully contact the publisher and ask what the status was. She did that once, and I don’t remember the response or if there was a response. We discussed it several times over last year. I thought it was about time for her to send another “what’s the status shall I look elsewhere” e-mails, but due to sickness, weather, and travel have missed her for several weeks.

Finally, today in my inbox was an e-mail from her. Except all she did was forward me an e-mail from the acquisitions editor she knew. She had sent him a second very respectful e-mail yesterday, and he responded something like, “Oh, didn’t you hear from us? We have your book scheduled as one of our 2015-2016 missions books.”

So there it is. The reluctant writer I mentored will be published. Before I will, at least as something other than self-published. Her success is, in a small way, my success. I wish her many sales and enough royalties to make it worthwhile. As the modern saying is, “You go girl!”

Author | Engineer