expatriate life, family, Operation Lotus Sunday

More on the Genesis of “China Tour”

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So I’m at the Write to Publish Conference in Wheaton, Illinois, in May 2004. I learn that publishers don’t want to publish someone who has written a story, but someone who has written a good story and has the potential for a long career with them. At that point in my career I had written one novel that I was figuring out how to get published, plus some poetry.

During the conference I began to think about what else I could publish. Very quickly the idea for a baseball novel came to me. I committed it to some notes. More slowly came the idea for a different novel, one that happened from an experience our family had overseas.

When we lived in Saudi Arabia we had the good fortune to do some traveling. In 1982 we did Europe for 28 days; also in ’82 we went to Cairo for Christmas. In 1983 we decided to do Asia, and planned for 30 days there. At the time of the trip, Sept-Oct, Charles was 4 1/2 and Sara was just under 2 1/2. They were with us on the trip, of course, since we didn’t do what some couples did, taking the kids home to be with grandparents then going on a trip by ourselves.

Our itinerary was Hong Kong, China, the Philippines, and Thailand. Two weeks in China was the biggest part of that. It had just opened to Western tourism a couple of years before that, and it seemed exciting to go there. At our stop in Hong Kong we visited with our church’s missionaries there, who asked us to carry Chinese language Bibles in and make contact with a man of our church in Beijing. Of course we said yes, not thinking much about what that meant.

A day or two later it hit us when we received the small suitcase with the materials: Bibles, cassette tapes, tracts, and who knows what in that bag. We thought about getting them through customs, as well has how to reach our contact in Beijing with just a name and phone number—and that of the location where his wife worked.

The short story is we got the Bibles through customs, to Beijing, and with the help of our tour guide were able to make contact with Alan. He had spent over two decades in a prison camp because he wouldn’t deny the name of Christ when asked to by Chairman Mao’s goons. Meeting him and his wife in that restaurant in Beijing was one of the great events of our lives.

Back to Wheaton in 2004. I wondered if I could make a novel out of a Bible-smuggling American tourist couple who were expats. What kind of trouble could I put them in? Would I put that in the current era or in 1983? On that trip I kept a very good trip diary, which had not been lost in the moves we made over the years. I also kept a lot of the literature they gave us at hotels and other tourist stops, as well as souvenir books we bought. So I had data to put it in 1983. That seemed like the better option, but what to do to make a full novel out of this story?

1983 was still Cold War times. President Reagan was working on arms deals and the Strategic Defense Initiative, meeting with world leaders. We all assumed that the CIA had our back, infiltrating countries, gathering intelligence, helping our government get the upper hand on our enemies without going to war. The first of Tom Clancy’s novels were a year away, but spy novels abounded. What if, I thought, I put this American couple into the middle of a CIA operation in China? A major plot twist came to mind fairly quickly.

By the last day of the conference this idea had come together. I hadn’t yet put anything on paper, but I had the idea. At the last lunch I wound up sitting at the same table as James Scott Bell. He was the keynote speaker for the evening sessions, and thought I hadn’t heard of him till that conference he seemed to be a rock star at this Christian writing conference.

We all talked about our works-in-progress, or planned. I said what I was thinking of for a novel. Someone asked how I could pull that off, i.e. China in 1983. I told of our trip there and of the trip diary and other literature I had. James Scott Bell nodded approvingly, though I don’t remember him saying much.

So that’s it. May 2004 was when I first thought of the book. Through the years I’ve worked on the tag line, a summary, and thought through scenes. But it wasn’t until October 2012 that I actually committed a word of it to paper or pixel. It’s now sitting at 34,300 words, looking at a February 2013 finish, maybe earlier if life aligns right. Figuring a month cooling off and a month to do final edits and publishing tasks, I’m looking at an April 2013 book launch.

Stay tuned.

Doctor Luke's Assistant, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Operation Lotus Sunday

The Genesis of “China Tour”

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I now have about eight posts on this blog in which I’ve mentioned my novel-in-progress, China Tour. I see, however, that I haven’t really said much about how it is I came to write this, when I first thought of it, what I’ve done about that over the years. On the odd chance that this becomes a bestseller, and hoards of fans of it want to know why I wrote it, I’ll go into that here. I don’t know if I’ll fit it all in one post or not.

In January 2003 I finished the first draft of my first novel, Doctor Luke’s Assistant. I wrote that in a creative slow rush, over two or three years. At the time I had no intentions of becoming a writer. The only other creative writing I was doing was some poetry. DLA was simply a story I wanted to tell.

Knowing nothing about how to be published, or how to write a novel, I set the book aside and began studying the market. Some people would say that was backwards. You should first learn how to write a novel, and study the market extensively, before actually writing the novel. Perhaps so, but in my creative rush I did it the other way. As I would learn later, letting a book sit for a time after completing the first draft and getting into the editing is a good thing. Who knew? I just did it.

Since I attend professional and technical conferences for my engineering profession, I figured I’d have to do the same. So I signed up for a regional writers conference in Oklahoma City, and meanwhile began using the internet to study novel writing and the market. By March 2003, at that conference, I still didn’t know much. I learned a lot at the conference. One of the best parts was a one-on-one appointment with Rene Gutteridge. She told me how my dialog was not what was needed, and in those short fifteen minutes gave me some good pointers. These were reinforced in a class I attended the second day of the conference.

From that I began the long editing process of my long novel, while at the same time beginning the querying process to editors. By the end of 2003 I had made three passes through DLA, and had received some rejections. I learned of a national Christian writing conference in Wheaton, Illinois in May, and signed up to attend. Our son living in nearby Chicago made selecting that conference a no brainer.

The biggest piece of eye-opening information I learned at WTP was that publishers don’t want to publish the book of a writer who has a story to tell. They want to publish the book of a writer who wants to have a writing career. Not one book, but many. Not a book and a sequel. Not a trilogy. No, someone who has the chance to have success with the book under consideration and then be able to produce more better books. [Ah, it does my writing heart good to write that in a grammatically and contextually correct way.]

This was a shocker. I think it was on the first day of the conference I heard that. No one would want to publish DLA unless I had other books coming, but I didn’t have other books coming. I just wanted to get DLA published. But I couldn’t under those circumstances. Self-publish it? No, too much negative stigma attached to self-publishing. I was stuck in author no-man’s-land, unless I could think of other books.

So for the rest of the conference, I sat in classes, workshops and sessions, thinking about what other books I could write. Poetry wasn’t an option, though even then I was thinking about something that eventually would become a book. Two novels came to mind. One came immediately: a baseball novel that eventually became In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People“. The other came to me more slowly, over the three days of the conference. That one is what I’m now writing.

So it took from May 2004 to October 2012 for the idea to actually become words on paper. If it was that long, I sure you all won’t mind waiting another day for a second post for me to tell more of the circumstances of the genesis of that idea.

Stay tuned.

Documenting America, Operation Lotus Sunday, Writing

Locking In Ideas, even out of season

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I wrote a blog post some time ago about capturing ideas for writing. Actually, I may have written several posts about that between here and my other blog, An Arrow Through The Air.

Two situations have come up in the last few days where I was able to do this. Actually, I guess it was three.

On my novel in progress, China Tour, I’m in the middle part of the novel now, between the two main plot points. This is the part where a novel often sags, as the protagonist overcomes a series of conflicts, preferably rising in danger/difficulty, before moving into the end game. And it’s the part of this novel I had mostly not thought out. So I’m writing each scene as it comes to mind.

But while driving home from work yesterday an idea for a conflict came to me. It seemed to be a good one, but I didn’t use memory techniques to lock it in. By the time I got in the house not only had I lost the idea but I forget I’d even had an idea. After supper and going through snail mail, I went to The Dungeon and started writing earlier than usual on a week night. I typed a few words, continuing a scene from where I left off Wednesday evening, when the idea came back. I grabbed a piece of paper to write it on, then decided to just put it at the end of the Word document, set off from the rest of the text.

While writing for the next couple of hours, two or three other ideas came to me. They went at the end of the ms. as well. So by the time I knocked off for the evening, around 10:00 p.m., having added over 2,000 words to the novel, I also had good ideas documented for middle-of-the-novel scenes. It was a good evening of writing.

So upstairs I went, intending to do some pleasure reading, but before I left the computer I saw one of the volumes of The Annals of America, the one for the Civil War years. I took it upstairs with me, and instead of reading for pleasure I went through the Table of Contents to find items to include in a future volume of Documenting America. While that book was a stand-alone volume, I have always hoped to make a series of volumes based on the style of the original book. I listed about twelve documents to include, and spot-read in two of them to make sure they are suitable. They are. The book will need about thirty documents all together, or perhaps a few less if I use some documents for two chapters. It’s not much, but it’s a start—and it’s on paper.

The other idea capture event happened on Tuesday. I was at a professional lunch, a PowerPoint presentation made by an Arkansas state official. It was all words, and sitting in the back of the room I couldn’t really see them. Plus, it’s stuff I already know, for the most part. So rather than concentrating on that I took a napkin (I hadn’t brought a note pad with me), and began thinking through books that might eventually go in my future series, The Alfred Cottage Mysteries.

Now, this is really long-range planning, as I don’t expect to be writing any book in this series. But I’ve thought of the series much over the years, had a couple of books in mind, but not the full series. So as the regulator droned on about short-term activity authorizations, I wrote on the napkin. Here’s what I came up with.

  • Alfred Cottage and The Coroner’s Inquest
  • Alfred Cottage and The Lost Love
  • Alfred Cottage and The Lost inheritance
  • Alfred Cottage and The Lost Years
  • Alfred Cottage and The Wife Murderer
  • Alfred Cottage and The Fornicators
  • Alfred Cottage and Stolen Identity
  • Alfred Cottage and The Cherokee Princess
  • Alfred Cottage and The Abolitionist
  • Alfred Cottage and The Cobbler’s Will
  • Alfred Cottage and The Soldier’s Son
  • Alfred Cottage and The Rum Runners

Each of these, except the next-to-last, comes from something in my or my wife’s ancestry. Some will have large pieces of the real family history as a basis, some just a small part. All of them will be fiction, however, with many embellishments and conflict added along the way.

As I’ve told people, when I dream I tend to dream big. Here’s a big dream: 12 books that are years away from being started, yet are already finding their way out of the gray cells and on to paper.

Stay tuned.

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Writing

Self-Publishing Surprises

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I’m currently in my 22nd month as a self-publisher. When you figure I was working on it a month before actually publishing something, that makes 23 months. I must say that a number of things have surprised me.

  • How uncomfortable I feel about marketing. I just don’t like it. It pains me to make posts to Facebook saying, “I have a new book for you all to buy.” Or the equivalent post for some FB writers groups I joined. I just don’t want to be a shill for my own books. This may spell doom for me as far as becoming a well-sold and well-read writer.
  • How difficult the technology is, or at least how steep the learning curve is each time something is needed. I’m not stupid about these things, and can probably figure a lot of them out for myself, but the time sink to do so is enormous.
  • How my books just don’t sell without marketing. Dean Wesley Smith and others say you should just keep writing and publishing. I thought he used to say get 10-12 books/titles available before you do any marketing. Now I notice he’s saying 20-25 books. I’m sitting there with 9, so either way I have more work to do. That’s if DWS is right. What if he’s wrong, and I should be spending more time marketing rather than writing. Oh, refer to a previous bullet point.
  • The total lack of response to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. I have three sales total. Three, in the four months it’s been out. I made quite a few posts about it, on this blog, my other blog, FB, and in FB writers groups. And nothing. I don’t really see how I can write a much better book than this one. Surely there are people out there who like baseball books. I guess I just don’t know any of them.

I could probably list a few more surprises, but will end it here. Oh, just one more: how there was no elation resulting from holding a printed book with my name on it in my hands. None. It was more of a so-what feeling.

Yeah, I’ll stop there. Maybe all of this will turn around at some point. Maybe I’ll learn to be a shameless self-promoter. Maybe I’ll find an audience. Maybe I’ll learn to write books that people want. Maybe I’ll return to content farm writing. The future is wide open.

Operation Lotus Sunday, Writing

Into new territory with “China Tour”

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My friend on-line friend and fellow writer Veronica commented on my last post. That spurred me on to post this new update to my work on China Tour.

I’m taking a semi-vacation. Last Saturday we began babysitting our two grandsons. Their parents spent a night here, then went off for three days r&r away from home and kids. I took three days vacation to help my wife, so with the Thursday-Friday holiday I’ll have the whole week off. Their parents just arrived from their trip, my mother-in-law is here, so the house is pretty full.

I decided that I would take the time off from writing: no blog, no novel, no writing resources to study, no research. I would concentrate on the grandsons. However, it occurred to me that I could get up at or near my normal time, 5:45 a.m., and do some writing while the house was quiet. I managed to do that on Monday and Wednesday. I worked on China Tour. On Monday I had a hard time with my computer, due to virus checking and automatic updates and recovery of documents from a power interruption. Then, since it had been a week since I’d written, I had to reread the about ten pages to get back into the plot. Wednesday—today—was better, with no computer problems and being fresh into the plot.

So I began to write this morning. It’s a scene I really hadn’t thought through before, at least not in detail. It’s at the point in the novel after a major switcheroo had taken place. But the words seemed to flow. I typed from about  6:30 to 7:30 a.m., and checked the word total for the day. It was about 1,200 words. Not bad for an hour, in a previously unplanned scene. The total word count is now over 19,000.

I’d like to keep that up. I know I won’t get a chance to write on Thanksgiving Day. I’m the main cook, so I’ll be busy probably from 6:00 a.m. on. Then there’s the traditional Thanksgiving Day long walk, preventing the tryptophan from doing its work. Then rest, leftover, dessert, etc.

The kids got back this afternoon and told us they will have to leave on Friday instead of Saturday. Hate to see them go. It’s been a good time with Ephraim and Ezra so far, and don’t like to see it cut short. But I will also enjoy having time to get back to work on my book. Hitting it hard on Friday-Saturday-Sunday, I’d like to get to somewhere between 25,000 to 30,000 words. Right now it appears the book is running short of my projected word count of 75-80,000. I really want a book that long to fit in with genre expectations. The length required for this next section, which is mostly unplanned, will let me know where I’m going to finish up at.

So stay tuned. We’ll see what the next few days bring.

Operation Lotus Sunday

Progress on “China Tour”

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As I stated previously, I decided to write China Tour, a novel, as my next work-in-progress. I came to this conclusion around October 24, and began work on it in earnest the next week. As I have time to write, I work on that. As of last night, the word count stands at just short of 17,000, I think.

I say “I think” because yesterday I wrote on two computers: the desktop in The Dungeon and my laptop upstairs. I concluded my work on the desktop about 6:00 p.m., came upstairs, ate supper, then went to my reading/writing chair in the living room and decided to write some more there, while the television was going. It’s not an efficient way to write, and I hate hate hate a laptop keyboard. However, once I finished there for the evening I had 1,648 words in a new file. Added to the 2,200 I wrote in the afternoon, and the 13,200 (more or less) I had at the end of the day Saturday, that should put me somewhere around 17,000. I said a little below above, but maybe it’s a little more. I’ll know tonight when I merge the files.

I just finished the fourth chapter, the one that includes the first “plot point.” For those unfamiliar with term, it refers to that action about 1/4 to 1/3 into the book which motivates the hero to continue on the quest. In this case, I have two heroes, Roger and Sandra Brownwell, the tourist couple who become embroiled in the CIA operation in China. The need for them to participate in the operation has been presented, they have argued about it, and the necessary juggling act to make it work is about to happen. Sandra is most unhappy, Roger more accepting. I really don’t want to say much more, for to do so will give too much away. Let’s just say that their marriage, which was already troubled, will really be stretched as they cooperate with the CIA.

My main problem now is to sustain momentum. Thanksgiving is coming. Our company will be here on the 18th, and not leave till the 25th. I don’t know how much writing I’ll get done during that time. Also, I’m at a point in the book that I haven’t thought too much about, so I’ll be writing each scene and chapter from scratch. I did that for the middle of Doctor Luke’s Assistant, and it worked pretty good there. Hopefully this won’t bog me down, and as I write one scene what the next scene needs to be will become clear. A few scenes have come to mind, such as when they get to the terra-cotta army in Xian.

Stay tune to this channel for updates. Right now, at the pace I’m going and considering the holiday period, I expect to wrapping up the first draft sometime in early February.

self-publishing

October 2012 Book Sales

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I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I should have posted October book sales results several days ago. Of course, sharing bad news isn’t a pleasant thing. Perhaps that was in the back of my mind.

In October I had only eight book sales. Seven of those were on Kindle, and one was a hard copy of The Candy Store Generation that I sold at work. I actually had one more sale, at Smashwords, but the reader returned it. So I’m not counting that as a sale. Here are the numbers for October, and the totals since the items were published.

Mom’s Letter – 0 in October/23 overall

Documenting America – 0/34

Too Old To Play – 0/3

Doctor Luke’s Assistant – 3/93

The Candy Store Generation – 1/13

Documenting America, Homeschool Edition – 1/1

In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People – 1/3

Whiskey, Zebra, Tango – 2/6

The Gutter Chronicles – 0/0

8 in October/177 overall

The sales graph looks like this. Clearly I have a long way to go to having a viable writing career. Click on the graph below if you want to see it in its un-distorted condition.

Operation Lotus Sunday

Checking In

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I haven’t posted on this blog for a while. Some extra busyness with non-writing things was one cause. Then there was the four-day trip to Oklahoma City to help babysit our two grandsons. Now it’s a cold that is trying to decide if it’s going to be mild, and hence is about over, or if it’s going to deepen, in which case the worst is yet to come.

I’m at work, muddling through, but quite inefficient. Leaving at 1:30 p.m., and will chalk up a half day of sick time.

I’m make a brief report. Since my last post, on October 24, I have been working on China Tour. I’m into the third chapter, 5,100+ words completed. I had been thinking this book would be 75,000-90,000 words, but it seems to be running short to me. I’m in the middle of what I consider the first key scene, when the tourist couple are mistaken for the CIA agents “couple” and thus botch the information exchange critical to the CIA operation. The agents have figured it out, and are just beginning their conversation with Chinese intelligence supervisor to figure out what to do.

This also takes me close to the end of the planning I’ve done. I have the denouement fairly well in mind, and one or two key scenes near the end. But except for the scene where the tourist couple meet the agent couple, the vast middle part of the novel is a blank page to me. Something better come to me, or my writing of it will grind to a halt real quickly.

Doctor Luke's Assistant, Documenting America, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Headshots, Operation Lotus Sunday, Preserve The Revelation, Writing

Looks like it’s probably “China Tour”

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I don’t recommend anyone go about their book writing they way I have for the last twelve days. As I reported in a previous post, because I felt no sense of direction of where to go next with my writing. I could write any one of three novels or one non-fiction book. So I decided to write the first chapter in each and see how the work flowed, how it felt to me during the writing, and choose based on the experience.

First up was Headshots, the sequel to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. I labored over a Friday-Sunday period, barely getting about 1950 words and the chapter done. I found that picking up the threads of all the people who were involved in the end of FTSP was tedious. In fact, after finishing the chapter I realized I didn’t have all the threads covered: missed one I need to add in.

Next was Preserve The Revelation, the sequel to Doctor Luke’s Assistant. This went better. I did a little work on Augustus ben Adam’s family tree and children before I started the writing, to make sure he could have two sons of the ages I wanted at the time I wanted them. It all worked fine. Then I wrote the chapter in two evenings. Though I had thought much about it over a few years, it still took me in a different direction as I wrote it. The needed scenes for the second chapter ran through my head as I concluded the first, which is a good thing.

Next was China Tour, a sequel to nothing. In fact, it will be a stand-alone novel. This has run through my mind many, many times over the years. I found our trip diary from 1983, read through some of it (the Hong Kong days), and jumped in to the writing. In two evenings I had my 1,500 word first chapter. It went fairly easy; but then I’ve run that chapter over in my mind many times, and had recently explained the book in detail to a colleague.

Then, to this mix I added another volume of Documenting America. This would be a Civil War edition, in recognition that we are now 150 years away from that event, with somewhat heightened interest in the reading public. Unfortunately, I found this heavy going. I enjoyed the research, but the writing went much, much harder than I wanted. This would be the shortest of the four books, and I would certainly enjoy the research, but I think the writing would be most labored.

Based on ease of writing and flow of words, it looks as if China Tour should get the nod to be my next book. Given that, last night I decided to give the second chapter a try, and in two hours knocked out the entire chapter, about 1,050 words. The problem is, this book makes no sense to be the next one. It’s not a sequel to anything, nor is it in a series or will it ever have a sequel. It might not be all that long (I’m thinking 70,000-75,000 words), though for all I know it could run longer.

One of the sequels makes more sense. Those 92 people who bought Doctor Luke’s Assistant, or the 5,000 people who downloaded it for free, might just come looking for something similar. Headshots makes more sense because I most recently wrote FTSP, so the characters are all known commodities and fresh in my mind. I’ve thought though what will happen in considerable detail. The problem? With 3 total sales of FTSP, it’s not like the public is clamoring for this book.

I haven’t committed yet, but it is probable that China Tour will be next. I know at least one of my reader/writer friends who will be happy.

Author | Engineer