poetry, Writing

The Incestuous Poetry Relationship

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I had a one-year subscription to Poet & Writer magazine, six issues at a deep discount of $10. I’ve always enjoyed this magazine, since it pulls together a broader variety of writers and writing topics than do many other magazines for writers. Often on my travels I will enter a Barnes & Noble, take one from the rack, buy a vente house blend and sit and read it. Usually I find such good things it it that I’ll buy the issue and read it in the hotel. So eventually I took the subscription. P&W is heavy on features: the writing life, debut novelists; debut poets. It is short on the writing craft, moderate on industry news, and what news it presents is usually done through features. A little short on regular columns, too, compared to other writing mags.

I read these issues slowly, only on Sunday afternoon, in our sun room, falling asleep and reading in several sequences. I’m currently working through the January/February 2011 issue, the last one of my subscription (which I did not renew). The covers says it is “The Inspiration Issue.” Under the heading of “The Literary Life” are many interviews of writers, but a series of short interviews of debut poets especially caught my eye. These are poets who had their first collection published in 2010. What I found instructive was the university attended/degree earned and employment of these poets. Let’s see how the columens will format, as I know the spaces will look right on my screen but probably not once published.

Age         University        Degree        Employment
41           Iowa                 MFA         theatre writer/critic
30           Warren Wilson  MFA         creative writing teacher
39           Columbia          MFA         mother
27           Wisconsin         MA           library worker
34           Iowa                 MFA         PhD candidate
29           New Mexico     MFA        teacher
30           Oregon             MFA        job hunting teacher
32           George Mason  MFA        PhD candidate
39            New York U    MFA       assistant professor
39           Utah                  MFA       associate professor
35           New School (NYC) MFA PhD candidate

All degrees save one are masters of fine arts, and almost all now work at teaching others. Is this the way poetry publishing is going? If so, it’s incestuous. Others have said this before me, that the MFA-based system results in inbreeding of poetic technique, begetting the same poetic technique, as those who are taught by MFA profs become MFA profs.

C.S. Lewis had a word to say about this, as I discussed a couple of months ago:

Great authors are innovators, pioneers, explorers; bad authors bunch in schools and follow models. Or again, great authors are always ‘breaking fetters’ and ‘bursting bonds’. They have personality, they ‘are themselves’.

We certainly have poetry “schools”, in the broadest sense of the word. And we’ve had ’em in the past, too.

Of course, I admit it’s quite possible that this magazine is not all that representative of the full range of modern poetry. It might be only a small part of it. Still, I wonder if this isn’t at least in part explanatory of why poetry is so unpopular these days. P&W is a magazine filled with adds for MFA schools and workshops. Every university and college in the country that has a creative writing program has an ad in each issue of the magazine. The ads almost always feature a rustic cottage surrounded by trees and meadows. A photo of some poet who’s supposed to be famous but who most likely I never heard of is inset, and the ad includes a list of faculty and visiting professors, almost all of whom I never heard of. Low residency requirements are typically trumpeted.

The ads that are not for MFA programs are for writing retreats or workshops. The ads that aren’t for any of those are for contests. The ads are so similar from issue to issue that I pretty much stopped reading them.

So P&W is of some limited use, but I really like it. I’m keeping these issues, and may refer back to them from time to time. But watch out for the problem of the incestuous poetry community I will.

book reviews, Christianity

Book Review: The Templar Revelation

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It was at my nearest thrift store, I think, that I paid 50 cents for The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ, by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince [1997, Touchstone, ISBN 0-684-84891-0]. On the cover of this paperback it says “As featured in The DaVinci Code“. I figured it was worth the modest investment to see how The DaVinci Code was related to it.

As far as is possible, I feel I wasted my 50 cents. The book is awful. It is divided into two part: 1) The Threads of Heresy, and 2) The Web of Truth. I read about half of part 1 and spot read 20 to 30 pages of part 2 (150 out of 373 total pages). The most common phrase used in the book is “as will be short later,” or various derivatives of that. John the Baptist was more prominent than Jesus, as will be shown later. Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife or concubine, as will be shown later. The Knights Templar were adherents to the cult of Mary Magdalene, as will be shown later. The Cathars understood the true importance of the Baptist and the Magdalene, as will be shown later. How tiring, with never a forward reference included, such as “as will be discussed in Chapter 17.” How much later? What chapter should I go to? Why don’t you just explain it now.

The second most common phrase is “according to modern scholarship.” The authors seemed enamored with any study/publication in the last hundred years that in any way contradicts the traditional Christian message and belief. Nineteen hundred years of scholarship is tossed aside simply because it isn’t the latest. This, too, was tiring.

The book does indeed follow The DaVince Code. Or, rather, based on publication dates, The DaVinci Code follows The Templar Revelation, and is its fictional counterpart. DaVinci’s Last Supper, the true purpose of the Knights Templar, the mysterious old or new Priory of Sion with its train of grand masters—all are here. Even some names of Dan Brown’s fictional characters came from historical figures mentioned by Picknett and Prince. Dan Brown must have read this 1997 book before writing his and publishing it in 2003. Although, that blurb on the cover references TDC whereas the latest date on the title page if TTR is 1998. What gives? I thought publishers put the date of the latest printing on the copyright page. Apparently not any more.

The Templar Revelation is poorly written, not from the standpoint of writing craft, but from its lousy scholarship. Despite many footnotes it is poorly referenced, I came away with a sense of the authors wanting to believe anything that would poke holes in Christian orthodoxy. Every hack professor is believed; hundreds of theologians are not. Clearly the authors were trying to strike a balance between a popular book and a scholarly work, and achieved neither. At one point it reads, “As we have seen, most modern Christians are surprisingly badly informed about developments in biblical scholarship.” [page 362]

Hey, Picknett and Prince, that’s because we have settled the question. We have no need to delve into the questionable works you cite to see what Satan has inspired. We believe the gospel message about Jesus’ life and teaching as told by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. We believe Christian doctrine as first outlined by Paul and later confirmed by thousand of works by a hundred early Christian authors. We believe that other gospels you seem enthralled with disappeared not because the church tried to destroy them but because they carried no authority, being obviously contradictory and bogus, thus rejected by scholars of a formative age. We don’t need to revisit the question. We are not badly informed; we know whom we have believed in, and why.

If you see The Templar Revelation in a used book sale, leave it there and use your pocket change to buy a sno cone or some other nutritionally void stomach killer. The stomach will recover faster than the mind, should it be infected with this garbage. I’m not going to finish this. I’ll put it in the garage sale pile, and hope to recover half my investment.

self-publishing, The Candy Store Generation, Writing

The Candy Store Generation

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To have a successful self-published e-book (“successful” meaning good sales), what you need, according to Joe Konrath, are:

  • a great book,
  • a catchy title
  • a dynamite cover,
  • good promotion, and
  • a body of work that builds on itself.

Even while I cling to the dream of having something published through a traditional publisher, and do some things to go down that road, I’m looking for the next thing to self-publish. What that next thing should be finally came to me on Memorial Day.

Why not write The Candy Store Generation? I first thought of this during the 2000 election, watching the first presidential debate between Bush and Gore. They argued about how to spend a budget surplus expected to be 1 trillion dollars over the next ten years, a result of five years of Republican-led Congresses. It struck me that they sounded like children in a candy store who were given an unexpected windfall from daddy.

But it also struck me that these political animals, children of political families and of privilege, were simply reflecting what America had become. By 2000 the majority of Congress had flipped from what Brokaw called The Greatest Generation to the Baby Boomers. The Boomers were now calling the shots. The Boomers made up a huge voting block. I’m one of them, and I see things in the majority of my generation that bode poorly for our nation.

I let the idea gestate for some time, and in 2009 I wrote four blogs on friend Chuck’s blog, “The Senescent Man’. I won’t say I wrote them to rave reviews, because they generated no comments. I also rushed them a bit, and didn’t develop them for the blog as much as I should have.

Last Monday I decided that I should try to expand them into what I wanted to do. I don’t have a complete vision for the book yet, but I don’t see it as a long book. Maybe 10,000 to 20,000 words. It will mainly explain what I see are the bad results of Boomer leadership in virtually all areas of American life. I’ll also discuss some of the why—from my perspective—the Boomers became what we became. It will be a book mainly of my opinions, with some research, but not a whole lot.

On Tuesday night I went to the old blog posts and dumped them into a MS Word document. It begins as a little over 2,000 words. So I’m already 1/8 to 1/4 done. The smaller word count isn’t much of a book, so I’ll probably go for the longer one. I have to get the full vision first, and an outline, and maybe couple of chapters done before I decide.

The good news is that I don’t start with a blank sheet of paper. I start with a concept that has been fermenting in my gray cells for a decade, and which saw the light of Internet day in small part. The blank sheet of paper is the hardest part of writing anything, it seems. Once that is overcome, it’s all downhill. I remember the comic strip “Shoe”. The editor asked the writer, “Is the article done yet?” to which the writer replied, “90 percent.” He then trudged back to his littered desk, rolled a blank sheet of paper into his typewriter, and said, “The white part.” I’m past that. May The Candy Store Generation come to fruition.

environment

Truncating the Library

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File this under “sad things that are sometimes necessary”. CEI is growing; we have taken on some new rental space. When we moved into this building in November 2009, renting out our much larger corporate headquarters, we occupied six modules of the seven in this building. The seventh module, near the center of the building, was occupied. That company had had the parking lot to themselves for years, and were not happy when we inundated the lot with our corporate pick-ups and engineers and surveyors. So they moved to new quarters across the street.

We got first dibs on their vacated space, but haven’t needed it till now. Next week we do whatever modifications are needed to make this space work. The best solution the space layout people came up with was to move the library to the new space and install cubicles where the library is. It’s a more efficient use of space.

But, the library must shrink. Since I took responsibility for the library during the last move, I was tasked with it now. First thing to go are old State and City standards. Most of our copies are out of date, and most states and cities have them on-line now, so out they go. If it’s a 3-ring binder I open it, salvage any clean divider sheets or tabs, put the paper in an OOP recycling bin, discard glossies and the like, and put the empty notebook in a pile for our off-site supplies storage. For comb binding, about the same thing, including salvaging the comb. My old college buddies would expect no less from the HEEDonist.

Next will be the manufacturers catalogues, most of which are for materials we don’t use, are out of date, and are on-line. So out they go. Next will be the Federal standards. Same out of date/on-line situation. Then will be a few shelves of old CEI project notebooks. I won’t discard these, since I can’t be sure they are duplicates. So I’ll box them for off-site archiving. We have 132 shelf segments, and I anticipate I’ll reduce the remnant to a little less than sixty shelves. I’ll report back when done.

This is sad to me. Perhaps these are not real books, but they are books nonetheless. I hate to discard them. The world won’t be a worse place for their being gone. In fact, it might be a better place. We will not have to purchase 3-ring binders for a few years probably (reduce). Less building space will be needed for the same size business (reduce). What can be re-used will be re-used (reuse). And the old office paper will become new paper products (recycle). Maybe the folks who many years ago formed Humans to End Environmental Deterioration would be proud. I won’t shed a tear, but neither will I rejoice.

Well, I’d better get back at it.

Christianity, Life Group lessons

Gleanings from John 14:15-21

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This was my week to teach our adult Life Group (a.k.a. Sunday school). We were at week twelve in our fourteen week all-church/denomination-wide “Ashes to Fire” study, combining the Lent and Easter seasons and ending on Pentecost, June 12. Marion and I have been trading off. I teach the weeks he is on call for his veterinarian practice and he teaches the other.

The scripture lesson was John 14:15-21

“If you love me, you will obey what I command. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him.”

I told the class this was “dense scripture”, by which I meant chock full of things to study. Jesus has just told the apostles He is leaving them (13:33, 14:7), they can’t follow (13:33) but that they knew the way to the place He was going (14:4). He has told them to love each other (13:34-35) as a new command, and that this will be how people will know they are Jesus’ disciples. He has told them he is the way, the truth, and the life, and the only way to the Father. Now he says:

  • If you love me you will obey what I command
  • He [Jesus] will ask the Father to send the Spirit
  • The Spirit [Counselor, Advocate] will be with them forever
  • The world cannot accept the Spirit
  • The Spirit already lives with the apostles
  • Jesus will come to them, in such a way that the world does not see
  • They will live because Jesus lives
  • “On that day” the apostles will come to a new realization
  • Whoever obeys Jesus’ commands loves Him
  • That person will be loved by God and by Jesus and Jesus will reveal Himself to that person.

Wow—how packed can scripture be? Stuffed with meaning. I could have chose to take the lesson in any of several directions, but chose to study the Holy Spirit and His work. This is something most evangelical Christians study early in their walk and need to review from time to time, so this was, in my mind, somewhat of a refresher lesson. I tied it to John 14:26, 15:26, and 16:7-15. Class discussion went well. We kept on leaving the work of the Holy Spirit to try and grasp again the Trinity. All three Persons of the Godhead are present in these verses.

We came to see the meaning of Jesus’ words in John 16:12—”I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear.” No kidding. We felt that we understood how the apostles felt. They were in the early stages of separation anxiety. We have the hindsight of 1,980 years (give or take a decade) of theological development, with witness and scholarship. That may or may not be a help to us.

I want to explore these words some more. They are familiar from years of reading the gospel of Jesus according to the apostle John, but I still have much more to digest from this. Children’s pastor Jessica Springer, in her sermon on Sunday, took this same scripture in a very different direction. Using the idea behind the Klondike bar commercials, she asked “What would you do for Jesus?” An excellent sermon it was, showing how dense this scripture is.

self-publishing, Writing

On Royalties, Accounts Receivable, and Holiday Weekends

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This morning I decided to finally create a spreadsheet that will track my e-book sales royalties. Now, one of the benefits of e-self publishing (eSP), at least the Kindle variety, is that you know exact sales figures in real time. Payout is only when you accumulate $10.00 in royalties, and there’s about a 30 day wait after that.

Compare that with traditional publishing, however. There, I’m told, the sales figures are more or less hidden, the royalty statements are advanced math, and the delay in payment is six to nine months. So the e-book royalty situation is much, much better than for traditional publication.

So far I’ve sold 3 e-copies of Documenting America and 4 of “Mom’s Letter.” My accumulated royalties are $2.70, rounded off and including any fractional cents for each sale. I guess I don’t know what Kindle does with those fractional cents, but I assume they accumulate. So I’m way far away from reaching payout. Obviously too I haven’t generated any buzz yet through limited promotional efforts.

At Suite101.com, I have accumulated $5.47 of ad-share royalties. We are experiencing hard times at Suite, due primarily to changes in the Google search algorithm that has de-rated the site, resulting in drastically lower page views with resulting drops in ad revenue. Except for two big days this month, I typically earn less than 10 cents per day. Of course, I haven’t added any articles there since February. I expect that to change this weekend, as I have a couple planned.

A positive thing is my accounts receivable. Buildipedia.com published my latest article yesterday: Asphalt Pavement solar Collectors: The Future is Now. That earns me $250. Also yesterday I submitted my next article for Buildipedia, a feature article on erosion control from construction sites. Once that is accepted and published, I’ll have another $250 earned. It’s possible they won’t accept the article (unlikely; they haven’t rejected any yet), in which case I’ll earn just a kill fee. So all together my accounts receivable for writing work stands at $508.17. Not bad.

Which leads me to Memorial Day weekend. I’m looking forward to the three days. We have nothing planned. Our children are together in Oklahoma City right now, son having driven there from Chicago to see his newest nephew for the first time. We’ll be in Bella Vista, chilling, maybe grilling, doing yard work, reading, writing—at least I’ll be writing, cleaning, de-cluttering. Normally my writing desires always exceed my productivity for these weekends, but it’s good to dream and plan big. This weekend I hope to:

– Upload corrections to Documenting America, and upload the professional cover my son created for me.

– Get started with SmashWords and upload both Documenting America and “Mom’s Letter” there.

– Get started with CreateSpace and upload Documenting America there.

– At least look into Pubbit, and maybe upload both e-books there.

– Possibly register a writer’s web site and begin work on it.

– Work some on the passage notes to A Harmony of the Gospels

– Type edits to In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, including one chapter written in manuscript, and maybe add one more chapter.

– Write/submit two articles to Suite101.com.

As I say, that might be more ambitious than practical. I’ll report back after the weekend on what I actually accomplished. Oh, and maybe I’ll be able to write a few blog posts and schedule them to post at future dates.

Danny Tompkins Short Stories, self-publishing

What One E-book Sale Can Do

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Actually, it was an e-short story sale. Yes, yesterday I sold another copy of “Mom’s Letter” on Amazon Kindle. That puts it up to 4 sales since I published it in mid-February. I did a little promotion on it today, both on Absolute Write and at the Suite101 forums. I don’t know where the sale came from, and no new review has yet shown up. I’m happy for it, and for the 34.65 cent royalty I’ll earn–if I ever make payout, that is. I’ll make payout, I have no doubt about that. It’s mainly a question of whether it will be on this side or the other side of the next New Year’s Day.

What are the impacts of this sale? The book ranking of “Mom’s Letter” skyrocketed from something below 300,000 (hadn’t checked for a while) to 45,632. At least a 260,000 place jump from one sale! That tells me that 260,000 other e-books haven’t had a sale recently. I don’t know how the Kindle rankings work. Are they cumulative since publication? Are they based on the last 30 days? Last 7 days? I haven’t figured that out yet, though I haven’t tried very hard to figure it out. I suspect it’s based on sales in a recent time period. That means 45,632 e-books have had at least 1 sale during that time period. Since the Kindle Store has some million or millions of books available, that means many, many, many had no sales in that period. Welcome to the world of self-publishing.

Another impact is promotion. This demonstrates how important promotion is. A simple link posted to a forum can generate a sale. It might be a sympathy sale, given that I mentioned how sales were lagging, but a sale is a sale. Actually, I don’t know if the sale came from my post. One gal responded to my post saying she would tweet it for me. But since that tweet (if she did it; I don’t tweet to check on it) came as a result of my forum post, that forum post should at least earn an assist. So I guess I should bet busy and promote some more.

What about the impact on my psyche? It’s not as great as the third sale was, nor the first two way back in February. Self-sustaining sales, not directly attributed to promotional efforts, might give me a bigger morale boost. But if I have to make two Internet posts to generate one sale…well, seems like a lot of effort for 35 cents.

But I am a little more encouraged to go ahead and complete the editing round currently in progress on Documenting America. I have four more chapters to read, and then fifteen chapters of edits to type. I’m not really finding much. I had a few embarrassing typos, a few not so embarrassing, and a couple of places where my wording could have been clearer. Nothing much, really. I hope to have the improved, artistically-designed cover available in a day or two, and it would be nice to have the text edits available at the same time, do the re-up-load in one shot instead of two.

Any encouragement is good. May the sales continue.

Engineering, Health, self-publishing, Suite 101

Things I Don’t Understand

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How my blood sugar can be 122 before a late supper, 127 at bedtime (3 hours after supper), take a higher Lantus dose as recommended by the doctor, do nothing for the next 5.75 hours but sleep and pee (not at the same time), and have my morning blood sugar 165. What’s going on? Do I have a very slowly acting metabolism? Did I have a stressful dream I don’t remember?

Why the note I just posted to Facebook shows up on my profile but not in my news feed.

Why Google chose to de-rate Suite101.com in their last algorithm update, so much so that I make almost nothing there now.

Why I procrastinated getting abstracts in for the Feb 2012 erosion control conference so that now I have only two days to get ’em done.

Why this company I work for (actually just the chairman) thinks I can write a bio paragraph for some project they are going after without knowing anything about the project or the form of the proposal.

Why my e-short story and e-book have each sold only three copies. Actually, I know the why to this one: the lack of promotion to make them stand out from the Kindle clutter.

Why I still have that desire to be published by a traditional publisher, knowing the odds of that ever happening.

Why almost no one in my family give a rat’s whisker about anything I write.

Why my rheumatoid arthritis seems to be getting worse as I lose weight.

Why my beta readers totally failed to do what they said they would do on Documenting America. I had zero beta reader response before I went to e-publish.

Why I can’t concentrate on engineering today.

Writing

A Challenge to Traditional Publishers

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I offer this challenge to traditional publishers (the NY Big 6 plus the major CBA houses): If you want to serve your readers, you need to be giving them more choices, not less. I know you are rejecting a lot of good books, books of high writing quality and excellent story-telling, all because you don’t think they will sell. I have heard this multiple times from agents and editors: “Your writing is great! I can’t sell it.”

Okay, then, open a new imprint—call it Breakout Books, or something similar. Use it to e-publish that next tier of books that you really want to paper publish but don’t think you can make money on. Figure out how to do it on the cheap. Produce good covers, but don’t agonize over them in committee. Mini-edit the book, rather than apply sequential story, line, copy, proof-reading; make it just good enough. Ditch all publicity except catalogue listing. Heck, that’s pretty much how it is anyhow, right? Get the book to the market in 4 months instead of 24. Price them competitively with indie books.

Do this for about double the number of books you publish in the traditional way, or maybe for any book the acquisitions editor brings to the pub committee (indicating the book has obvious merit), but which doesn’t pass the committee. Try this for a couple of years. These books will have the backing of a major house, the vetting by an agent and acquisitions editor, a little attention by the ones readers consider gatekeepers, and thus might attract the traditional audiences of your house. Do it for books you really like but aren’t sure will sell.
You might be surprised at the results. You might find a few books that will self-fund their subsequent paper production. The ones that won’t sell will have minimal overhead expense, no warehousing expense, no distribution costs, and almost no returns.

You would be serving your readers, I believe. I don’t see how you can go wrong, and it might just save your rapidly shrinking businesses.

miscellaneous, Writing

Insert Witty Storm Metaphor Here

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This weekend I wrote what I wanted to write, not what I thought would lead to publication. As I had time, I worked on the passage notes to A Harmony of the Gospels, and completed several of them. Unfortunately I looked ahead and saw just how many of these are left to be written. It might be fifty pages of writing materials.

It’s pouring outside right now. I’m searching for a witty storm metaphor to insert here, but haven’t one. It poured last night. People may have seen news reports about tornadoes in our area. Some were spotted in our county, but I’m not sure they have been confirmed. Joplin was devastated, as you might have read. That’s just 45 or 50 miles north of us.

I’ve been reading a book I picked up at the thrift store, titled The Templar Revelation, and it’s turning out to be awful. From 1996, I think this is one of the books from which Dan Brown drew material to write The DaVinci Code. It is not well written, it is not documented. I’ve invested several days of my reading life into this, after 50 cents of my budget, hoping it would get better, or would become more substantive as I got past the introductory chapters. Not so.

My next article for Buildipedia is due Thursday. I think this will be an easy one, on erosion and sediment control.

I’m currently fighting with my home owner’s insurance company, Nationwide, over how they jacked up the rates on me because I turned in claims last year, and then billed me 12 percent more after the renewal was complete. Just got off the phone with Kelly of Nationwide, a nice man who bore my wrath with dignity. But I will not stay with his company nor with my agent who made a mistake on the renewal. Goodbye, Nationwide. It was a nice 15 year relationship up until last August.

My quarterly doctor’s appointment is tomorrow. Hopefully he’ll give me three more months. I’m not apprehensive about it at all. Now that I’m checking my blood sugar I know exactly where I’ll be at this appointment. I’m hoping he’ll take me off my blood pressure medication. It was marginal that I should be on it in the first place. About a month ago I checked it at the blood pressure check station at Wal-Mart (I’m sure not the most accurate machine). It was 87/59, so I began breaking my pills in half. Last Saturday it was 81/69. Let’s hope it’s low like that tomorrow.

I’m back to this after a ninety minute hiatus. Had a couple of phone calls, ate lunch at my desk, read some writing blogs. I called Friday’s post “miscellaneous”, but this one is more so. Maybe that reflects my state of mind. I need to latch onto a project and run with it. With the Wesley study aside, I suppose it will either be improvements to Documenting America and expanding it’s published locations or completing A Harmony of the Gospels or getting back on In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People and seeing if I can finish that.

Meanwhile it seems the worst of the storm has passed, and no witty metaphor has come to mind. Will post now.

Author | Engineer