Last day of the month, time to enter my progress for last month and goals for the next.
Blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. Did this. I think only one time did I do a somewhat minor post. The rest were all more meaningful.
Attend two writers meetings, one of which I’ll present at. A third meeting may happen and I’ll attend, if the library can schedule them. I was able to attend only one writers meeting, due to a change in travel schedule. It was the one I presented at.
Work on Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution. Last month, even though it wasn’t on the schedule, I managed to copy most of my source documents and load them into a Word document. The next step is reading and condensing them to the right length for the format of the series. I anticipate this will take all of July and possibly even longer. I was able to complete this. It was a fairly large task, cutting 130,000 words in the source documents down to 30,000 for my book. Happy to say I completed that on July 25th!
Write up my recent Bible study idea into a proper outline of what it would be. It turned out I wasn’t quite ready to write this up, except for some minor, handwritten notes. I continued to do more reading in some reference documents. Possibly I’ll get to it in August, or I may put it off until September.
Not an official goal, but I did a lot of scanning, saving, and discarding of genealogy papers. Having a good electronic filing system in place has really streamlined the process. That, and getting to the point of simply discarding stuff rather than scanning it.
So what about goals for August? Summer and family travel appear to be over, so maybe I can get some good writing time in.
Blog twice a week, on Monday and Friday.
Attend three writers meetings. One writers group is folding, so I’ll only have three most months henceforth.
Begin serious writing work on Documenting America: Run-Up to Revolution. I don’t know how fast this will go—or how slow—so I won’t set a word goal. I actually began this on Saturday, and was able to complete the commentary part of Chapter 1—first draft, of course. This bodes well for future writing progress on this book.
Read more in reference documents for my new Bible study idea. If everything gels, get started on the study overview and outline.
Continue to work on digitizing/discarding of genealogy papers.
That doesn’t look like much in the way of goals, but it’s all I can think of at the moment.
The book is available in modern reprints. My copy was a free e-book of the original, out-of-copyright edition.
Some years back, after twenty years of searching, I finally “found” my maternal grandfather. I had a last name and diminutive first name, but no location. A few hints that my grandmother gave, along with DNA triangulation at 23andMe, and in August 2017 I finally confirmed Herbert Stanley “Bert” Foreman as the man, and his birthplace as Port Carling, Muskoka, Ontario, Canada.
The genealogy research went fast, as did finding cousins. The library at Port Carling was incredibly helpful with making copies of book pages for me. With the location being totally knew to me (now mainly a vacation area north of Toronto), I began to look for and acquire books about the area. The ones I got were available on line through Google Books as they were out of copyright. I downloaded four books, and the first one I read was Letters From Muskoka by “an Emigrant Lady”.
I read this several years ago, probably back in 2018, but, being somewhat less familiar with Google Books than I am now, I didn’t save it to my library there. Also, I find that I’m not as prompt at reviewing books I read as e-books, and hence I never reviewed it. This week, wanting to catch up on book reviews, I went looking for “that Muskoka book I read a few years ago” and didn’t find it. Fortunately, through a simple search I found it. In order to write a review of it, I had to give it a bit of a re-read. Mainly, I scrolled ahead to this haunting passage I remembered from the end of the main narrative:
I went into the Bush of Muskoka strong and healthy, full of life and energy, and fully as enthusiastic as the youngest of our party. I left it with hopes completely crushed, and with health so hopelessly shattered from hard work, unceasing anxiety and trouble of all kinds, that I am now a helpless invalid, entirely confined by the doctor’s orders to my bed and sofa, with not the remotest chance of ever leaving them for a more active life during the remainder of my days on earth.
What a sad commentary on her years there. She, a serviceman’s widow for fifteen years, and her adult children were Brits who were living in France when the Franco-Prussian War broke out. When the war ended in 1870, changes in the country made life there less attractive for these British expats. One daughter and family had emigrated to Muskoka, and most of the rest decided to follow.
When the book was first published in 1878 in England, the author was listed as “An Emigrant Lady”. Later editions identified her as Harriet Barbara (Mrs. Charles) Gerard King. She was a widow with four children, at least two adults. At the end of the war, they decided to emigrate to Canada to take up free land being offered in Muskoka. Harriet was 61 at this time.
They arrived in Muskoka, after a major ocean storm in transit, after train delays, after finding themselves without money, in fall of 1871. The hardships began almost immediately, and did not abate for the next four years. Here are other salient quotes from the book.
It was anguish to see your sisters and sister-in-law, so tenderly and delicately brought up, working harder by far than any of our servants in England or France.
We were rich in nothing but delusive hopes and expectations, doomed, like the glass basked…to be shattered and broken to pieces.
A portrait of Harriet, I suspect after she left Muskoka in 1876, more likely shortly before her death in 1885.
Normally I don’t have much sympathy for or interest in those who are, or think they are, part of the aristocracy. They have their good things in life and don’t need my sympathy. But it’s hard to read this and not have a little sympathy for the emigrant lady. In the last day or two, as I read on in the book, I learned that she was a writer and tried to bring income in by writing and submitting articles. At this, she was mostly unsuccessful.
The letters take up the bulk of the book, with a few ancillary sections. I’m not sure that I read beyond the letters. Mrs. King described in great detail the hardships in getting a farm cut out of the rocky woods. All family members saw their health deteriorate due to the hard work and the meagerness of the provisions.
The book did what I wanted it to do: help me to understand the area my long-lost grandfather came from. As I wrote this review, I can see I need to finish the last few short sections of the book. I’ll download it to my phone and begin reading it in the off moments. Then, when I’m sure I finished it, I have three other books about old Muskoka to read. So I’d better get on it.
Unless you have a connection to Muskoka, or you really, really like pioneer stories, there’s no point in reading this. For me, it was a great book. The detail and the quality of the writing make this a 5-star book—for me. For most people, it’s maybe a 3-star book. But, in the beauty of e-books, I’ll keep it in my library for a while.
My wife and I had an interesting conversation Saturday night. We were talking about someone we knew in the past, from our church in Kansas City. I wasn’t sure who she meant at first, and I mentioned another couple from the same era and same church. Except I couldn’t remember the wife’s name of the second couple. We talked about it and together were able to remember both couples’ names.
The couple I first brought up was somewhat older than us. When he retired from the railroad, they moved from Kansas City to somewhere in southern Missouri. around Springfield. We had their contact info at one time but have lost it. I wondered, though, since they were at least 10 years older than us, if they were still alive. Was there a way to find out?
I searched for obituaries for them, then searched finagrave.com, a site where I’ve had great success finding dead people there, in my research for genealogy and for the church Centennial book. I looked in those places and…nothing. The couple didn’t show up in any searches. That may mean they are still alive and well and living in southern Missouri. Or it could mean they simply didn’t show up in searches. I then tried searching for them among the living and couldn’t find them there either.
Being unconclusive, Lynda said something about why I searched for them at findagrave, a site she hadn’t heard of before. I replied, “I’ve had more success finding the dead than the living.”
That was a catchy way of saying, perhaps, what my preferences are when searching for people. The dead don’t argue with you. They don’t talk back or insult you. They don’t take political sides or belittle someone you like. They also don’t ignore you when you find them.
Obviously, expectations are different when searching for the living. If you do find someone you’re looking for, it’s likely you try to contact them and, if successful, you hope for an answer. Alas, that answer often is not forthcoming. But, when you search for the dead, if you find them you learn something about them. If they left many footprints, they speak to you through those footprints. It’s not much of a conversation, however.
Maybe that’s why I enjoy looking for the dead so much. You learn a lot without engaging in conversation. The fewer conversations in any given day usually makes it a better day for me. Maybe that’s why I’ve enjoyed genealogy so much over the years. It’s coaxing dead people to talk to you, but without actual conversation—if that makes sense.
This isn’t much of a post, but it’s what’s in my head right now. Perhaps I’ll do better on Friday.
This is a novel that might appeal to some. The writing is good, but the plot suffers from needless complexity and, dare I say, some goofiness.
I’m not sure where we got it, but The Darwin Conspiracy by James Scott Bell has been in our house for a long time. I’ve been in writers conferences where Bell has been the keynote speaker or taught workshops, so I definitely wanted to read it.
It’s a novel, Bell’s first published novel, written in the 1990s when he was trying to transition from lawyer to writer. The plot is rather strange. It goes back and forth between the present day and times in the 19th century. Keeping them straight was difficult at first, easier at the end of the novel.
The premise is a document, called the Busby Manuscript. Sir Max Busby was the assumed name of a man who, as a boy, hated his father and killed him. He took on the name Max Busby and went to sea to avoid the law. The ship he sailed on was The Beagle, the same vessel on the same voyage that carried Charles Dawin on his famous round-the-world trip during which Darwin did the bulk of his formative research.
Busby sensed that the evolutionary theories that Dawin was just starting to develop would be disastrous to Christianity. Being an evil man, Busby wanted science to thrive and Christianity to suffer, and so egged Darwin on. As the story develops, Busby posed as an educated man (which he was not) and was with Darwin at every critical stage in Darwin’s work. Then he was with Darwin’s friends and every person who eventually touted the cause of evolution, right up to the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. Busby interacts with all the famous scientists and others who had a hand in either pushing evolution forward or fighting against it.
In order to accomplish this, Bell had to have Busby live to the age of 125+ years old. Not believable in the slightest, even in a novel where it is assumed you will suspend unbelief.
The book was complicated by 1) constant switching from present to 2) Busby writing his narrative in 1927 to 3) his days with Darwin and Darwin’s successors, a period of 90 years. Keeping these times frames straight was difficult, especially because often two were mixed in one chapter.
The novel was also complicated because Bell puts himself in it. He was the one who was given the Busby narrative by an old professor, only to lose it when the professor is killed, the police confiscate the narrative, and someone steals it from them. This whole scenario was, quite frankly, ridiculous. Having Geraldo Rivira make a cameo appearance was way over the top.
I rate this book just 3-stars. It would be two for the plot, but the writing is quite good and that pulls it up. But it is not a keeper. I don’t anticipate ever reading it again, nor recommending it to anyone else.
Some of those special projects relate to disaccumulation in anticipation of a future downsizing. No date is set, but we know it’s coming. A couple of years ago I looked at the shelf of genealogy notebooks on a shelf in my closet and knew I had to do something about them.
I seriously doubt that my family members will be interested in it. Never say never, of course. I wasn’t interested in my genealogy until I was 46. So children or grandchildren might still show some interest. But as of now, none. When I’m gone, what’s going to happen to them? The trash can, I imagine. I really don’t want to leave them to my heirs to have to clean up, and I doubt I would have room for them in a smaller place.
These are about half the notebooks that I’ve been able to declare surplus.
I thought of donating them to some research library. But there are two problems with that. First, since I have been researching all family lines, both mine and my wife’s, and since we grew up in very different places and circumstances, the files would have to be split in two or more places.
But the really big reason why I can’t simply donate them is that they are atrociously unfinished. I started many sheets on many ancestors and never finished them. My documentation of facts I’ve accumulated ranges from excessive to non-existent. I would have to put a lot of work into bringing my files to a much higher level of completion than they are now before I could even think about donating them.
So I went through the notebooks, one by one, to see what I could cull from each. Page by page, I made a keep-discard decision. Some were easy but many were not. I got rid of enough pages to eliminate maybe a notebook or two, maybe even three.
Finally, early this year, I decided what I needed to do was digitize my files and throw most of the papers away. That, at first, proved to be a difficult process. How should I file them, and where? Do I file by family name first and generation second, or generation first and family second? I had already put in place a system for filing genealogy papers, which included a way of numbering ancestors.
But I found the system I started using wasn’t working. The system I needed had to be “retrievable”—that is, if I ever get back to active genealogy research I need to be able to find on the computer the files I digitized. That took some thinking and trials, but I finally got it. I would number each person first by their Ahnentafel number. I won’t explain that. It’s easily findable if you’re interested. Then I would include their generation number. My method for numbering generations is to designate my children to be Generation 100, and count backwards and forwards from there. I’m generation 99, my parents are generation 98, etc.
I decided to save everything to Microsoft OneDrive. If that ever goes away, or if they have a data failure, I could lose everything. That’s a risk I’m willing to take so as to reduce the amount of paper I have.
I began this project in earnest sometime earlier this year. Working notebook by notebook, page by page, I look at each page to see, with a more critical eye than I did before, if it’s a sheet that I want to keep, or if it’s so unfinished or preliminary or far in antiquity that it’s better just to discard it. My goal is to discard 10 sheets a day, either by scanning and discard or by immediate discard.
Ten sheets a day doesn’t sound like much, but over a year that would be 3,650 sheets if I did this every day. That’s over seven reams of paper in a year. That will put a serious dent in that shelf of notebooks in the closet. And while 10 sheets is the goal, my unofficial goal is 20 sheets. that would be approaching 15 reams of paper.
It’s actually kind of burdensome. Making the keep-discard decision, doing the scanning, figuring out the right place to save the scanned file and the right name to give it. After ten pages, I’m somewhat brain weary. Maybe that doesn’t make sense, since “getting things done” normally energizes me. I do feel energized when I work on the project, but it also wearies me.
I’d say I’m averaging 15 pages a day, discarded directly or after scanning and e-filing. That may not be fast enough to do what I want to do, but it’s the best I can do unless I stop all other things that make life interesting.
I’ll check back in and report more about this project in another month. Maybe I’ll have reduced my paper files by another couple of notebooks.
This book claims Froude did a poor job on the bio he wrote of Carlyle, but could Froude be right and Wilson wrong?
I have been reading more and more and more books on my phone lately (my Nook having reached obsolescence a year ago). I’m always reading a print book, or two, but I enjoy the convenience of having the e-books available wherever I am.
One of these books I finished in May. Mr. Froude and Carlyle, by David Wilson. Published in 1898, seventeen years after Carlyle’s death, the book appears to have been written to counter the four-volume biography of Caryle that James Anthony Froude had written and published in the mid-1880s.
It seems that Froude, at least in Wilson’s mind, had been very hard on Carlyle. But that was only in relation to Carlyle’s wife, Jane. It seems that Wilson thought that Jane could do no wrong and Thomas no right whenever there was a dispute between them. Wilson didn’t like that. He took up each of those disputes and re-cast it as favorable to Thomas and negative to Jane.
I have not yet read Froude’s four-volume work. After having read Wilson’s book, I started on Froude’s but haven’t read very far into it yet. That Froude’s biography of Carlyle would be inaccurate is puzzling, since it was an authorized bio and Froude had access to all of both Thomas’s and Jane’s papers.
I found the book a bit comical. Wilson wrote it in a format something like this:
Froude wrote about this incident in 1848, indicating how Thomas treated Jane shabbily.
But I, Wilson, have looked into that incident and in fact it was Jane who was in the wrong.
How could Froude have been so far off the mark? He must have wanted to run Thomas down.
Oh, and Froude regularly redacted critical information from letters or journals. Shame on him.
I’m anxious to get further into Foude’s book to see if it’s as lopsided against Thomas as Wilson said. I began that book at Volume 3, because all of Wilson’s examples were in that time period or later. For the 60 pages I’ve read in it, I can find no fault.
This book by Wilson is something that would be of interest only to Carlyle scholars and amateur scholars, like me. It’s certainly not worth picking up and reading for anyone else.
Around twenty years ago, maybe a little longer, I discovered Project Gutenberg. Back in those dark ages, pre-Kindle, no one had yet manufactured and marketed a reliable and functional e-book reader. Creating digital copies of books back then was done using OCR scanning or, heaven forbid, retyping from print copies. But it worked. PG had, by the time I discovered it, a large library of digitized books. A whole library on your computer, at your fingertips! I was in heaven.
I downloaded a number of books in rich text format (Word format not being an option). One of those was The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. 1. I loaded the RTF into Word and formatted it for compact printing but comfortable reading—a nice blend. I never printed it, however, not knowing when I might read it. In the last year I discovered a Kindle feature where you can upload any text file to your Kindle device. I tried that with several files, including this one.
A controversial figure to many, but certainly something worth knowing more about.
I wanted to read this because I’ve already read a fair amount about or by Darwin. I read Origin of Species about three years ago (reviewed on this blog). And many years ago I read Irving Stone’s The Origins. Plus I’ve read several other articles about him. So in May sometime, having finished other reading projects, I pulled this up on my phone’s Kindle app and began reading it. I set it down several times, finally getting into a rhythm of reading a good number of pages. I finished it about two weeks ago.
It’s a good book. Not stellar, but good. It was compiled by Darwin’s son, Francis Darwin. Volume 1 covers up to and including publishing The Origin of Species, but not his life afterwards. The book is more biography than it is letters. That was a downer, as I was looking forward more to letters than to biography. The bio portion was a little bit lackluster. Francis Darwin arranged this topically rather than chronologically. I generally prefer chronological biographies. So I found the biography portion generally uninteresting.
The letters were also arranged a little bit topically, though with a nod to chronology. The letters written from The Beagle, the boat Darwin sailed on his famous voyage around the world, were quite interesting. As were the letters in the years following that voyage.
The letters in the two decades between the voyage and publishing Darwin’s famous book were mostly good. Many included the scientific names of species Darwin was studying. Those were somewhat hard to read, but interesting if you could skim past all the names. All together, they told a story of a man who was sick most of his life, but still managed to get a fair amount of work done and publish things that the scientific community embraced, followed by the rest of the world.
This is a book I’m glad I read, but probably will never read again. I don’t remember if I downloaded and formatted Vol 2, but I’m not going to go looking for it right away on my computer. As for Vol 1, I give it 3 1/2 stars, marked down for the biology section, with the letters section not stellar enough to pull the whole book up to the 4-stars category.
I had thought my children’s time travel books might spur sales, but, alas, not so.
After having taken the month of June off from writing—except you can’t fully take that long of a time off from writing—what you do is back off of new writing and pretty much maintain things like the blog and promotion—I’m now back at it, working on a new book in my Documenting America series.
It felt a little weird at first, to come down to The Dungeon in the morning and do things other than writing. But my routines, interrupted for a mere 30 days, have quickly re-established themselves. I have a goal as to where I want to be at the end of July, and I think that I’m either on pace of maybe even a little ahead of where I want to be.
I haven’t yet promoted the sequel. I know I should, but it just seems meaningless to do so.
That gets the long-suppressed dreams of a writer going in my mind. As I work on a new project, other projects come to mind. Even as I plod along toward daily goals, and book sales trickle in at Amazon (10 in June, so far 3 in July, plus one personal sale), other new projects come to mind. Specifically, things I could write and publish serially on Kindle Vella. Four non-fiction series are rolling around, taking up brain space that should be going to the new book. Well, one of those projects is related to the Documenting America book.
The other three potential Vella projects are pie-in-the-sky stuff, things that are more dreams than real projects. Things that would spur sales and generate a little income, get my name a little more wide-spread. Things that would take up time.
And that’s the problem. Do I want to hop over to Vella series from books? That makes no sense. I have no idea how well Vella series sell. Most that are there seem to be fiction, and my ideas are non-fiction. Last month I browsed the non-fiction titles there, and could draw no conclusions. Would my non-fiction series gain an audience there, or not?
In my dreams, they would, and not just a small audience, but a fantastic, large, and ever-expanding audience, waiting for the next in each series, almost begging for more. I won’t share the dreams of how many dollars those series would bring in, because if I did, someone would say it’s time for an intervention, to bring me back to earth.
Such are the dreams of the writer. Working on one project while dreaming of four others while watching anemic sales show up in the Amazon sales report while wondering how to better self-promote. I suspect I’m not alone in that.
Time to move on to the next daily task on the new book. Push the dreams into the background for a couple of hours, and see what I can get done.
In that post, I said my main project would be the next Documenting America series, Run-Up To Revolution. I started working on it yesterday, creating the Table of Contents and cataloging the source items already in the Word document. I turns out I only have five more documents to either find and copy or type. That’s a good start.
But is it the right thing to write? The last couple of days I did some more looking into Kindle Vella. For those who don’t know, that’s an Amazon platform for stories/books brought out in serial form. I thought maybe I could publish my nascent memoir, Tales Of A Vagabond, there. I have five “episodes” as K-V calls them) written, and a little inspiration caused me to start planning the broader book.
But wait, because that new Bible study I mentioned in a previous post continues to pull at me. I did a little research reading for it yesterday in the second source document, and a proposed outline has started to come together in my mind. Nothing is on paper yet.
But it also occurred to me that maybe I should return to working on the eight-part Bible study A Walk Though Holy Week. I’ve written about that before. Parts 4, 5, 6, and 7 are written, and Parts 4, 5, and 6 have had one editorial pass. These four could be ready to publish in a couple of months, Parts 1, 2, and 3 are fully planned, and Part 8 partially planned. It occurred to me that maybe I should shift to writing Part 1, for I don’t know if it makes sense to begin publishing the series at Part 4. What to do, what to do?
Then, our adult Sunday School class has begun re-studying C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. We went through it around 2008, and I wrote four chapters covering four letters. I found them useful in teaching fifteen years later, and I feel the itch to work again on it again. But, that would be quite time consuming and energy sapping. What to do?
And that’s not all. A couple of months ago, finding myself at the time of our critique group and me with nothing to share, I dashed off the first four pages of the first book in my long-planned-but-never-started Alfred Cottage Mysteries. The crit group seemed to like it, as they had liked the series summary I had shared earlier. I’ve wanted to write that series for a long time but have hesitated since it would be yet another genre—something I don’t really need.
And one other thing occurred to me. Perhaps it’s time to get going transcribing the letters from our years in Saudi Arabia, as I did with the letters from our years in Kuwait. I want to get to that while I still have strength of mind and body. That’s not a commercial project; it would be only for family. But it’s important to me to see it done. I think, among all these things I’ve mentioned, it is the least likely to pop up to the surface at this time.
With all that, I actually have one or two other ideas floating around in my head, things that have come to me recently that haven’t gelled sufficiently to think of a title, an outline, or a purpose and scope. But they are there, consuming brain cells, and interrupting my reading on more immediately pressing projects.
Ah, the life of the writer with Genre Focus Disorder, too much immediate time, and too few years left in an already fruitful life to write everything that sits a while in my mind, never mind those ideas that flit through.
How can I possibly have progress in a month that I was taking off from writing? Well, taking time off for me is different than for others. It’s hard for me not to keep up with writing even during my month off. So I got a few things done. I’ll list them along with the goals, then I’ll see what kind of goals I can set for July.
Blog twice a week, Mondays and Fridays, as always. Even with grandparent busyness, I was able to get this done. Each day had a real blog post written and posted.
Attend writer groups meetings as I can based on travel schedule. As expected, travel kept be away from all but one of the scheduled meetings.
Proofread as much as I can of the four completed volumes of A Walk Through Holy Week. I proofread parts 4, 5, and 6 (which I didn’t remember proofreading last year). Part 7 will be a July goal.
Work on the cover for the AWTHW series. I don’t sell enough books to pay for cover creation, so I just have to do it myself. I have a concept I want to use, if I can do the graphics. Which leads to my last goal… This is done, sort of. I worked with my 10-year-old granddaughter, who shows some artistic talent, to go from my preliminary concept to a working prototype. Whether it’s a fully workable prototype, I’m not sure.
Work with G.I.M.P. on how to do more artistry in covers. I’ll have to find some tutorials.
Other things I got done were:
Catching up on correspondence, both new writing and filing all unfiled correspondence for 2023.
Publish The Key To Time Travel. I didn’t mention this as a June goal because I wasn’t sure of the timing for getting the cover. After dealing with some health issues, the cover designer finished her work, and the book went on sale this month.
Work on the source material for the next Documenting America book. See the July goals.
Do more reading than normal.
Brainstorm an idea for a new Bible study, and read some source material for it.
Made a few updates to my website—not major ones, but things that needed doing.
And one thing that wasn’t writing related, but which I feel like mentioning, was digitizing my genealogy files. No, they are not done—far from it. But I added to what I did in prior months and fine-tuned my filing system as I went along. At the end of the month I felt good about how much of this I accomplished.
Now, for some July goals.
Blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays.
Attend two writers meetings, one of which I’ll present at. A third meeting may happen and I’ll attend, if the library can schedule them.
Work on Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution. Last month, even thought it wasn’t on the schedule, I managed to copy most of my source documents and load them into a Word document. The next step is reading and condensing them to the right length for the format of the series. I anticipate this will take all of July and possibly even longer.
Write up my recent Bible study idea into a proper outline of what it would be.
That’s a good number of goals for a month after a break. Documenting America will be my main task for the month.
