Late. Sparse. Not all writing related.
1. Replace my failing router. Do it tomorrow before rebellion occurs. Figure out how to install/configure/whatevertheheck ones does with a router.
2. Finish income taxes. Getting real close on the Federal haven’t started the state.
3. Do my mother-in-law’s taxes. Haven’t started.
4. Blog 10 times.
5. Write/publish 5 articles at Suite 101.
6. Work ten days on the Harmony of the gospels.
7. Somehow keep the dream alive.
Good grief! I missed checking in on my March goals, and setting April goals. Here it is the 4th of April already. Okay, so here is the March report.
1. Blog 12 or more times. This seems a comfortable pace. I’d like to bump this up to about 16 posts a month, but will wait to make that a goal. >>> I bloggd exactly 12 times. Should have done more, but at least I made my goal.
2. Write and post 10 articles at Suite101.com. I think I can do this. >>> I fell one short on this, posting 9 articles at Suite101.
3. Write 1,000 words on In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. Almost made it in February; might as well try it in March. >>>Well, I did nothing on my novel this month. My attention was pulled to working on the Harmony of the Gospels, and much time that I could have put into the novel, or into Suite articles, instead went to the Harmony. And I’m okay with that. I really got a lot done on it.
4. Work on a new Bible study, about the sacraments. I may have an outline somewhere. I’ll be teaching it in about two months. Time to get to work. >>>I completed quite a bit of work on this. The outline of the lesson series is done; I have a good idea of what it is I want to accomplish; and I’m reading a book for research. I could be much farther along, but I feel good about this.
5. Make three freelance submissions. This is pretty minimal, but I’m working a lot on work stuff still, and will be making a presentation on the 31st and two or three brown bags during the month. I find the time needed to research freelance markets and actually make the submittals tedious, and for some reason if I’m heavy into work stuff, including taking stuff home, I can’t concentrate on freelance. Of course, a couple of the work things I’m working on could make good freelance articles about engineering. Hmmm. >>>Not quite sure how to count this. I made two freelance submissions–or I could count it as five, if I count the articles I submitted to a Suite101 contest as separate submissions. It’s really not as much as I hoped to accomplish.
6. Read 40 pages in writer helps, not including blogs. That’s forty solid pages, books or magazines (not including ads). I would say I read maybe 20 pages, not 40. The research into the Bible study took up much of my reading. That and working logically through my magazine and newsletters pile. The first issue of my subscription to Poets and Writers magazine is next on the pile; I should get to it tomorrow. So this will be an easy thing to do in April.
So, all in all a month with a fair amount of accomplishment, but not as much as I hoped for. Taxes got in the way (as they will in April), as did the church parking lot project (as it will in April also. I’ll come back in a few hours with April goals.
If those are averages, then someone must be below that. It appears to be me in the extreme.
I just did an analysis on my page view statistics for articles I posted in June through October of last year, 57 articles. They are all evergreen, except perhaps for one article somewhat related to the US Independence Day that I posted July 2, 2009. I checked to see if my page views were going up over time. See the attached graph.
The only month that, in March 2010, had the most page views was my June 2009 articles, and that barely so. All the others peaked in October 2009, and have declined ever since. July articles are down 33 percent from their peak in October. Aug-Sep-Oct articles are down 50 percent since their peak in October. The graph shows a slight uptrend in 2010, but a very flat uptrend. So, as of right now, I conclude that I’m somehow not able to achieve the Suite mantra concerning rising page views over time. And, despite posting 36 more articles since the end of October, I’ve not come even close to the October highs with all articles counted.
Now, if revenue were good, I might ignore falling page views. But my present rate of $/article/per month is $0.13. Yes, a mere 13 cents per article per month. That’s my average for the last 30 days. In 2010 it’s been as high as $0.20 and as low as $0.08, but for the last month it’s been pretty stable at $0.13.
So, if I don’t post any more articles, and page views and revenues stay the same (i.e. the trend of declining page views stops), I can expect to earn $12.09 a month in residual income. My articles take about 2 hours to write, between research, writing, and the nuisance of finding, documenting, uploading, and captioning images. It would be nice to earn $15 per hour for this work. That’s kind of low, but it beats what I could earn delivering pizzas. For 93 articles published, and 2 hours per article, and $15 per hour, that would be $2,790. Based on what I’ve earned so far, including the $101 I earned for a contest, it will take me 216 months to get up to $15 per hour. 18 years. That doesn’t account for the time value of money. If I figured that in, I’ve no doubt it would be 40 years. If page views were increasing, I could perhaps ignore current revenue in favor of future prospects. But page views are going down.
Am I crazy doing this, writing for Suite, writing for Internet content? A Suite writer once wrote in the Suite forums that some people can’t or won’t write in topics that are lucrative enough to be successful at this. That seems to describe me. I can’t write about something about which I know nothing. Another wrote in the Suite forums that Suite 101 is not for everyone. I’m starting to think that includes me.
Well, the erosion control conference in Bentonville is over. I delivered my paper today to rave reviews. Well, one rave review, which I heard about later from the guy’s girlfriend, both former employees of our firm. I gave my site visit talk yesterday, to rave reviews. Well, two or three people complimented me on it. That’s all behind me.
Now I just have the church parking lot rehab project to fill my time. I’ve made at least one trip a day to view the work (2.7 miles each way from my office), even with a full time, volunteer inspector to assist me. Still lots of things I need to make decisions on. And the work has really just begun. The next two days they will be putting a temporary gravel finish to the part they have repaired so that on Easter Sunday the lot will be reasonably serviceable.
Then there’s the parking situation. I decided to arrive at church an half hour early last Sunday, to make sure parking attendants were present and knowing what to do. Only one was there (we need five to do it right) and he really wasn’t able to figure it out. So I stayed out there all the first service and a short time into Life Group hour, working the lot mostly by myself. Tonight it turned out we had the same thing. Two guys had responded to the call for volunteers, but they just stood together at the drive we didn’t want people to come in and chatted, occasionally waving people down to the alley entrance, while I worked the whole parking lot alone.
And I don’t mind helping in this way. But couldn’t those guys understand that their ministry was to help people park their cars, given that the construction has caused us to use unfamiliar entrances and traffic patterns? We didn’t need two guys standing together. We needed them spread out, helping people. It seems no one knows how to serve, no one knows how to use their common sense.
Oh, well, I shouldn’t write when I’m frustrated, nor when I’m emotionally and physically tired. I think I’ll go upstairs and read. If I can concentrate. I guess I’ll get to Easter Sunday services an hour early, cause the two things I can be sure of is a) the volunteer attendants won’t get there early enough, and b) once they do show up they won’t have the common sense to spread out, work together, and minister to those who only want to park and enjoy Easter services.
Well, the article that BiblioBuffet accepted is now rejected. A week after acceptance they e-mailed me requesting changes, saying, “You do have a wonderful topic here. But…it needs to be more you and less a college assignment.” I tried. I looked at it slowly, reading it over and over, finally coming up with a “patch”, an addition to it where I used words for the Carlyle-Emerson correspondence to express my feelings. No good, according to the editor. I received the e-mail this afternoon: “While I do find [your essay] well written it is missing…passion. I still see nothing of you in it. …There’s nothing that tells me…why you…or care about it. I am afraid I am going to have to decline to run this essay. …I urge you to continue with your writing group. Perhaps in a year or you might wish to try us again.“
“A year.” That in itself speaks volumes.
Oh, well. But to what do I ascribe this failure? I’m wondering if the uber-objective viewpoint required by Suite101.com has caused be to think only in that mode and have trouble with the personal point of view and with creative writing. That’s a possibility. Or maybe I really want to write college essays rather than creative pieces. That’s a possibility. Or maybe I just don’t have it. Whether or not I turn out to be the hero of my writing career…blah, blah, blah.
Oh, well. Tonight, being in a bachelor mode with Lynda in OKC, I went to Barnes & Noble after work. I had a gift card burning a hole in my pocket, and last time I was there didn’t find anything I really had to have. Tonight I picked up a remainders copy of Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. Six hundred and eight-six glorious pages of his letters, plus index; a fair number of footnotes, and I love footnotes. This will be enjoyable reading for me, even given ACD’s spirituality issues. Into the reading pile with it; should get to it in late 2011.
I also looked in three writing magazines and culled some ideas. I’m wondering now how to approach my freelancing, or if I should just go back to novel and Bible study writing and see what I can do there. The good news is I made a whole $0.30 at Suite101 on Tuesday. Two tanks of gas per year for 72,000 words. Either I’m crazy or obsessed.
I’m not done with my taxes. Made little progress over a snowy weekend, but made excellent progress last night. So I now feel comfortable taking an evening to write things I enjoy, such as a book review of How Now Shall We Live? by Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcy [Tyndale House Publishers, 1999, ISBN 0-8423-1808-9]. I finished reading this on March 9, after having begun it Feb 11. I took a couple of more days to go through some of the notes that I skipped while reading, then brought it to the Dungeon to write my review. It sat docilely on my work table awaiting this day.
I picked this book up used, for $1.99, at some used book store. I bought it more because of Coulson’s name and having liked the two or three of his books I’ve read before. I didn’t really know what it was about, even from a little bit of reading on the dust jacket. It’s about world view, specifically Christian worldview. So it agrees with a buzz-word topic of the 00 decade.
The book was somewhat heavy to get through, despite Coulson’s and Pearcy’s attempts at lightness and levity. Points of what a Christian world view consists of are illustrated with personal stories, both true and made-up, of people who lived out certain points: the New York cop who walked a beat and made a difference as he modeled Christ to those he encountered (true); a Hollywood producer who had to make choices about his films (fictional); and others.
Those were good. Actually, there’s nothing wrong with the rest of the book. Coulson explains that everyone has a worldview, and that worldview must answer three primary questions:
Where did we come from and who are we?
What has gone wrong with the world?
What can we do to fix it?
This leads into the section titled per the book: How now shall we live (i.e., in response to answers to the first three questions)? Coulson and Pearcy do an excellent job presenting the Christian answers to the three primary questions, and backing those answers up with a variety of references, both scriptural and extra-scriptural.
The book has extensive notes, which serve as a sort of reference to the Christian worldview. In fact, the entire book is almost a reference book, rather than a reading book. Oh, you can’t just jump into the middle, find a subject, and expect to use the book in refuting arguments against non-Christian worldviews–that is, unless you’ve already read the book. If you have, then you can use it as a pure reference book, with the excellent notes, index, and bibliography.
I will come back another day and write some more about this, as I don’t think I’ve done it justice. It’s 491 pages of text (plus notes, bibliography, and index) are, as I’ve said before, a bit difficult to sit with and read it cover to cover. But I’ll give my standard wrap-up in this post, and save a more detailed analysis for another day. This book was definitely worth the price, and would have been at full price. It’s a keeper, and shall be permanently in my library among its Christian counterparts. If you have not read much on worldview, this would be an excellent book to start with. Read it with concentration, and unhurriedly.
I would write more, but I’m anxious to write several other things tonight, including a political piece on friend Chuck’s blog. The wife went to OKC today to help with daughter, son-in-law, and grandson. I went straight from work to critique group tonight, but was the only one to show up. Must have had my signals crossed. Now I must use the solitude wisely.
Sorry for my absence of late. Been working on my income taxes, beginning with my writing income (or lack thereof) and expenses, followed by the stock trading business income and expense. We actually made money this year.
But I find this all consuming. Monday-Tuesday it took up the whole evening. I skipped church tonight (well, truck trouble had something to do with that) to do the taxes. I had one more thing to do to finish figuring the stock trading income, something that should have taken me all evening. However, I started it and five minutes into it realized the answer I was working towards was right there on the Fidelity brokerage statement. To be sure I contacted Fidelity, and the rep confirmed it. What I thought would take four hours took fifteen minutes.
With my evening thus relieved, I should have knuckled down and gotten to the expense side of the business taxes. However, my wind wafted into reading land. I went upstairs, cooked a simple vegetable supper, read some pages in an academic article about the canon of the scriptures, then went to work on editing my article for Biblio Buffet. A way to possible do what the editors wanted had come to mind today, and the found time seemed a good time to get that done. Fired it off a few minutes ago. We’ll see how it works.
So, tomorrow I get the pick-up back, and will get back on the taxes. I think one, possibly two, evenings to get the expenses done, then one more evening to actually fill out and print the business forms. Then the personal Federal forms will consume the weekend. I’ll take a week or a little more off and then hit the Arkansas taxes. No, wait, I need to get my mother-in-law’s done too, and this year she will likely owe taxes so I can’t turn them in late. Rats. Then there will be calls from someone who always needs my guidance for his taxes.
So, I may not be posting here at the frequency I like.
This week I have been writing with the flow, on my Harmony of the Gospels. I completed passage notes for several passages, about one a day and sometimes two. I worked on the events of Tuesday of Holy Week, and pretty much finished them. This led me to the problem of the dinner held in Jesus’ honor at Bethany. Was it six days before the Passover as John said, or was it two days before the Passover at Mark and Matthew say? Or was it two separate dinners with amazingly similar actions, except for the day?
When I wrote the harmony originally I decided on one dinner per John’s timing, and I still agree with this. This, however, I had always planned to discuss in an appendix, which will have significantly more discussion than would the passage notes. So, going with the flow, I wrote the portion of that appendix that goes with dinner. The appendix will be a fair amount larger, and I’ll work on that later. However, writing this appendix required more work than the passage notes, and I’ve spent the last two days reading other commentators for agreeing and disagreeing opinions on this. It’s amazing what I found on Google Books.
Between this writing and Ephraim’s arrival on Thursday I’ve neglected this blog. Yes, Sara and Ephraim drove here from Oklahoma City on Thursday to spend a few days with us. Sara is busy conducting Mary Kay parties, so grandma and grandpa have been baby-sitting. Yes, this blog will wait while Ephraim’s here. He’s down for a nap right now, which has allowed me to finish the writing in the appendix for the present, and write this blog.
Better go proofread what I wrote in the Harmony, then head upstairs to await Ephraim’s wakening.
Yes, I’m still thinking about that. I wrote my post from yesterday at work, e-mailed it to myself at home, and posted it in the early evening. After that, I got to work on the passage notes and completed one passage. That still gave me time to read a literary agent’s blog, and achieve my reading goals for the night. Oh, and I got caught up on my personal finance budgets and on the checkbook. So I would call it a successful evening, if only there were more left in the checkbook and the budget balanced.
Tonight I decided to continue with the passage notes in the Harmony of the Gospels. I’m at the place where Jesus warned his disciples, and the crowd, to beware of the teachers of the law and the Pharisees (Mark 12:38-40, Matthew 23:1-12, and Luke 20:45-47). I originally worked on this 2 October 2001, and appear to have completed it in one evening. Now, however, as I was writing the passage notes “with the flow,” I saw a number of places where my original harmony missed some key information. So I took time to break the passage down into smaller chunks, something I didn’t do before, and reworked the harmony. I’m more pleased with it now, as it is more complete.
Maybe this writing with the flow is better. My mind is still engaged on these passages and on the passage notes. The way I’m writing them is to go back to my hand-written notebooks–three of them–where I wrote out the passages, discussed the similarities and differences, then wrote the harmony. Sometimes I began with chunks too big, and had to go back to the beginning with smaller bites. I should have done that with the passage in question. What I’m doing now is typing those notes I made as I harmonized the four gospels. However, I’m expanding my personal shorthand, and adding a few extra comments I didn’t before–the laziness of writing by hand when you’re used to typing seventy words a minute.
But I find I’m adding quite a bit more to the passage notes. After I reread my old notes, and the harmony, and the gospels again, and think some more, more words flow, giving a more complete picture of the process I went through and the nature of the finished product.
So maybe this writing with the flow does work. I’m writing these passage notes kind of fast, yet at the same time adding to them and improving the Harmony. I don’t know how long this inspiration will continue, but I’ll go with it for a while. Maybe I’ll actually finish the project in a couple of years. Since it’s probably non-publishable, no hurry.
I still need to work on the discipline part of writing with the flow, which will involve writing where the flow stops so as to finish a project. I’ll figure it out someday. Otherwise I’ll never get a book published.
Meanwhile, the flow to do my taxes has not yet come.
Unluckily or luckily this notion of writing on the Working Classes has in the interim died away in me; and I have altogether lost it for the present. I have got upon Thuycidides, Johannes Müller, the Crusades, and a whole course of objects connected with my Lectures; sufficient to occupy me abundantly till that fatal time come. We will commit my Discourse on the Working Classes once more to the chapter of chances.
In early 1838 Thomas Carlyle wrote these words as the introductory paragraph of a letter to John Stuart Mills. It seems that Carlyle had committed to writing an article about the working classes for Mill’s London and Westminster Review magazine. Carlyle, however, with this letter put off Mill, claiming he didn’t have the notion to write on it at that time, being fully engaged in preparing to give a lecture series that would start April 30, 1838.
I can sympathize with Carlyle. As I wrote yesterday on this blog,”inspiration” suddenly hit me yesterday, and I went back to working on the Harmony of the Gospels, going after the passage notes with great interest. When I worked on some of the passage notes previously (meaning over a year ago) I had some difficulty deciding on a format for them. Should I type the parallel passages in a table or columns? Or should I just refer to the passages and let a reader (including me sometime in the future) pull out a Bible and flip between gospels? I elected to go with typing the parallel passages in a Word table? More work, more paper, more trees killed (or pixels consumed), but more usable passage notes.
As I said yesterday, working on this wasn’t on the radar screen for this month, probably not for the year, but my reading drew me to it. This seems to be the way of my writing life. Reading or teaching or some other of life’s activities gives me a burst of interest, and I (research if necessary and) write. It doesn’t matter if it’s a new project or old project, an outlined project or seat-of-the-pants piece. It doesn’t matter if I have been hot and heavy in the middle of something else. I go with the flow. Wherever the creative waters gush, there I go.
So that puts me at odds with Carlyle. It seems that, while he recognized that he should follow his creative juices, he also knew he had to complete a project to make some money. His lecture series would be quite profitable, and Carlyle at that point in his career still did not have financial success. So somehow he found the inspiration he needed to prepare his lectures. The working classes did not inspire him at that moment, and would not really futher his goals, though they would a year or two later.
When I feel the creative juices flowing in a certain direction, I go there, regardless of what I’m working on at the moment. That’s why I have a dozen writing projects opened, and none finished. In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People was where I was supposed to be spending my time yesterday. That and two articles for Suite 101. Despite the busyness of a Sunday, I had enough time carved out to write a thousand words in FTSP or complete at least one if not two articles for Suite. Yet I went with the flow instead of practicing creative discipline.
On Rachelle Gardner’s blog on Friday I made a comment about that (comments 207 and 208 to Rachelle’s post), claiming I had genre identity disorder (G.I.D.). That may have been a misnomer. Perhaps I should call it Writer Discipline Deficiency. Or maybe Uncontrolled Creative Flow.
Somehow I need to learn to do what Carlyle did: go with the creative flow, yet complete projects started before going on to the next. Get the next idea documented in a notebook or journal, locked down, and carry on where I was before the inspiration hit.
Oh well, tonight, as the time allows, I will be mostly working on passage notes again, trying to get the notes written for at least one passage. If time allows and inspiration calls, I’ll see about a Suite article too. However, what I really should do tonight is get my household budget and financial records up to date (1.5 months behind) and get something done on my income taxes. Unfortunately, inspiration for those two items is lacking.
