Bible study, Documenting America, goals

May Progress, June Goals

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  • Blog twice a week on Mondays and Fridays. Some of those I may have to write early due to schedule conflicts. Did this, including writing a few pieces ahead of time and scheduling them to post on day we were traveling.
  • Start writing Volume 2 of A Walk Through Holy Week. I don’t have a specific goal as to word count. Just making a start will be sufficient. I began this! And it’s good to be writing again. As of this morning, I’m approximately 30 percent done with it. I had hoped for a little more progress, but am pleased with what I got done.
  • Continue to scan, format, and file old documents, specifically poem critique I did from 2001 to approximately 2012. I have done well so far, but have another ±400 pages to go. I have no specific page goal—just getting some done will be sufficient. I thought I finished this, but found another two notebooks, with maybe another 300 pages that need to be scanned. I’ll write a post about it later in the month—or possibly next month.
  • Do a little reading for the next Documenting America book. The problem is, as reported in a previous post, I don’t know if the subject will be the Articles of Confederation or Abolition. I hope by the end of this month to be far down the road in deciding between the two. I did a fair amount of research reading for this project in May. That’s the good news. The bad news is I found it very laborious, and am not sure I’ll be able to use it. I’ll have to think about this going forward.
  • One other major thing accomplished, thought not an official goal for the month, was transcribe the writing diary for our trips in 1983. Most of it had to do with the big Asian trip, but I also documented some other snippets. That’s now done. Will next have to format it and work it in to the book of letters for the Saudi years.

I still have one more day in this month, so perhaps I’ll get a little more done on the book and scanning.

As far as June goes, it’s difficult to set goals since we have a trip in the works and then a grandchild with us for a week. But I’ll take a stab at it. I can always edit the goals at some point in the month.

  • Blog twice a week on Mondays and Fridays. That’s starting to sound monotonous.
  • Make good progress on A Walk Through Holy Weeks, Vol 2: Temple Teaching. I’ll have to see if time will materialize for writing. If I had to set a goal, I’d like to be at least 70 percent done.
  • Continue with my scanning/formatting/e-filing of old poetry critiques project. This task is bigger than I thought, and will take a lot of perseverance to get it done. I think it will take three more months to finish.
  • Begin to put together my book of our letters from Saudi Arabia.  The letters are transcribed and saved, the travel diary is only a day or two away from full transcription. I’d like to have the book mostly done by mid-July (for reasons that will be revealed in a future post). That means I need to be 2/3 done by the end of June.
  • As with last month, I want to spend some time reading for the next Documenting America book, but it will have to be different material than I read in May. I have a book picked out to take with me and read on our next trip. May also get some in before that.

That’s it for goals, subject, as always, to amendment.

family

Trip 1 Is In The Bag

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It was good to see our son, and attend a Woo-Sox baseball game.

From May 11 until just the wee hours of May 23, Lynda and I were on a road trip back to New England. The posts you saw during this time were written ahead and scheduled to go live at my normal posting days when I knew it would be difficult to post.

Lots of good memories on this trip.

The reason for the timing of the trip was my 50 year reunion of graduating from URI, which was held May 17-18. Of course, other reasons exist to go back there. Our son now works at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. While we have seen him regularly at our place, we hadn’t to where he lived for close to three years. Also, I have family in the area, friends in the area, who I hadn’t seen since 2015.

Too many good meals. We both gained weight on the trip.

 

The trip took much planning. Number of days to drive outbound. Where to stay. Which reunion events to attend. When to hold a family gathering. What kind of buddies gathering we could have. Who to meet up with outside of the main gatherings. Where to stay in New England. When to head home. Many pieces to fit together. I tried to arrange for several other meet-ups, but people were unavailable.

The full gathering save two: one who left early for a birthday party, and Mario, who took the photo.

Surprisingly, all turned out well. I booked hotels for the 3-day outbound trip. Always before we’ve taken two days for this drive. When we neared our hotel the first night, Lynda thought it was ridiculous to stop so soon. But stop we did. A traffic tie-up the last half hour made the early stop seem closer to normal. The next day, the early stop seemed more normal. And getting to Worcester the third day seemed totally normal.

We had several days of meals with our son, who had to work every day. We saw the house they’re staying in, lots of the Holy Cross campus, and his office. I wouldn’t say we learned a lot about Worcester, but what we did see we like.

Many changes at URI campus. I toured the new engineering center.

On Friday it was to Rhode Island for the reunion. Part of the day included a stop at the library special collections, which I’ll tell about in a future post. It was good to be on campus. I took time to go to the Memorial Union and visit old haunts, including the student senate chambers, where I spent so much time junior and senior years. My main complaint about the reunion was it wasn’t very well attended.

The Student Senate chambers. I wonder if that’s the same carpet from 50 years ago.

Saturday was our family gathering, partially catered and partially potluck. We had twenty attend overall, including a surprise visit by my half-sister, who flew up from Florida for the occasion. She got to meet family members she didn’t know before. This was a good time for all.

Lynda and I then rushed back to R.I. for the last reunion event. Sunday was a visit to the cemetery where my family is buried and a tour of places in Providence and Cranston, Then off to Cape Cod for two days, then reverse course with a stop in Worcester on the way out. The drive home we did the old-fashioned way: freestyle, with no plan and no reservations.

The first day heading home, I routed us over the new Cuomo Bridge north of NYC, just because I wanted to see it. Big mistake. That cost us close to an hour lost to heavy traffic. We stopped for the night in central Pennsylvania. The next day we ditched the stopped we had sort of planned at the Columbus zoo and just kept driving. We made it home around 1:15 a.m. Thursday morning after 18 hours of driving.

The trip was good. Maybe this was our last long driving trip. It sure took a lot out of us. Had we flown it would have been 9 days instead of 12. But it was a good trip. Good to see the old house and schools, friends from long ago, and family.

Trip 2 is coming soon. Not near as long a drive, but maybe the same number of days.

Christianity, miscellaneous

Things Proposed on Facebook, Pt 4: How Stupid Can You Be?

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Is this an appropriate meme to be sharing? Somehow I think not. It certainly doesn’t comply with the law of love that Jesus spoke about on several occasions.

Here’s one more in my series of social media posts. This one is a little longer than the other ones. I’ve seen it worded two or three ways. It’s based on the premise that people act stupidly. Now, I know that the word “stupid” is out of favor at present. You ought not call anyone stupid, which is usually meant to demean their intelligence.

The meme I see fairly regularly on Facebook, and I suspect it would also be on other social media platforms, is something like this.

I have got to stop saying “How stupid can you be?” I’m beginning to think people are taking it as a challenge.

In other words, people in general are really, really stupid. And just when you think they can’t be any stupider than they have been so far, they go and do something even more stupid.

This grates on me. Behind this meme is the thought by the one posting it that everyone he/she knows is stupider than he/she. The person has an expectation that everyone he encounters in life is below him on the intelligence scale. Or on the behavioral scale.

I look at Jesus’s command to love one another, love your neighbor, and love God. Somehow this meme doesn’t fit that command. You might say, “I’m just telling it like it is.” You might think so. You might even be way high on the behavioral and intelligence scales. But saying this meme is not loving others.

It’s your choice. Post the meme if you want to appear arrogant. I’m going to do my best to live out the law of love.

Engineering, miscellaneous, Personal Growth

Things Proposed On Facebook, Pt 3: Surround Yourself

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I find truth in this saying, but when do you get to the place where you give rather than get?

Continuing with my mini-series of mini-posts about advice found on Facebook, here is the third one. On Facebook, you have heard it said:

If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.

Said another way:

Surround yourself with people who are better than you are.

Admirable sentiments, don’t you think? How can anybody object to that? In order to improve yourself, choose your friends wisely; make sure they are smarter than you, better than you. Let their wisdom, experience, and common sense rub off on you. You will soon find yourself a better person.

But…but…if you really, rigorously do that, you might help yourself, but can you ever help someone else to be better? You can’t. You will always be taking, never giving.

So it seems like this is the height of selfishness. Yes, sometimes surround yourself with good, smart, better people, and grow from your association with them. But at other times, be the smartest, most experienced person in the room and help others to grow.

I remember back to college. I think it was fall semester sophomore year. Several of us in the engineering program were in the same calculus class. This was level three calculus. We’d already been through calculus both semesters freshman year. Third level was what was supposed to weed out those who would make it or not as an engineer. I was working a lot of hours at the Burger Chef that semester, riding my 5-speed bicycle the 5 miles each way, along with 18 credit hours, leaving little time for study. Leading up to a critical test, I thought I knew the material fairly well but still wanted to study more.

But two other guys in the same class with me were struggling big time. They asked me for help. So between classes and work, rather than study on my own to improve my knowledge, I met with them and went over the material. The test came without me doing my normal intensive study for a math test. I felt fairly good, but thought I could have done better if I had found the time to study.

The day the grades were supposed to be posted, I went to the professor’s office. He walked in about the time I got there. He said the tests were graded but not yet entered in his book. Would I help him do that? I took the pile of tests and read off the names and grades while he entered them in his book. Yes, this was a primitive time, long before computer databases and grading systems. Page by page I read, over 60 students in his three classes of this course. Finally I came to my test. I got a 100. My best grade of the year. It paid to help my friends study what they needed to know, perhaps more than studying on my own.

I want to be careful here. Making sure others in the room are smarter than you may be a form of selfishness, but making sure you’re the smartest in the room could easily lead to arrogance. Some balance is required.

But I think it’s easy to reject this Facebook advice. Be in the position with others that makes sense for you. Look for smart people when you need help and needy people when you need to minister.

Christianity, Politics

Things Proposed On Facebook, Pt 2: Willful Workers Of Wickedness

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I’ve seen this several places. Somehow it grates on me.

This second post in the series about advice found on Facebook somewhat stunned me. It came in a post titled “A Prayer for Removal of the Wicked”. Here’s the text of it.

Father, we ask in the name of Jesus that all WILLFUL WORKERS OF WICKEDNESS be removed from position of power, prominence and prestige. Open the eyes of those being deceived and place people who stand for your righteous cause in the high places of government and influence.

I have to tell you, I have mixed feelings about this. At least until I think about it. Do I want our government to function efficiently, honestly, and ethically? For sure. Would I like to see every government employee be an ethical person and do only good, never wickedness? Of course. Am I so naive that I think everyone in government has good as their only attention? No, I know that in any large group of humans there are plenty of people who meet the definition of “willful workers of wickedness”.

Should we pray for as stated in that posted prayer? You would think so, but I wonder. As Christians, where is our hope? Is it in government? Or in God? If in government, where is there room for God? If in God, why would we pray a prayer so all-encompassing as to ask God to remove all those from government whose conduct does not meet with our definition of goodness? Because, before you declare some people wicked, you have to define wickedness.

Well, that’s easy, you say. Sin is the definition of wickedness. But no two people can agree on the definition of sin; hence, no consensus definition of wickedness is to be had. But surely there is a degree of wickedness so bad that we can agree on that? Let the prayer be limited to the wickedness we all can agree on, and ask God to run all of them out of government. So to pray that prayer means we are setting ourselves up as the ones who define what wickedness is.

I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t seem to be following the law of love. How could we rephrase that prayer—assuming the presence of wicked people in government at any or all levels is a true problem—so that it complies with the law of love? How about:

Father, we ask that you help our government to be a force for good, not evil. We pray that government workers and leaders at all levels work only for the good of their constituents.

That would be a prayer I could pray. As for that prayer suggested on Facebook, I think it better to leave it un-prayed.

Christianity, miscellaneous

Things Proposed on Facebook, Pt 1: How To Treat Others

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You all have probably seen something like this on social media.

Yes, Facebook, like all social media, is full of advice. Is any of it worth listening to? Or actually modifying your behavior to emulate it? I’m thinking of doing a series of short posts—not necessarily consecutively—discussing some of them. Or, perhaps I’ll do one or two and find it a waste of time. But here’s the first.

If you treat me right, I’ll treat you right. But if you cross me, I’ll hurt you right back.

I have seen this over and over on Facebook. It’s probably on other social media platforms as well. I’ve seen it said by men and women, though more often by men. The people who say this seem to span many ages, though I think they come more often from those considered middle aged.

Is this good advice, something worth making one of you life behaviors? When I think of wise maxims people have grown to accept as useful guides to behavior, I think of the Golden Rule.

Do unto others as you would have them do to you.

But that’s just the opposite of the Facebook advice, which can be rephrased as

Do to others as they have done to you.

That’s just the opposite of the Golden Rule. Let your behavior be governed by others—not just by others, but by behavior that you dislike or even find reprehensible. You wind up behaving just like them.

I also see in this Facebook phrase a touch of passive aggressiveness. That may not be the right use of that psychology phrase, which I’m not sure I ever fully understood. But you are saying something aggressive that you will enact in a passive way—your behavior totally depending on how others behave toward you.

How much better to treat others, not how they have treated you, but in love. To return insult with blessing; evil with good; hate with love.

So, when you see this advice on Facebook or other social media, counter it with the Golden Rule. Don’t let your behavior be dictated by that of others.

Bible study, critique group, Health, home improvements, letters

Busy, Busy, Busy

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I’m late with my Friday morning post. Chalk it up to busyness.

I won’t say all that’s going on that made the days busy, but here’s a little of it.

  • Monday I went to the hospital for a test, only to find out the test was no longer needed because a test they did back on April 15 covered the same area. $20 miles of expense just getting there, and about two hours I would never get back.
  • Wednesday I went back to the same hospital for a different test, an MRI to take a closer look at a small mass of “neoplasm” found in the April 15 test. While the final report isn’t complete, it appears to be just a cyst on my kidney. Nothing to worry about.
  • We had painters at the house Monday-Wednesday, finishing the work needed after repairs from water damage to the house. I think I’ve blogged about that before.
  • Yardwork continues, though I’m pretty much on top of it and need to do only a little every day. I hope to get in an hour today.
  • We are slowly putting everything back in place from the house repairs. Got some done last night.
  • We continue to sell a few things in our dis-accumulation efforts. Sold two items this week, and brought a bookshelf to the garage for work to strengthen and repurpose it.
  • I’ve been writing this week. Today I wrote the last two sections of Chapter 2 of Volume 2 of A Walk Through Holy Week. I feel good about the progress.
  • I’ve had several items of correspondence this week with other writers—some for our critique group and some just for pleasure.
  • Yesterday I finished transcribing letters from or years in Saudi Arabia. I still have a travel journal to transcribe, then I’ll start putting them in a book for family. No hurry on this project.
  • I have made great progress with scanning/formatting/e-filing the poetry critiques I did from 2001-2010, which I had printed and saved. I’m down to less than thirty still to do. No hurry on this project either.
  • I’m working on plans for three special events over the next two weeks. Not going to say much about them now, but will likely blog about it later.

So with all this to do, I sort of forgot about my regular Friday post. Still, I’m not terribly late with it. And I won’t be late with my Monday post, for it’s already written and scheduled.

Documenting America, self-publishing

Book Sales

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Selling more of this series than any other.

I believe most people think authors make a lot of money. Alas, it’s exactly the opposite. Conventional wisdom within the author community is a self-published writer is above average if they sell 50 copies of a book.

When you get to my position, with over 40 items for sale (novels, non-fiction, short stories, essays), you hope the sales start to add up. But again alas, that hasn’t happened so far.

The last in this series if doing OK in sales—better, actually, than the others did in this stage of their publishing life.

Amazon is an enigma. Several times in my 13 years of bookselling on their platform, I’ve seen sales start to increase. I get to the point where I think I may see a breakthrough, only to see them plummet after a few months of increasing sales. That’s happened three of four times over the years.

Now, I don’t want you to think that the ramping up period meant huge sales for a few months. I might have had sales go from 5 to 10 or even 15 per month, but then suddenly it dropped back to under 5. It’s frustrating. Since I started running ads on Amazon I’ve seen some increase, but not great.

The pattern seemed to repeat in 2023. After some decent sales—well, decent for me—the bottom dropped out  in September and stayed down the next few months. Last December saw a slight uptick and I was hopeful, while at the same time waiting for Amazon to change their algorithms again, Let me give you sales per month for the last year.

Or, to see it another way, here’s a graph of my lifetime book sales. The current month, May 2024, is obviously not complete yet, but is off to a good start.

Lifetime book sales. The blue line, which I keep forgetting to label, is sales per title, now at a whopping 37.3 sales per item.

So it’s not a lot of sales, but the number is growing. The recent trend upward is encouraging. And unexplained. Did Amazon change their algorithm in a way that’s favorable to me? Did they suddenly start showing my ads to people more likely to buy? Or have I reached some point of combination of past sales, ranking, and total items for sale that sales have become self-sustaining? I wish I knew.

My Documenting America series continues to sell best. It makes me anxious to get on to the next one. But I think I’ll stay with the schedule I’ve made: finish the Bible study series, write the next The Forest Throne book, then see what’s next.

 

Bible study, letters, miscellaneous

Writing Again

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Vol 1 is published, Vols. 4, 5, 6, and 7 are written and edited. Vol. 8 is written and edited one time. Vol. 2 is now underway.

I finished writing my latest book, A Walk Through Holy Week, Vol 8, on April 1. I set the book aside for a time of seasoning—not of the book, but of my brain. For two weeks, almost three, I concentrated on my two special projects: transcribing letters from our years in Saudi Arabia, and scanning/saving of the hundreds of pages of poetry critiques I posted at on-line poetry boards years ago.

On Friday April 19, with the two special projects making good progress, I decided to pick Volume 8 again and do a round of edits. I did one chapter that day. That felt good. I did this using Microsoft Word’s text-to-speech feature, which I am liking more and more. So on Monday April 22, I edited two chapters, then did two each day and finished up one chapter on Saturday April 27. The main problem I found with the book is what seems to be too much repetition.

I then made the decision to put the book on the shelf and let it rest until I’m ready to publish Volumes 2 through 7. That will allow me to publish them in order.

But that got me to the point where I figured it was time to get to work on Volume 2 (Volumes 4, 5, 6, and 7 are already written and simmering, waiting their turn to find the book pages of Amazon). On Saturday, April 27, I took about an hour to begin the outline of the book. I finished that on Monday April 29. That brought me to Tuesday, April 30. Time to begin writing.

And that’s what I did on Tuesday April 30. I sat down at my computer, outline in hand, and got started on Chapter 1. Each chapter has seven sections, and I decided to write just one this day.  I was able to do that in less than an hour, a little over 750 words. I also did some formatting of the Bible verses already loaded into each chapter.

One section a day is less than my normal production, which is two sections a day. But for the first day writing after a layoff of almost a month, that wasn’t bad. Then, on Wednesday and Thursday, I was able to write two sections a day. The target for today is two sections, which will complete Chapter 1.

If I could equal the production I had when writing Vol. 8, I would finish he book sometime in June, possibly even early June. But I have lots of interruptions ahead: medical appointments, home maintenance need, and traveling. I will be happy if I can finish the book around the end of June or even into early July.

If I put my special projects aside, I think I could finish this well before July 1, but I don’t want to totally abandon the projects for the sake of writing. The trick will be to write the book while still working on the letters and critiques. Tuesday was a trial run of that. After writing, I transcribed two letters and scanned and saved several critiques. What I’ve found about the critiques is that each file created needs careful proofreading to check for scanner errors, as well as formatting to make sure everything is in a printable format. The goal is to someday put these in a nice concise volume, or probably two, as a record of a large part of my writing life.

I thought I was done with transcribing the Saudi years letters. I searched for letters that might have been missing to match a dozen or so empty envelopes. In the process I found a batch of letters written to us in Saudi Arabia. These were mainly from our last two grandmothers, with a handful from others. I found 43 of these letters, then another eight. So far I’ve transcribed sixteen of these. Only 27 to go. And I don’t have many more places to look for what should have been in those envelopes.

But that won’t be the end of the transcribing project. That year I kept a detailed travel journal for our trip through Asia, especially China. That will take a fair amount of transcribing. After that will be proofreading the transcriptions, then putting them in book form for the family. I don’t think I’ll finish this project in 2024. The transcription—yes; the proofreading—maybe; but assembling them into a book? Not a chance—not unless I drop everything else.

So, busy times.

Bible study, Documenting America, goals

April Progress; May Goals

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The end of April is upon us. Time to give an accounting of my writing time, and set some goals for May. My goals were modest because i expected to have several medical appointments. Those happened as expected, and cut into my writing quite a bit.

So, here’s my April progress.

  • Blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. I managed to do this, though I was quite late one day due to not having planned ahead.
  • Attend two writers meetings. I’ll miss one due to the heart cath. I am the presenter at one. Did this. Actually, I sort of attended a third, when I met with one writer in our critique group to help her with her writing.
  • Make two rounds of edits on A Walk Through Holy Week, Vol. 8. I did only one round of edits. I’ve decided that’s all I’ll do right now. It’s going on the shelf until early next year—an approximate timing.
  • Begin outlining the next volume to write in the Bible study. Maybe, if other things go faster than I expect, I’ll be able to actually start writing this. I did most of the programming of this volume.
  • Do some website upgrades. I saved this for the end of the month. As of this writing (Apr 29), I’ve made some but not all of the upgrades.
  • Continue with scanning old documents and saving them as e-files. I did a lot of this. In fact, I exceeded my goal as to how much I got done, completing one notebook. I have a lot to do, but I feel very good about how far I’ve gone.
  • One unofficial goal was to make major progress in transcribing letters from our years in Saudi Arabia. I actually exceeded this goal, transcribing the last one on April 25th. Though, I’ll have to restate the progress on this goal based on new information. Stay tuned.

Here are my may goals. Once again, they are modest, as some things are going on this month that will severely cut into writing time.

  • Blog twice a week on Mondays and Fridays. Some of those I may have to write early due to schedule conflicts.
  • Start writing Volume 2 of A Walk Through Holy Week. I don’t have a specific goal as to word count. Just making a start will be sufficient.
  • Continue to scan, format, and file old documents, specifically poem critique I did from 2001 to approximately 2012. I have done well so far, but have another ±400 pages to go. I have no specific page goal—just getting some done will be sufficient.
  • Do a little reading for the next Documenting America book. The problem is, as reported in a previous post, I don’t know if the subject will be the Articles of Confederation or Abolition. I hope by the end of this month to be far down the road in deciding between the two.

That’s enough. I will be very surprised if I manage to get all these done.

Author | Engineer