It’s been a bad few days, with computer problems, people problems, etc. Spent all yesterday evening trying to work through the computer problems, so I didn’t write a blog post for today.
Nor can I do it this morning. Not a real post. I’ll work through this stuff, and hopefully, by Monday, I’ll be back with a real blog post.
As I said in my last post, the weekend just passed was full of publishing tasks. I made good progress on them, but that will be a subject for a future post.
In terms of writing, one of my current tasks is research on the next book in my Church History series of novels. Tentatively titled Adam Of Jerusalem, it will be the prequel to Doctor Luke’s Assistant. All this I have mentioned before.
My plan is to have Augustus’ father, Adam, as a junior scribe in the high priest’s employ. On the night when Jesus is brought in for questioning and trial, Adam will be sent on an errand to gather members of the Sanhedrin for the illegal nighttime trial. Later, after Jesus’ death and the early growth of the Christian movement, Adam is assigned to gather information on the teachings of Jesus, with the idea that they will prove heretical, and the high priest can use them against what he sees as a threat to his authority.
In essence, Adam will be the one who pulls together the document known today as “Q”. Short for Quelle [i.e. Source], this is a document thought to have existed prior to Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels. First proposed in the early 1800s, by the mid-1900s, Christian scholarship seems to have more or less accepted this as having been a true document. It’s contents, while technically unknown, are proposed to be the sayings of Jesus, that large body of teaching that appears in Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark. The supposition is Mark was written first. At the same time, “Q” was written, and was available to both Matthew and Luke as they wrote their gospels. Possibly both Matthew and Luke had other sources, which of course is the subject of Doctor Luke’s Assistant.
So, I’ve been researching “Q”. What I’m finding is its existence actually isn’t all that universally accepted by scholars as I thought. A lot of scholars seem doubtful to downright derisive. If “Q” existed, they say, where are the copies? Why haven’t we found any manuscripts? To that I would counter: We haven’t found any copies of any New Testament manuscripts from the first century. Once the contents of “Q” were incorporated into the gospels, to continue to copy it as a separate document would have been silly. You copy the later and more complete document, not the earlier notes that you used to write the later document. Doesn’t that seem logical?
The “Q” opponents don’t seem to think so. Some of them are almost vitriolic in their arguments against “Q”. Why? I read some other essays/papers on the existence/non-existence of “Q”. What I gather from that is that those who say “Q” existed—at least those who say “Q” existed widely, and was copied frequently and used in the early churches before the gospels were written—say that “Q” represents a purer form of Christian teaching than the gospels do. Why purer? Because it came before the gospels. Why widespread? Because if both Matthew and Luke had it, it must have been often copied and widely disseminated.
So what? you might ask. Why is this important. The proponents of “Q” say it consisted of only sayings/teachings of Jesus, not the virgin birth, not the miracles, not the passion, death, and resurrection. It presented Jesus as a great moral teacher, not the divine Son of God, the God-Man that we think of him as today. So say some of the proponents of “Q”.
This, I think, is the reason why some people are hitting back so hard against “Q”. If you’re going to expand “Q” from someone’s research notes into a document intended to stand alone and be used as teaching, and if you’re going to say that represents true Christianity before it was “corrupted” by all this God-Man gibberish, well, yeah, I can see why other scholars would push back so hard against it.
The amount of time spent on this question, based on the large mass of documents available on it, is mind-boggling. It seems logical to me, almost intuitively obvious, that someone, somewhere, before Matthew and Luke began to write their gospels, had written some notes on Jesus’ sayings. Someone else had probably written something about his passion, death, and resurrection; so it made sense for someone else to concentrate on his teaching. Why argue against that? Why try to make it into a proto-gospel, and claim documents subsequent to it are un-pure Christianity, i.e. corrupted Christianity? It’s this larger claim, I think, that fuels those who say they don’t believe “Q” existed.
Both sides, then, appear to be over-stating things. And so the controversy goes on. Scholars are trying to use what were someone’s simple research notes and make them more than they were, which causes others to say they probably never existed.
My take in Adam Of Jerusalem will be that they existed, but they were never widely copied or disseminated, and never formed a stand-alone teaching document. Maybe that’s a middle-of-the-road position, but I think it’s a good one, and I’m sticking to it.
After a four day weekend trip to Meade, Kansas, for the funeral of my wife’s aunt, we returned home Monday evening, around 6:15 p.m. That’s what I call getting in in good time. After unpacking and relaxing a little, I went to The Dungeon, with the intent of resuming my writing career.
However, I saw that I had two directions to go in, and that one was necessary and one was optional. On the weekend I had spent some time reading for research into my next church history novel. I could continue with that, as well as re-read what I’ve written in my workplace humor novel, and decide which I would do next. Those two, together, form one direction: a writing path.
The other direction was publishing tasks. I need to get the print version of Documenting America: Civil War Edition finished and published. I need to get the print version of Headshots finished and published. On Monday evening, as I sat trying to make the decision, the former needed only a little work, while the latter had the interior done (I think; it’s been a while since I did it), and the cover needs to be done. I also need to get recent books listed on Goodreads, and a couple of short stories added to Smashwords.
I could see right away that the publishing tasks were more important right now. Yet, I couldn’t do them. Just something about them made me want to not start them. The same was true Tuesday and Wednesday. I couldn’t make myself do them. The DA:CWE cover it on my computer at work, and the interior on my computer at home. I guess it’s also on OneDrive, but I don’t really know how to use that or access it from work. But at work, in my personal time, I couldn’t make myself work on the cover. At home, I couldn’t make myself finish the interior. Consequently, Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday I got nothing done on my writing/publishing.
Yesterday was different. Thursday morning, before work started, I pulled up the cover in G.I.M.P. Just using that program makes me want to vomit. But, I didn’t really have much to do. I had one block of text I needed to change the font on, move an image a little, and I was done. I couldn’t figure out how to make the text changes. I looked in the manual, in some on-line tutorials, all with no help. Finally, I looked closer at my cover, and could see that the text, which was placed in the cover by someone else for the last book in the series, wasn’t a text layer at all; it was an image that couldn’t be changed. I quickly deleted that layer, created a text layer and put the text in with the correct font. I had the cover done and saved at 8:05 a.m.
Then, last night I took a look at the interior. I had finished it a couple of weeks ago, but wanted to give it one more look-through, just to make sure. I did that, and judged it “done”. I e-mailed it to my office (because I don’t know how to use OneDrive) to make the PDF today. I’ll do that shortly. At that point, I’ll have the cover and the interior files done, and on the same computer, and so will do the upload. I hope to have the finished on the noon hour today.
That brings me to Headshots. I think this weekend I’ll see what I can do with that. If the interior is really done, all that will be left is the print cover. That will have to wait until next week, unless I wake up my old computer (which had G.I.M. P.) and try to do it there. They say it’s to rain much of the weekend. How I would love to get Headshots done.
Adding books to Goodreads is easy; there’s just a few steps to go through. Adding the short stores to Smashwords will take a little formatting, but that should be only 30 minutes for each. Who know? Maybe by Sunday I can have all my publishing tasks behind me, and Monday I’ll be ready to get back to writing tasks. I’ll give you a report then.
My wife and I, along with her mother, just made a four-day trip to Meade, Kansas, for the funeral of Faye Pohl, aunt of Lynda and sister of Esther. As a result, I didn’t get a post written for today. I’ll be back at it Friday.
My wife’s aunt, Faye Irene (Moler) Pohl, passed away on July 18, 2017, in Wichita Kansas. She had gone there for surgery, an extensive surgery for one who was 90 years old. She didn’t survive this, passing away less than a week later.
I first met Faye in October, 1975. I was dating Lynda at the time, things were getting a bit serious between us, so I was obliged to make the trip to the hometown and meet the family. After a late arrival and a night’s sleep, we walked the two blocks from my (then future) mother-in-law’s house to Faye’s. Her husband was in the midst of remodeling a large home in Meade. I didn’t see a lot of Faye on that trip, as there was much to do and many people to see. But we ate Sunday dinner at her house, and I could clearly see she was a gracious hostess and a good cook.
Over the years, I’ve had many chances to be with and see Faye, always at family times. We made trips to Meade, she and her husband Leonard made trips to where we were, and I got to learn much about her. Her gifts as a hostess I saw demonstrated many times, in meals large and small. She always had a nicely set table, a balanced meal fixed, and desserts at the ready. She also always urged second or third helpings on me. Yet, I’m not going to blame my lingering though shrinking obesity on her. I did that all on my own.
Faye’s life was spent mostly in Meade County, Kansas. She was born in Meade, the county seat, but the family soon moved a few miles north of town to the silica mine, where her dad, Millard Moler, was the crane operator. Her first seven years of school were at the Artesian Valley School, a one-room, rural schoolhouse. The family moved back to Meade in time for Faye’s 7th grade year. She lived in Meade, or on a family farm south of Meade for most of the next two decades. Briefly the family moved to Colorado then Idaho, but was back in Meade by 1973, stayed there until the late 1990s, when Leonard retired and the moved to Hutchinson Kansas. After Leonard’s death in 2005, Faye moved back to Meade for the remainder of her live.
For those of you who don’t know the Kansas high plains, it’s bleak, dusty, and windy. Part of the so-called “Great American Desert”, it’s devoid of trees except where the town folk plant and nurture them. It’s farming country, traditionally for winter wheat, though more recently for corn, always with other crops mixed in. If you aren’t a famer or farmer’s wife, you are working to somehow support agriculture. The land isn’t quite as flat as you might think. It’s gently rolling, with a fair amount of true flatland. Farmers have done some major earth moving and flattened miles and miles to make the land more suitable for easy farming. Despite the bleakness, I fell in love with the Kansas prairies a long time ago.
That was an aside to say that Faye learned to be prepared for weather on the prairies. I remember stopping at a cemetery in Spearville, Kansas, at Faye’s request. We were taking her from Meade to Hutchinson sometime after her husband died. She and Esther had an uncle buried there, who had died as a boy in an accident with some horses, before the family moved to Meade. She wanted to see his grave, which she hadn’t seen for a long time. We found the cemetery, on the prairie north of Spearville. The minute we got out of the car that wind hit us hard—not a storm; the wind just blows constantly. I noticed that Faye already had on a clear-plastic rain hat, to protect her hair from the wind. She must have pulled it from her purse and put it on before leaving the car. Yes, she was well prepared for what the prairie would throw at her, that time, and every time.
Faye was active in her husband’s accounting business in Meade, as well as on the farm for the years they lived there. She was a life-long member of the Church of the Nazarene, teaching Sunday School, singing in the choir, and taking various positions of service within the church. Faye demonstrated the heart of a servant in all she did. Her ministries extended beyond the local church. She served as treasurer of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and was active in Country Gospel Music Association events, singing with other family members.
Faye will be missed much. She enriched the lives of those she met and interacted with. She lived her last twelve years as a widow, and survived cancer during that time. She’s now singing the old hymns and choruses in the celestial choir—with maybe a little country gospel mixed in.
In a recent post, I mentioned how my mind was starting to focus on things I might be writing next. Documenting America: Civil War Edition is finished. All except the print version, that is, but I think I’m not more than two days away from having that done and submitting it for checking by CreateSpace. I have a few publishing tasks awaiting me that don’t involve writing, such as getting the Headshots print version done. And making corrections to the Smashwords edition of Preserve The Revelation so that it can be pushed out to other vendors via Smashword’s premium catalog. Yes, I have much publishing to do.
But that’s not writing. With one book finished, it’s time to work on the next. But what to work on? I have two obvious choices:
The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 2. The first volume of what I hope will become a series, of workplace humor about the engineering business, has been out since 2012. It’s one of my five highest selling items, mostly to people who work where I do. A couple of years ago I started the next volume, and got into chapter 4 (of a planned 15 chapter book), when I set it aside to do other things. I have the book mostly planned out, the humorous stories pulled from my past or manufactured. All that remains it to decide to write it and get it finished. Hopefully, I can find my scattered notes.
Adam of Jerusalem. This will be a prequel to Doctor Luke’s Assistant. It’s been on my list of things to write for some time. A few plot elements came to mind early, but not how I’m going to get it done. How do you squeeze a prequel ahead of a book when you never planned on it when you wrote the first book? You can’t go back and unwrite, or rewrite the second in the series. But ways of doing this have been coming to me. I’ve figured out how I want to open the book, and what the inciting incident will be. A few other scenes have come to mind.
What to do? The Gutter Chronicles makes the most sense, and I suspect I’ll at least give it a try. However, the gray cells have been giving me more ideas for Adam of Jerusalem. What to do? I could wrap up TGC Vol 2 in 30,000 words; AoJ will take about 80,000.
As an example of what I mean by the gray cells activating, until recently I have having a hard time figuring out how to show Adam’s slide from Judaism to adopting Roman ways. As mentioned above, I had decided what would be the inciting incident for this, but how to make it work in the story without violating anything I’ve already written in Doctor Luke’s Assistant. Well, the way to do this came to me recently. I don’t have every scene worked out, but it’s clear how I can accomplish this. I’m not receiving similar clarity on The Gutter Chronicles—although I’m further along with that book. Perhaps that will be less of gray cells stimulation and more of in-the-seat perspiration.
While these two books are prime on my to-write-next list, they aren’t the only candidates. The next short story in my Sharon Williams Fonseca series has been coming to mind. It will be set in Paris. Also on my mind is a book about the Stephen and Elizabeth (Cheney) Cross family of Ipswich, Massachusetts, in the 1600s. Last year I spent a month of intense work on this couple. It is intended to be a chapter in a book about Elizabeth’s father, John Cheney of Newbury. When I finished the Crosses, I saw I had between 60 and 80 pages (formatted as 5.5×8.5 pages), and was shocked. John Cheney had ten children who grew to adulthood. The work before me seemed to massive to continue with, so I set the project aside. However, I have the Cross portion done, and, I figure, why not publish it as a small, stand-alone family history? It would take perhaps another month of tidying up, expanding the narrative a little, and doing all the publishing tasks. I may do that, but not as the next book. Maybe after I finish whichever one I choose to do next.
So, while the gray cells are active, and I can sense writing in the near future (such as in August, if not some in July), I don’t know which book is next. Today will be a day of publishing activities. Tomorrow, who knows? I may take some time at work to read what I’ve already written on TGC. If I like what I read, perhaps that will be next.
Here’s the quarterly table:
………1Q…..2Q…..3Q…..4Q….Year
2011….2…….7……11…..15…..35
2012…16…..73……45…..22…156
2013…14…..22……16…..13….65
2014…..7…..48……25……2…..82
2015…11…..25……38……9…..83
2016…. 9……6…….10….17…..42
2017…17…..22
Total sales to date—502
So, the 2nd quarter was a little better than that 1st, and certainly better than the 2nd quarter last year. It’s a little deceiving, however. My sales by month were: April 13, May 5, June 3. So sales were trailing off. The April peak was due to my personally selling some print books to acquaintances at work and church. Once those were done, sales trailed off.
Once again, I did no advertising this quarter. My only promotions were a few Facebook posts, and talking my books up in person when the opportunity seemed right.
Here’s my sales table for the year. Note that I had one sale at Kobo. Kobo has reported that I had a sale, but not of which book. So that the table would be right, I applied the sale to “Growing Up Too Fast”. They should report for June in about two weeks. When they do, I’ll correct the table, if needed and edit the post. Click on the table to see it in readable size. Note: I did come back and edit this post to show one additional sale, but it’s not the Kobo sale. In June I sold a an e-book copy of Documenting America: Lessons From The United States’ Historical Documents – Homeschool Edition, to a library through Baker & Taylor Blio. First sale through that bookstore, and, so far as I know, first sale to a library.
So, I still haven’t given you the post about the gray cells awakening. I plan on doing that on Monday. This last week I was working on getting Documenting America: Civil War Edition published. That took all my gray cells for a few days.
Making an extra post this week to announce that Documenting America: Civil War Edition is published. Over the weekend I got a lot of the work done that I described in a prior post. But, I mostly worked on the print version. On Tuesday evening, I sat in The Dungeon with the intent of getting a start on the two e-book versions. That work went well, much better than I expected. In less than an hour I had the Kindle version ready to go. So I went ahead and uploaded it.
Normally I would wait until the next day to mess with the Smashwords edition, mainly to keep from feeling overwhelmed with everything that needs to be done. However, I went ahead with it, and, lo and behold, I got that done in less than 30 minutes and uploaded. By the next morning, I had messages that the Kindle upload was successful, but the Smashwords upload wasn’t. Something I had done with the formatting was supported by Kindle but not by Smashwords. Last night I got it corrected and uploaded, and I’m waiting to hear if it will go live today.
On Kindle, I had two sales yesterday. That’s a good start. Those two sales place it at #35 in one of its subcategories. One or two more sales today and it might make it to the front page of the category bestseller list. That could get me excited.
Yes, I’m almost there.
On Friday, I went to The Dungeon after supper and worked on formatting Documenting America: Civil War Edition for print. I finished it in an hour and a half. That is, I think I finished it. I still will proofread it. And I haven’t created the PDF file yet. But it’s there, on the computer, ready to go. In less time than I expected.
On Saturday, in the afternoon after a busy day of yard work, house work, and grocery shopping, I again went to The Dungeon, to see if I had enough energy to tackle the two e-book versions. Following the procedures I outlined in my previous blog post, I got started, one step at a time. I stripped out the headers and footers. I already had bookmarks at each chapter, so only had to put hyperlinks in the Table Of Contents. Got that done. Then put a link at the end of each chapter back to the TOC. That’s probably not necessary, but I did it. Then I saved it as both Kindle and Smashwords files, and did the final couple of touches each of these need.
That brought me to about 6:30 p.m. I had a meatloaf on, due to come out, so I left my documents. I think, however, they are done. All except for the covers, and the acknowledgement about who did the covers and took the cover photos.
Sunday afternoon, my wife and I took a drive to the Pea Ridge National Military Park, about 25 miles from us. We’ve driven by it many times over the years as we head to Ozark destinations east of us, but haven’t actually been in the park since around 1995. I won’t go into a lot of detail on the park, or on the battle. I don’t cover this battle in my book, but this is the closest Civil War site to us, and, based on my vague memory of past visits there, knew I would have places to take photos.
We spent an hour or so there, in the visitors center, then driving the loop through the park. I got a lot of photos, the best of which, and the ones I’ll likely use on the cover, are here in this post. I will likely begin working on the covers tonight: the e-book cover for sure, and the print book cover once that’s done. One problem I have is I may not have an editable file of the original print cover. I’ll have to look around on my old computer. My son did the e-book cover for me, and a woman at our church, who does graphic design, took that and made the print cover from it. If I find it, it will either be a PDF or, possibly, a Photoshop file. If the first, I might be able to load it into G.I.M.P. and do the necessary edits. If the latter, I’m not sure G.I.M. P. can use it.
And, of course, I’m not even sure I have the necessary skills to get this done. I’m going to try, but we’ll see. I may need outside help on the print cover. So, it’s down to the covers, and the acknowledgement of the cover on the copyright page. Get those done, and uploaded to the three sites, and it’s published. Oh, yeah, still have back cover copy to write, along with the description to put on the websites. So, a couple of days, most likely, to first publication.
Meanwhile, I promised to post about the awakening of the gray cells. That will have to wait till Friday.
I’m in a bit of a slow period right now. Documenting America: Civil War Edition, is done. That is, the writing and editing of the master document are done. Today at noon, I went through my last mark-up of the manuscript, to see if I missed anything. I hadn’t. I thought I made a couple of notations where I wanted to add a couple of sentences, or perhaps paragraphs, but nothing showed on the manuscript. Apparently, such things were on my mind when I last read it, but I didn’t mark them on paper. Now, to re-read the entire work to find them seems too daunting to me. No, it will go to publication just as it is.
So what’s left? I need to create, from the master file, three separate files: one for Kindle, one for Smashwords, and one for CreateSpace (the print edition). I believe I will start to do that tonight. I could have done that anytime in the last week, but I wanted to wait for that one last flip through the marked-up manuscript. That now done, I’m ready to go on.
But, I’m really not ready. For some reason, the shift from writing to publishing tasks always seems to be a roadblock to me. I’d love to be able to turn this over to someone, pay them to do it. Alas, I don’t make enough on sales to afford that, so I won’t.
What’s involved with publishing, you ask, that’s so daunting? To each of the three publishing files, I have to add a Table Of Contents. I don’t need to do this for fiction, but for a non-fiction work such as this I do. For the print version, that means inserting bookmarks in the text and cross-references to the bookmarks in the TOC. It’s not hard; just feels like busywork. For the e-book files, I have to add hyperlinks in the TOC to the beginning of each chapter, having first inserted bookmarks there, and then add hyperlinks at the end of each chapter back to the TOC, after first having inserted a bookmark there. Again, it’s not all that hard, but feels like busy work.
Next is putting information on the copyright page. It varies slightly for the three different versions. Next is adding a list of my published works to each version. For the print book, this goes in front, on the back of the half-title page (something you don’t use in an e-book). For the e-books it goes in back. And, for each version, it’s different since the list is really links to sales pages: Kindle links for the Kindle version, Smashwords links for that version. I have master files of these links on my computer at home, and can just insert them into the publication files. Normally I have to do a minor update to each file to add whatever my most previous publication was.
That gets me up to the cover. Sometimes I have another person help me with it, or even do the cover for me. This time, however, I’m determined to do make the cover myself. The cover of Documenting America: Lessons From the United States’ Historical Documents, established a series theme, a theme I like. I suppose it could be called a series brand. I’m going to use that theme, changing the text just a little, and superimposing a Civil War era photo over the old document text, leaving some of the text showing around the outside. This, I think, is something I can do, both for the e-books and the print book.
Print book covers are harder, because you have to have dimensions matched to the print size of the book. So, before I do the print cover, I’ll have to re-format the print publication file to the right size page, adjust the margins to a proper size for the smaller page, and check to make sure headers/footers are correct, and there’s no stray blank pages I don’t want. I then will know the thickness of the print book, and can finalize the cover.
Oh, yeah, at this point I also need to strip the headers/footers out of the e-book files. Running headers/footers have no meaning on an e-book, which has free-flowing text.
A final step for the print book cover is to write some back cover copy. I don’t know that I do a very good job on this. How do you condense your 70,000 word book into a couple of paragraphs? Or, rather than condensing, what do you write that will make people take notice and want to read the book? Once I figure that out, I might get more sales.
Then, and only then, do I get to upload the three files to their respective sites. Actually, the e-book steps will most likely come together quicker, and I’ll have them done about a week before I have the print book done. I struggle with graphic arts software so much, that could actually take longer than a week.
But this post was supposed to be about gray cells starting to be activated. By that, I meant that ideas for specifics in the next book are starting to flow. However, since publishing tasks took me so many words to describe, I’ll have to save more on the gray cells for another time.