Carlyle, self-publishing

Learning GIMP

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PowerPoint works well enough for e-book covers, but not for print book. The reason is PowerPoint produces graphics that will print at 72 to 96 dpi (dots per inch), whereas a print cover should really print at 300 dpi. And it’s not a matter of creating the cover in PowerPoint, loading it into a good graphics editor, and printing it like that. The dpi won’t increase to print quality. At least that’s as I understand it.

So my choices with regard to a cover for my current book I want to get into print, Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles, were:

– Do it myself; or hire it done.

– If I do it myself, use Photoshop Elements, which I have on our laptop; or buy a full-fledged graphics editor; or download a free graphics editor, such as GIMP.

– If I do it myself, with any of those three choices, I’ll also have to learn how to use the program.

Since I need to know how to do covers, and since my wife often travels with the laptop, or is otherwise engaged with it, I decided to download GIMP and use that to produce print covers. I’ve heard nothing but good things about GIMP, that it’s more than adequate for cover productions, and that everyone who’s used it has been please with it. But before, when I downloaded GIMP, I was actually at a site masquerading as GIMP, and got a nasty virus from it. This time I asked out I.T. people for a link to the correct site (since they have GIMP on their work computers, I knew they knew the right one). I downloaded it late last week, and spent a lot of time on Friday and Saturday trying to figure it out. Then last night I knuckled down, using the small amount I learned, and created a cover. Here it is:

TCEEA print cover 01

I’m not saying it’s great art, or that it will win any self-published cover awards, or that it’s even the one I’ll use. I lost the “pedestal” from the e-book cover, as I don’t see how to do that in GIMP (something to learn at some point). But I think today I’ll create a PDF from it and upload it to CreateSpace and see if it passes muster. If it does, I’ll at least use it as the cover for the proof copy.

self-publishing

Book Sales in March 2014

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Another month, another time to report book sales. I could go with the good news first.

The good news is that my book sales increased by 50 percent over February.

The bad news is that means they went from 2 sales to 3 sales. I was more aggressive in talking to people about my books, and as a consequence I sold one copy of Operation Lotus Sunday, to a woman in my writers group. I also availed myself of the $50 coupon Facebook gave me for running ads, and have put four ads up. So far I’ve spent a little more than half the budget, have had 43 clicks to one of the book websites, and have had one sale of the advertised books. Whether that sale came from the ad I have no idea.

So, here’s the two tables, the big one for easy viewing and a smaller one to link to in my self-publishing diary at Absolute Write.

2014-03 Book Sales Table

 

2014-03 Book Sales Table 455x163

Carlyle, Writing

Beware the Introduction

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Every non-fiction book needs one: an Introduction. A section that tells what the author’s purposes are with the book, what they hope to accomplish, what the reader will take away from it. Sometimes the Introduction is labeled as Chapter 1, but it’s still an Introduction.

I’ve read many books that have introductions, some short, some lengthy; some interesting, some boring. Sometimes the Introduction is the best part of the book. Sometimes the Introduction is so long it constitutes a book in its own right. I have a book on Old Testament pseudopigrapha, and the Introduction is about as long and as interesting as Leviticus. Then there’s the Introduction to Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, which is the first chapter. It’s fairly long, but perhaps not in relation to this three-volume book. For sure it is dry reading, a hindrance to me getting into the book.

Introductions have proven difficult for many writers. I recall reading in one of Charles Lamb’s letters about his friend, George Dyer, who had written and published a book of his poetry. He had a long Introduction—80 pages sticks in my mind. When reading the proofs off the press, before actually releasing the book, Dyer found an error in the Introduction. Lamb doesn’t say what the error was, but since the type had been set, the Introduction couldn’t be changes. All Dyer could do was eliminate the Introduction and let the poems stand on their own. This he did, at his own cost, probably as much as the profits he hoped to gain from the book. Yes, writer, Beware the Introduction!

In my book Documenting America I had an Introduction. I did exactly what I described in the first paragraph. I included a quote from C.S. Lewis, even though the book was about USA historical documents. I thought it was pretty good: fairly short, describing why I was writing the book. For The Candy Store Generation the first chapter served as the Introduction. In this I gave the record of how the idea for the book came to me. The chapter was about the same length as chapters forming the main contents of the book. Again, I was pleased with it.

For my current non-fiction book, Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles, I took a long time to decide what to do about an introduction. First I uploaded the printer’s notice and editor’s Introduction from the 1897 book that included about half the total material in the book. That was a given activity. I knew I needed to do something more, but what? After considerable thought, I decided to pull in some apt quotes from a handful of Carlyle’s letters from the time when he began to write these articles. I also pulled in an important footnote from The Carlyle Letters Online. Those things gave me the ideas I needed to flesh out an Introduction, and I did so.

It’s not terribly long: about five pages for a 220 or so page book. It gives my reason for having published the book and the methodology I used. I avoided using the royal “we” in it, or avoiding first person all together and going with totally passive voice. So from that standpoint it doesn’t meet the criteria of a scholarly Introduction. But it’s mine; it does what I want it to; and the few people who I’ve shown it to have had few comments.

I have one more night of editing tasks on the e-book, and it’s ready then to upload to Amazon. It could be live and for sale a day and a half from when I post this. Then it will be on to other things, things that don’t need an Introduction.

Doctor Luke's Assistant, Documenting America, Operation Lotus Sunday, self-publishing, The Candy Store Generation

My First Ad Campaign

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Not too long ago, I decided to go through the motions of placing an ad for my books on Facebook. I went through the clicking process, saw what was involved, learned a little, then closed out of it. FB, of course, tracked my clicks. A couple of weeks later I received an e-mail from FB, saying it looked like I had tried to place an ad, and giving me a $50.00 coupon for an ad campaign, with a deadline of April 16.

I let this sit there a few days, not really believing it, and not having time to go back and figure the creating an ad process all over again. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, I put writing tasks aside and decided to get on with using the coupon. I clicked on the link provided in the e-mail, and an appropriate page came up.

I decided to advertise Operation Lotus Sunday, it being my latest and probably my best novel. I also planned to use some of the coupon to advertise Doctor Luke’s Assistant and The Candy Store Generation. I did OLS first. A few clicks, with the budget set at $20.00, and I had my ad for OLS. Then I saw I could have multiple images for it. So I started adding images to the ad. I went up to five, but did something wrong with three of them, and so had only two. That was fine with me. I had the front cover and the photo of the Stone Forest from the back cover. So I clicked to place the ad, had to wait a few minutes while FB approved it, then went to see what I had done.

Then I realized I had actually created two ads! Oh no, I thought, what have I done? Moreover, what have I done to my budget, which was $20 out of the $50 coupon? I couldn’t really tell. Since I had to enter credit card information, even though I was using a coupon, I figured the worst that would happen was I might use up $40 on OLS instead of $20. Again, no problem. So I went ahead to create an ad for DLA, using the other $10. It was fairly easy. I entered links and words, and clicked to go to the next page, which would be the budget information. Except, it didn’t go to the next page; instead it brought up the page that said thank you for placing the ad, it would be reviewed by FB within so many minutes. After those minutes the ad showed up with a budget of $20.

I thought “Now what have I done?” I figured the worst that could happen was I would be billed $10 over and above the coupon. So I decided to place the ad for OLS, and did so going through the same procedure. Again it didn’t ask me to set a budget, and the ad went live with a budget of $20.00. So was I potentially going to be out $30?

I went to the ad analytics page, and learned a few things. FB took the budget as an ad campaign budget, not for a single ad. And the two different images on the OLS ad were indeed considered two different ads. So in fact my budget was too low. I quickly changed my budget to $50 for the campaign.

So, my campaign is off, now in its third day. FB gives quite a few analytics to look through. So far I’ve spent $6.11, based on the number of clicks on the ad and click-through rate to the book pages at Amazon. At that rate my ads should run for eight or nine days. But I’m going to make a couple of changes. On the second OLS ad I’ll change the image from the Stone Forest photo to the entire book cover, front and back. And I’m going to add an ad for Documenting America. Might as well.

Alas, as of an hour ago the ads had resulted in no sales reported by Amazon. I sure hope something sells in the next eight or nine days.

Carlyle, critique group, poetry, self-publishing, Writing

Acquiring an Editor’s Eye

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MEditing Illustration 03y time in the poetry wars, as I call the days I spent at Poem Kingdom, was my first time to begin to acquire what I recently termed an “editor’s eye”. At that site I critiqued hundreds of poems, first as a participant, later as a moderator and still later as an administrator. That actually wasn’t my first time and place to do that. I had already been critiquing at Sonnet Central for a few months, and had been in a writing critique group for a couple of years.

After Poem Kingdom there was Poem Train (with it’s critique forum Café Poetica), Poem 911 (which died in the whole EZ Boards hacking fiasco), and Absolute Write’s Poetry Critique Forum. In all of these I’d estimate that I critiqued somewhere around 1,000 poems. No, I don’t think I’m exaggerating. I copied off a bunch of them, but not all I’m sure, and have them in notebooks, preserved for posterity and research, should I become a famous author who someone ever wants to research.

Editing Illustration 02A thousand critiques at an average of perhaps 300 words each is 300,000 words. If anything I’m probably short with that. That’s a lot of time and effort given to critiquing. What I did was analyze the poem as a work-in-progress. Literary criticism—whatever that is exactly—was not the goal, but rather helping the poet bring the poem to a state of completion as the best poem possible for the subject matter and desires of the poet. In short, it was to be an editor. Not a cheerleader. Not a critic. But an editor.

During the years, ever since around 1998, I’ve also been in writers critique groups in real life, and one time on-line. It was the same thing: look at works in progress and consider how they might be made better in the writer’s quest for publication. These weren’t written, or at least not type-written and posted for all the world to see. A handful of us sat around a table and marked manuscripts in pen/pencil and gave oral crits. Still, it was the same type of editing, it seems to me. Sometimes I was most concerned with what is essentially proofreading. At other times it was line edits: looking at grammar and sentence structure to see how the writer’s intent can be better communicated. Still other times it was structural edits. I remember critiquing one piece at an e-mail critique group where the woman described a character as timid. Then she had the girl go up to a fellow student she knew of but didn’t know and offer help to her. It was completely out of character. I pointed that out; I’d call it a structural edit. Still other times I’d do a big picture edit, such as is the plot interesting? Are there holes or conflicts in the plot? Those kinds of things. Different types of edits as the situation arose.

Now I’m editing my next publishing project, a book titled Thomas Carlyle’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia Articles. These are public domain articles that I found in five different places, plus a few notes that others have written about them (explanatory notes, not critique). I know I’ve written about this project before. These twenty-one articles have never been gathered before, so I decided to do so and add it to the Carlyle bibliography. I pulled the publisher’s note and editor’s introduction from the 1897 re-printing of sixteen of them, and pulled some references to them that Carlyle made in his own letters. But I knew I needed to write an introduction of my own. So I did. Last night I sent the much-critiqued Intro to my critique group, which meets next Tuesday. We’ll see what they say.

Editing Illustration 01But I’ve had other things to do as well, things that an editor would do. Such trivial things as deciding how much info to give about each article. How the text should appear on the page. Whether to break up long paragraphs (I didn’t), whether to modernize archaic punctuation techniques (I did). How to make lists and tables work best in modern typesetting and e-book formats. I suppose some of this is book production, but it feels like editing to me.

So through all of this I’ve been acquiring my editor’s eye. They (that is, various experts and claimed-to-be experts) advise that one who self publishes should hire an editor before ever publishing their works. I think that’s good advice, in general, but a very expensive practice. Simple line editing for an average length probably costs $300 dollars. Add proofreading, structural edit, and big picture edit, and you will have a large editing bill. I don’t know about others, but I don’t have $500 or $1000 to pay for editing. Therefore I just have to do the best job of producing the book with the skills I have.

So maybe all my editing work through the years, even that from before I realized I was editing, is helping me with my self publishing. I’d like to think so.

poetry, Writing

Haiku and me

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Poetry has escaped me for some time. When I post about it at a place like Absolute Write I’ll say that poetry no longer comes to by either by inspiration or perspiration. However, that’s not completely true. To some extent I’m avoiding poetry so that I can concentrate on my prose works. I think I could write poetry again if I put my mind to it.

The only type of poetry that currently comes to me is haiku. You know what I mean: those pesky, three-line poems of certain syllable count and subject, including nature and a season of the year. We worked on them, I remember, in 8th grade English. I even remember one I wrote, and it being criticized in class, not for how it agreed with the form requirements, but rather that people didn’t like the conclusions the haiku drew. I even remember the main critic: Linda B——. I know nowadays they have students write them at an even earlier age. After all, it should be easy to do. Three lines, 5-7-5 syllables. What could be simpler.

Well, to some extent it is simple, as far as the mechanics go. But to have a haiku transcend being mere prose broken into lines takes some doing. I don’t know that I’m really there yet.

Part of the problem is trying to force a form that worked in Japanese to work in English. What we call syllables is different than how the Japanese language works. Their sounds are called “ohns”, and they are shorter than syllables. So while they may have a 5-7-5 structure, that would would be shorter than our 5-7-5 syllables. So the syllable count for English haiku should be seen as a maximum, not a fixed requirement.

Then there’s the issue of subject matter. Is it just simply about nature and a season, or is there more to it? Lee Gurga thinks there’s more, much more. He was once president (or maybe it was executive director) of one of the main haiku societies in America and editor of a haiku magazine. In a series of posts a number of years ago at eratosphere.com, he explained what it is the Japanese try to do with their haiku. Along with the length requirement, the subject matter is critical.

– It must include something about nature.

– It must include something about a season of the year.

– It should be two images, separate, and yet linked together simply by the words. He calls this the “syntactical cut”. Syntax should both link and divide the two images.

These are fairly exacting requirements. And, these are not requirements necessarily followed by most people who write haiku. To most people, the seasonal and/or nature reference is sufficient. A similar poem, the senryu, is the same length as the haiku, but can be about almost anything.

For myself, I took up the challenge of the two images divided by the syntactical cut. Only I decided to take it a step further. I decided make the images be in the first and third lines, and make the middle line able to apply to either image. Each image should be complete and natural when read with the middle line or read by itself. As a result, the middle line will have to include a preposition or conjunction.

My normal place to “write” haiku is on my weekday noon walks, or when commuting to work in the morning. Cloud patterns often inspire me, or other conditions of weather. For some reason my evening and weekend walks in our neighborhood don’t provide me with inspiration, nor does the commute home at the end of the workday.

Driving to work Friday morning in the pre-dawn, I saw a particularly large star in the east. Except then I remembered someone said that the planet Venus was rising ahead of the sun these days. That caused me to think of a haiku that would begin “Venus rising”. This stuck with me as I drove the last six miles to work. By the time I arrived I had the haiku finished. However, on the walk from my truck to the office I forgot that I had to write it down quickly. Thankfully by mid-morning it came back to me. Here it is.

Venus rising
ahead of a cloudy dawn
cold office beckons

The middle line will go with either of the others as a complete image, and the first and last lines stand alone as images of their own. I don’t know that that’s the final version yet, but I think it’s close.

So today, as I’m writing this to post tomorrow, I’m in The Dungeon.  Outside a mid-March snow storm is raging. The temperature is now in the 20s, the wind is howling, and snow is about at 2 inches accumulated and still coming down. This is the latest it has snowed in the 23 years I’ve lived in the Bentonville-Bella Vista area. It has inspired another haiku.

wind, cold, snow
five days before equinox
no spring in sight

Again, I don’t know if that’s any good, nor if it’s the final version. But it fits the rules I use, based on Gurga’s teaching. I’ll keep it, I think, and add it to the mix of my poetic works.

Two poems in one week. I don’t think I’ve done that for two years. They’re only haiku, but…what am I saying? Only haiku? No, haiku aren’t simple, and shouldn’t be labeled as only anything.

fiction, Harry Potter, movies

World-Building Trumps Everything

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In writing classes, you learn lots of “rules.” Be consistent with point of view. Avoid or at least minimize the use of adjectives and especially adverbs. Keep sentences short. Watch out for plot gaps and gaffs. Mind your sentence length. Etc, etc. These things are drilled in, over and over, in every writing techniques class in every conference, book on writing craft, and writing webinar.

Breaking “the rules” is possible, or course, for a skilled writer who is already published. But a writer starting out should avoid these rules. The rules are what good writing is all about. “Get a copy of Strunk and White, learn it, embrace it, apply it.” So the experts say.

Another factor that comes into play in writing, apart from the quality of the words as they are strung together into sentences, at least for novels, is to create the fictional dream for the reader to get lost in. Or, as they would call this in science fiction and fantasy, build your fictional world carefully, expansively, and invite you reader to inhabit that world for a time. It’s called world building.

As I read books or watch movies, I’ve come to realize that world building is more important than the quality of the writing (in the case of books) or production (in the case of movies). This came home to me twice recently. We went to the theater and saw Saving Mr. Banks, the story of Walt Disney obtaining the rights to the Mary Poppins stories and making the movies. The difficulty of the author in letting go of the rights, and why, was the key element in the story.

As we were at this movie, I found myself lost in the story. The scenes switching between early 1960s Los Angeles and the author’s childhood in rural Australia was easy to follow. As you saw the girl’s relationship with her dad, the problems he had with alcohol, you immediately began to wonder how this tied in with Mr. Banks, the father in the Mary Poppins story. Was Mr. Banks the girl’s dad? If so, how did saving Mr. Banks tie in with the real life dad’s story?

As I say, I was lost in the story. For ninety minutes I forgot about books I wasn’t writing, blog posts I should be planning, specs I should be developing at work, wondering how I will be able to retire on schedule, and a host of problems that seem to consume life. The developers of the movie had created the perfect fictional dream, and I was lost in it.

The second thing to bring world building to mind as the most important element in fiction is the Harry Potter books. As I explained in my last post, the wife and I are reading these. I want to be careful here, because it’s very common for an unsuccessful writer to criticize the writing of a successful writer and have it appear as sour grapes. I assure you my criticism of Rowling isn’t in that category. But, in fact, while she does well with some of the rules, she violates many of the them that I mentioned at the beginning of this post.

She uses adverbs to the point where it become sickening, especially on speaker tags. “said Ron hesitantly.” “Hermione said emphatically.” “said Snape snarkily.” “asked Harry cautiously.” More often than not, the speaker tag comes with an adverb. Three or more in a row might have the adverb with the tag. And, she way overuses speaker tags. When the speaker is clearly identified by the context, why include a speaker tag? It’s redundant and slows down the story. But she does it over and over.

And then, some of her sentences are awkward, with subordinate clauses modifying/referring to the wrong reference, based on the rules of grammar. These are typically long sentences, with the properly referred-to item and the descriptive clause so far removed from each other that it’s a mental struggle to understand what’s being said. These aren’t excessive, but there are enough of them to be noticeable.

Since the books are wildly successful, who am I to criticize the writing style? It smacks of sour grapes. Yet, I’m not making up what is taught in writing classes. I’ve heard the same things over and over. Why then is the Harry Potter series so successful? Are the experts wrong? Is there a separate set of “rules” for children’s books? Or is it possible that readers don’t care as much about the quality of the writing as the experts say? And that, what the readers want more than stellar writing is…

…an outstanding story? One that gives them the fictional dream, and puts them into a different world for a time. That’s what I think. There’s nothing wrong with stellar writing. But it shouldn’t come at the expense of world building or creating the fictional dream.

I have more to say about that, but unfortunately I’m at the end of my post, and shall have to cover it in the next post. See you all then.

Harry Potter, reading

Reading Harry Potter

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Having seen all the Harry Potter movies, I have always had in mind to read the books. However, they never seemed to get any closer to the top of my reading pile. Indeed, they never really made it into my reading pile, but rather remained on the shelves, gathering dust, wondering if I would ever get to them.

Well, I finally did, at the wife’s insistence. More of a suggestion, really. She said, “Why don’t we read the Harry Potter books out loud?” We don’t do a lot together, the wife and me, except eat meals and watch television. And I’m fairly sick of television these days. This would give us a chance to do something together. So even though it would cut into my writing time, I said okay.

I believe it was after the first of the year that we began with The Sorcerer’s Stone. That’s a fairly short book, I think around 300 pages. Lynda has read them all before, but at least ten years ago, and she really didn’t remember the details of the books. We’ve seen the movies multiple times over the last year, as we watched them in rounds. But finally, I was reading Harry Potter.

At first we read around five pages, then passed the book to the other and they read five pages. Back and forth. Eventually we read longer sections, around a chapter each. I’m sure we were done with The Sorcerer’s Stone in less than a week. One of the main things I noticed was the different beginning in the book than in the movie. The basics were there in both: one-year-old Harry is taken to the Dursley’s to grow up away from the wizarding world. In the movie it’s a fairly short scene with only Dumbledore, McGonagal, and Hagred, told from Dumbledore’s point of view. It serves as a nice prologue to the story. In the book it is much more elaborate, and is told from either Vernon Dursley’s point of view or by an omniscient narrator. I don’t know that either is better.

The it was on to The Chamber of Secrets. A little bit longer book, it begins to flesh out some of Harry’s back story. At least it tells how he comes to be a prisoner in the Privet Drive house. His rescue by the Weasley brothers is much less dramatic in the book than it is in the movie. I think, on the whole, I’m going to remember this one less than the others.

Next was The Prisoner of Azkaban. Longer still, it was good to see Harry, Ron, and Hermione start to grow up. In this book we learn something more about their schoolwork. The book does a better job of explaining things such as the Marauder’s Map, and the secret passageway to the Shrieking Shack. The friendship of Moody, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs is explained much better in the book, as it to be expected. On the other hand, the dramatic scene in the movie where Harry goes into the corridors at night in search of Peter Pettigrew, who he saw on the map, is much better in the movie.

The Goblet of Fire is the one, so far, where the book and the movie diverge the greatest. The interaction between the students of the three schools is significantly different between the two. The movie excels in showing the Yule Ball, with the women in all their finery. The book does a better job of explaining what becomes of Rita Skeeter, what Fleur is like, how the tasks take place, and many more things.

Which brings us to The Order of the Phoenix, which we finished on Saturday. This is the longest of the books (so I understand); thus the movie is much condensed. It’s hard to know whether the movie is better or the book is better. The book explains a lot that the movie doesn’t. The book tells more about the Order of the Phoenix, whereas the movie seems to focus more on Dumbledore’s Army. My only negative comment is that the book seems over-long. It probably needed to be to flesh out the remaining back story on the encounter of baby Harry and Voldemort, but it seemed to take forever to get through it. By the end, had I been reading silently instead of aloud with Lynda, I would have found myself skipping or skimming sections.

The Half-Blood Prince and The Deathly Hallows remain. I need to take a break from this reading every evening. It’s taking an hour or two every night away from my writing. It’s not bad time spent, but I need to make progress on my novel if I’m ever going to get it published. So I’m not sure when we’ll finish the last two.

In my next post, however, I’m going to make some comments on the story line of the Harry Potter books, and what has made them a success.

self-publishing

Book Sales, Jan-Feb 2014

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I didn’t report my book sales in January. There wasn’t much to report. Nor is there much more to report in February. But I don’t want to hide this information, so here I’ll post it, and comment after.

2014-02 Book Sales Table 989x368

 

Yes, that’s right. Two sales in January and another two sales in February, four all together. The best news is they are of four different books. One was a print book, the other three e-books.

I still don’t do much by way of marketing. Occasionally I make a post on FB, or tell someone individually (online or in real life) that I have books for sale. At some point, perhaps next year, I’ll have to quite taking all of my writing life time for writing and instead use some of it for marketing.

Below is a smaller size of the table, for linking to from the Absolute Write forums.

2014-02 Book Sales Table 396x147

 

 

Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Headshots

Progress on Headshots

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Last week I was in Nashville for most of the week, attending the IECA annual conference and presenting a paper there, “Who Pays the Fine?” It was a great trip, and I’m writing a detailed trip diary about it. It’s not something that I’ll publish, though possibly I might take some of it for a blog post. It’s just something I want to do, something I have to get out of my system before returning to work on Headshots.

And, that’s the subject of this blog post. I last worked on Headshots on February 23. I left for the trip on February 25 and came back just before midnight on the 28th. March 1 was moving day for my mother-in-law, with tiredness overcoming me and having no mind or energy to write, little enough to read.

Today is the day I planned to have a blog post here, but my blog post planning record is at work, and I’m at home on a snow day. Having shoveled the drive this morning, I came down here, uncertain of what to write. I just finished a travel log of my trip to Nashville, running on to seven typed pages. Next is this post, which I have decided will be on Headshots.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m slogging through the sagging middle. The idea came to me to make this mostly about baseball, since I had very little baseball action in the early chapters. The timeframe has moved into during the season, so I’ve written about Ronny’s comeback attempt. This has taken me through Chapter 18, and 56,222 words. Since I’m heading for around 80,000, and I think the ending action will take close to 20,000 words, that means I’m almost through the sagging middle.

But, I have other things to add to it. I have to add that Sarah gets kind of stir-crazy, hiding out at the farm, not being able to go anywhere without Federal protective agents going with her. I need for her to do something stupid to make her situation worse. I also haven’t touched on any Mafia/gang actions for a while. I can’t forget them in the midst of the baseball action. Some ideas have come to me for both of these problems. One is to give back story on the four main mobsters: Mancini, Russo, Cerelli, and Washburn. In both books I’ve said very little about what motivates them. Washburn and Mancini got a paragraph each in FTSP, and I think I gave some of Mancini’s back story earlier in this book.

Once I add those things in to the sagging middle, I suspect I’ll be somewhere around 65,000 words. So either the book will be a little longer than I thought, or perhaps the end game will be shorter. Either way, I’ll try to get back to this in a few days, or perhaps next weekend.

The end is in sight.

Author | Engineer