Passing through a dry spell

It began a week ago today, or maybe even a week ago yesterday. The dry spell, I mean.

It’s not writer’s block. I know exactly what I want to write next on my work-in-progress. And what after that and after that. I think I finally have all the scenes in my mind right up to the end of the book.

So why not write? It’s an overwhelming sense that it doesn’t matter if I write or not.

I could say more, but I think I’ll leave it at that.

Progress on two books

As reported in other posts, my main writing work at present is China Tour, a novel of events in Communist China in 1983. I had planned for this to be about 75,000 words. However, as I worked through it, it seemed to be running shorter than that. After a week adding 10,000 words, the book is at 53,600 words. At this point I think it will be completed at between 60,000 and 65,000 words.

As I say, that’s shorter than I thought it would be. Is it too short for a spy novel? A typical romance is around 50,000 words; a general novel might be 75,000 words. A sci-fi or fantasy is typically 90,000. An epic is 125,000 or much more. So I’m not sure what I have here. I do not that there’s no point in “padding” the novel with useless stuff that doesn’t advance the story or enlighten the reader concerning the characters.

If I’m right, then I’m near the end of the novel. Next I have what I call the temptation scenes. After that it’s the culmination of the book as the CIA operation takes place in Beijing. Then will be the denouement chapter to close out. I see all of this as being about 10,000 words, unless the operation itself takes more than that.

So I’m on the downhill part of the novel. My experience with my first two novels is that the writing goes faster at this point. Maybe that’s because the motivation is there to stick to business and get it done. Maybe it’s because the story is so familiar at this point, as are the characters, that writing scenes is easier at this point.

Whatever the reason, I may be a week away from finishing. That’s exciting. I would like to finish it before February 7, when Lynda and I take off for a road trip. I’d like to have it with me and use some evenings on that trip for editing. That seems like a better vacation/business trip activity than new writing.

The news on another book is also exciting. This isn’t even on my list of publication goals for the year. It’s my poetry book, Father Daughter Day. This has been essentially done since 2006. I’ve made minor tweaks in the years since. The delay in publishing it has been illustrations. I don’t think the book will sell as well if it’s text only as it will if it is generously illustrated.

But how to get an illustrator when you have no money to pay one and when hopes of sales are just that: hopes? I tried to get some art teachers at the high school and university level interested as a practicum project for their class, to no avail. I checked with a couple of amateur artists I know, and couldn’t get them to do it. So I let it sit. I should also say that I never made finding an illustrator a priority. When I had a free moment and this book came to mind, I did something about an illustrator. Otherwise the book sat dormant. I have one more poem I’d like to add to it, but it’s not essential.

So back in October 2012 one of those times came, when thinking of the book and having the name of an artist I know both came together at the same time. I asked her about it and she sounded interested. Then I didn’t hear anything, leading me to believe she wasn’t interested.

Then yesterday she contacted me. She had computer troubles as well as family and life issues. Yes, she said, she was interested, and was anxious to get started. So I recent the book and some sample illustrations. She’s going over it now. We will have to have a conversation about deadlines, speculative compensation, etc. Depending on her schedule we might not be able to get it done this year. Then again, if she works fast and we keep most of the illustrations simple, it may be done this year.

This also is exciting. I’m trying not to get too excited, actually, in case it falls through. China Tour will be published, probably before April 1. I’d love to have Father Daughter Day available on Amazon before Fathers’ Day, though that’s probably not possible. All in all, however, I see my publishing much farther down the road now than it seemed to be a week ago.

Review of 2012 Publishing Goals

Back in January 2012 I established some publishing goals for the year. Since I just did the same for 2013, I thought I should go back and see how did on those goals. I wrote them in three posts last January. I’ll summarize them here and tell how I did.

Fiction

Publish my second short story, titled “Too Old To Play”. I did this in January, exactly on schedule. It’s only sold three copies, but it’s there and available.

Publish my novel Doctor Luke’s Assistant. I did this in March, exactly on schedule. It’s been my best selling work so far.

Publish my novel In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. I did this in August, a little later than I’d hoped, but I delayed it for consideration by a publisher, and by then I was too engaged with other projects to jump right back in this. It isn’t selling, but baseball season is just around the corner.

Publish another short story in the Danny Tompkins series. I did not do this. Instead I wrote a different short story and published it, and it’s sold 10 copies.

Begin work on my third novel. Okay, I suppose this was a writing goal, not a publishing goal. I did this, beginning China Tour in October.

Non-Fiction: Articles

The no-money one of these is Suite101.com. I did not write any articles for Suite101 this year. As I wrote in January, “The site is soon to go through a major re-vamp. I’m waiting to see what they do, and if anything I want to write on will still be suitable.” The revamp occurred. I’m making a little more residual income there than I thought I would, but I still don’t expect to write any articles for them any time soon, almost certainly not in 2013.

The one for decent money is Buildipedia.com. As planned I wrote for Buildipedia for several months. Then they axed my column. I haven’t had any ideas for feature articles for them, so that prospect is dormant for a while and probably will remain so.

The third gig is a site named Decoded Science. I wrote and published one article with them in 2012. I still like the concept of Decoded Science. I like the owner/editor. I just haven’t had any ideas for articles. I wanted to do a series of articles on low impact development. The owner/editor was favorable, but I haven’t found time or energy to do them. It’s a possibility in 2013, thought not all that likely.

Non-Fiction: Books

The Candy Store Generation. I wrote this and published it in July 2012, more or less on schedule. I liked how it came out. It’s sold about 15 copies, which is a big disappointment.

John Cheney of Newbury, Massachusetts. This was to be a family genealogy book. I found no time to add to the research I’ve already done, so did not write anything on this. Maybe some day.

Articles written about floodplain engineering that would form the basis of a decent book. Yes, they would, but I’ve done nothing on this other than brainstorm a little.

A second book in the Documenting America series: the Civil War years. I wrote the first chapter of this, or most of the first chapter, then abandoned it for the time being. The research was going to be much more than I thought. I read some as research, maybe 10 to 15 hours of reading. I wish I could have written it, and hope to do it in 2013.

So, I didn’t do too badly, did I? I hope I do as well, relative to my goals, in 2013.

2013 Publishing Goals

My time off from writing during Christmas and New Year’s travels was extended by the flu. Finally the last three days I’ve felt like doing something. I read about 50 pages in China Tour, doing light edits. I should finish it tonight and get the edits typed not later than Saturday morning.

Then it’s send it off to a beta reader and get back to writing. My goal for the weekend is to add 6,000 words. If I manage to do that, I’ll be at 44,000+ words, on the way to…? I’m still not sure how long the book is, but if I get the 6,000 words added I think I’ll be at a point where I’ll have a handle on the length.

One things I haven’t spent much time on is my goals for 2013. Last year I decided to establish a publishing schedule rather than writing goals. It seems more definite, more intentional. I wasn’t writing to write. I was writing to publish. I intend to do the same thing in 2013.

Except, I haven’t spent enough time so far considering what I can actually accomplish. So for right now it’s publishing goals. I hope, before January ends, to do the necessary work to establish a publishing schedule.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.

  • Publish China Tour
  • Publish one other novel, either Headshots or Preserve The Revelation
  • Publish two short stories. One will be in my teen grief series, and probably be titled “Kicking Stones”. The other will  likely be in the Sharon Williams CIA agent series (if the inspiration comes), currently untitled.
  • Publish one non-fiction book, almost certainly Documenting America: Civil War Edition.
  • Publish two professional essays in the engineering field. These are actually written. I would only need to tweak them for a somewhat broader audience and figure out how to do covers, or bite the bullet and pay for them.

So there it is. Stay tuned for further updates.

December 2012 Book Sales

Forgive my absence, please. After trips to Chicago and Oklahoma City during Christmas and New Year’s, I came home sick, possibly picked up from sick grandchildren in OKC. After fighting it for several days at home, I went to the doc and learned it was flu. So I’m on antibiotics and strong cough medicine. Finally today I was well enough to go to work. The good news is I’ve lost 12 pounds through all of this. Now if I can just keep it off and lose 30 or 40 more in 2013.

I compiled my December book sales today, once I had access to the spreadsheet on my computer at work. Here’s the totals and the graph.

  • “Mom’s Letter” – 1
  • Documenting America – Homeschool Edition – 1
  • In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People – 1
  • “Whiskey, Zebra, Tango” – 3

In short, my sales have flatlined for the last five months (8, 12, 8, 7, 7) after the bump that Doctor Luke’s Assistant gave them in June and July.

I’m working on a table of book sales for the year, and will provide that in another post, either today or tomorrow.

Editing “China Tour”

On Saturday I found myself with some time, so I decided to edit China Tour. I started from the beginning, and got all the way to page 48 in the couple of hours of quiet time I had. I enjoyed this time. Editing doesn’t bother me.

What concerns me, however, is how few changes I have. Granted that I’ve been over some of this before, when I read the last five pages before going on to new material. But I’ve found in past novels that I always have some things to change in the early chapters based on what I write in the later chapters.

Perhaps it will be the need to foreshadow a plot element that I added, which I didn’t anticipate early on. Perhaps it was foreshadowing of something I later decided not to put in the book, so I have to take something out. For whatever reason, I’ve always found the edits to be necessary.

This time, not so much. I’m editing at the point in the story where the mistaken identity has happened, but the CIA agents haven’t figured it all out yet. They are about to meet the tourist couple, and learn the extent of the problem.

Perhaps I’ll find more to edit as I get into it more. I might find some time tomorrow, Christmas day, to edit twenty to thirty pages. We’ll see how that goes. I’m anxious to get back to the writing, to adding new material and completing the story. Right now I’ve fallen behind the pace needed to have it done by early February, but there’s still time to catch up.

Stay tuned. And Merry Christmas.

The Christmas Writing Slump

Last night I found many reasons to be upstairs and not writing. Finally around 9:15 p.m., with all necessaries and unnecessaries completed, I went to The Dungeon and began writing on China Tour.

These were scenes interspersed with scenes I had already written. I decided to follow one couple through an intense 24 hour period and write all those scenes consecutively, even though they wouldn’t appear in the book that way. By doing so, I think I wrote more efficiently, not having to go back and think about what I had written before tracking the other couple. I took that couple through that critical period, to a point where they were apart from each other. Their next scene will be when they join each other again.

Sunday I began working on the scenes for the other couple. Their time is not all that intense, at least not physical danger like the first couple. They have a different kind of relationship crisis going on, with kids in the middle. I found it somewhat difficult to write these scenes, and on Sunday only wrote around 1,000 words in three hours. I couldn’t concentrate.

But by the time I got to the computer last night, I had been over these scenes in my mind. I opened the file, went straight to work, and in just 90 minutes pounded out about 1,900 words, bringing the total to 38,700. After I left The Dungeon and went upstairs to do a few things before going to bed, I realized I had left a critical part of dialog out. I’ll try to insert that tonight.

All of these scenes were basically unknown to me two weeks ago. Even as recently as three weeks ago I hadn’t figured out how to put the first couple in physical danger, and I had no idea how to put the second couple in the relationship problem. But as I write one scene, the next one comes to me. Then another and another.

I’m writing the action that happened on September 18, 1983. My intention was to go day-to-day all the way up to September 27, with the two climax scenes happening on September 26. If I do that, however, I run the risk of a couple of things. One, it might get boring, because I don’t know that much is going on of interest to the average reader. Second, it might run too long. That’s a surprising statement as just a couple of weeks ago I was lamenting that the book seemed to be trending shorter than I had first expected. I’ve now come full circle and think maybe the length will be just right.

I think what I’m going to do is skip some days. I’ll finish September 18th, right up to lights out (a long, long chapter). Then I may skip ahead to Sept 21, and figure out some action in Chengdu. then I may skip ahead to Sept 23 and a scene I’ve planned all along for Xian. Then it will be on to Beijing for planning on Sept 25 and the culmination of the two quests on Sept 26, and the denouement on the 27th.

BUT, for the next week or two I don’t know that I’ll get much writing done. We’ll be traveling for Christmas. I don’t write well on the laptop, and I don’t know how much time I would be able to devote to it. So I’m going to print out the manuscript as it now stands and edit it on the trip. If Lynda is interested, I’ll have her read it and make sure some of the, shall I say, edgier scenes in it get the spousal blessing.

Hopefully I’ll check in here a few more times before the end of the year.

 

More on the Genesis of “China Tour”

So I’m at the Write to Publish Conference in Wheaton, Illinois, in May 2004. I learn that publishers don’t want to publish someone who has written a story, but someone who has written a good story and has the potential for a long career with them. At that point in my career I had written one novel that I was figuring out how to get published, plus some poetry.

During the conference I began to think about what else I could publish. Very quickly the idea for a baseball novel came to me. I committed it to some notes. More slowly came the idea for a different novel, one that happened from an experience our family had overseas.

When we lived in Saudi Arabia we had the good fortune to do some traveling. In 1982 we did Europe for 28 days; also in ’82 we went to Cairo for Christmas. In 1983 we decided to do Asia, and planned for 30 days there. At the time of the trip, Sept-Oct, Charles was 4 1/2 and Sara was just under 2 1/2. They were with us on the trip, of course, since we didn’t do what some couples did, taking the kids home to be with grandparents then going on a trip by ourselves.

Our itinerary was Hong Kong, China, the Philippines, and Thailand. Two weeks in China was the biggest part of that. It had just opened to Western tourism a couple of years before that, and it seemed exciting to go there. At our stop in Hong Kong we visited with our church’s missionaries there, who asked us to carry Chinese language Bibles in and make contact with a man of our church in Beijing. Of course we said yes, not thinking much about what that meant.

A day or two later it hit us when we received the small suitcase with the materials: Bibles, cassette tapes, tracts, and who knows what in that bag. We thought about getting them through customs, as well has how to reach our contact in Beijing with just a name and phone number—and that of the location where his wife worked.

The short story is we got the Bibles through customs, to Beijing, and with the help of our tour guide were able to make contact with Alan. He had spent over two decades in a prison camp because he wouldn’t deny the name of Christ when asked to by Chairman Mao’s goons. Meeting him and his wife in that restaurant in Beijing was one of the great events of our lives.

Back to Wheaton in 2004. I wondered if I could make a novel out of a Bible-smuggling American tourist couple who were expats. What kind of trouble could I put them in? Would I put that in the current era or in 1983? On that trip I kept a very good trip diary, which had not been lost in the moves we made over the years. I also kept a lot of the literature they gave us at hotels and other tourist stops, as well as souvenir books we bought. So I had data to put it in 1983. That seemed like the better option, but what to do to make a full novel out of this story?

1983 was still Cold War times. President Reagan was working on arms deals and the Strategic Defense Initiative, meeting with world leaders. We all assumed that the CIA had our back, infiltrating countries, gathering intelligence, helping our government get the upper hand on our enemies without going to war. The first of Tom Clancy’s novels were a year away, but spy novels abounded. What if, I thought, I put this American couple into the middle of a CIA operation in China? A major plot twist came to mind fairly quickly.

By the last day of the conference this idea had come together. I hadn’t yet put anything on paper, but I had the idea. At the last lunch I wound up sitting at the same table as James Scott Bell. He was the keynote speaker for the evening sessions, and thought I hadn’t heard of him till that conference he seemed to be a rock star at this Christian writing conference.

We all talked about our works-in-progress, or planned. I said what I was thinking of for a novel. Someone asked how I could pull that off, i.e. China in 1983. I told of our trip there and of the trip diary and other literature I had. James Scott Bell nodded approvingly, though I don’t remember him saying much.

So that’s it. May 2004 was when I first thought of the book. Through the years I’ve worked on the tag line, a summary, and thought through scenes. But it wasn’t until October 2012 that I actually committed a word of it to paper or pixel. It’s now sitting at 34,300 words, looking at a February 2013 finish, maybe earlier if life aligns right. Figuring a month cooling off and a month to do final edits and publishing tasks, I’m looking at an April 2013 book launch.

Stay tuned.

Author | Engineer