The Great American Novel

 

Work on the Work keeps going on apace.

That, plus two bouts with the stomach flu (first Patch, then me), accounts for the sparsity of posts of late.

More, down the road …

A Proustian Exercise

 

As a young man I struggled once to claim my earliest memories, and after more than a little bit of thought, I arrived at two. Interestingly, they do not involve people. They are primarily visual and interior. And they happened a long, long time ago. By my reckoning the Beatles had just broken up. Nixon was still unfamiliar with the word, “Watergate.” We were at Half Time of the Vietnam War. The AFL had just merged with the NFL.

In the first memory, which I think is the oldest, I am lying in a crib looking up at the night sky and I see a bright shooting star flashing overhead. Long, slow, with sparkling contrails. That’s my initial feeling, but it is plausible I am a toddler on the balcony of the apartment my parents rented and I could have been watching fireworks.

In the second, I am leaning against the bottom part of a wooden fence, the kind made by laying horizontal beams into slots in the horizontal posts, and before me is a massive field of wheat grain, blowing gently yet very sublimely in the wind. It’s a gray day and this field seems to stretch onwards forever, the ground undulating as it fades into the distance. I recall myself fascinated with this scene. But it could have only been three- or four-year-old me at the fence enclosing our small, weed-infested backyard at same apartment complex.

I dunno.

Anyway, there is a famous French writer name of Marcel Proust. Famous in literary circles, that is. He is primarily known for writing a multi-volume “biography” entitled In Search of Lost Time, in some translations. The style of these books was very unique up to that point: extremely centered on self, on his feelings and impressions, very, very focused on minutiae in a grasping attempt to get at something beyond normal, everyday experience. Something kind of like all of us being sleepers sleeping through life, and such a Proustian examination is meant to create a change in our consciousness of experience.

Or something like that. I’m far from being an expert on Proust. More of a novice’s novice.

I do know he spends inordinate amounts of time and pages on simple, singular experiences. Ten or twelve pages on how he sleeps opens the first volume. Then, later on, he devotes another eight or ten on trying to get a kiss from his mother as a young boy before bed. A hyperslow approach to reality that is at complete odds with current, contemporary, twenty-first century life. (And that appeals oh so much to me.)

Anyway, I thought it would be an interesting idea to try to apply such a Proustian approach to these two early memories. Really, really delve into them: what was I seeing, thinking, feeling? Why sight, but no sound? What were the pinpoint details that have eluded me this past half century? What is the meaning behind – and beyond – these memories? Why them? What was the feel of the wood of that fence? What was the temperature of the air? Why did I believe I was lying in a crib? Was that firework – or meteor – so bright and so yellow and so close to me I felt that I could reach up and touch it? And by all this, come to excavate what they have done to me and for me, stretching out an echoing across the decades, me as an adult?

I’m thinking this would be a good warm-up to my Grand Project. I beginning outlines after compiling pages and pages of notes and plan on starting writing January 1st (to follow a similar pattern to the first book I wrote). If anything good comes from it, who knows? I might publish an excerpt from it here at the Hopper.

Jazz Drumming

 

“If you don’t have ability, you end up playing in a rock band.”

   - Buddy Rich (1917-87), legendary jazz drummer

 

 

I spotted this quote in a superb film I watched a few weeks ago, Whiplash, and have not been able to put it out of my mind. It’s become a sort of mantra to me. And though its deep truth seems enigmatic and ungraspable to some, I know what he’s saying here, and I herewith place it in the sanctum of my heart.

 

It actually inspires me to keep chipping away at my Grand Obsession, carving and chipping and etching like Michelangelo hovering about a slab of marble, a project I’ve begun over 18 months ago, and still proceeding along at a snail’s pace …

 

And I’ve played in a rock band!

 

The Mighty Theme

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.”  

– Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 104


*   *   *   *   *   *   *


The “mighty” themes of my two novels (one completed, on Amazon, the other half-way through the final phase of editing) are:


Oncewhere Walked the Whale: What is a messiah?

Kirana (working title): What is fear?


Note: the two books, and thus their themes, are not related.

Project Update V

Well, November was a crazy month over here. Tremendous highs, debilitating lows, and lots of hopping about hither and thither.

First, I began the month on Cloud Nine, as they say, floating high in the stratosphere because I attained my primary goal of self-publishing a novel.

Then, I faced the really hard part. The follow-up.

Basically, I raced upstairs to my bedroom and dove under the bed, figuratively speaking.

Early November had us spending the wife’s annual bonus on annual house upkeep. In this case, a brand new boiler so we can have the privilege of heat this winter. Then my better half needed to fly out to Montreal for four days leaving me to focus on the children, i.e., herding cats. My true focus, though, turned from the writing and the child care to finding a paying day job. Spent a few days compiling and researching my targets in my market, composing resumes and letters, and sending 77 of them out in staggered waves. (Still have 20 or so more to mail out.) The result to date was two inconclusive interviews last week. Finally, we all enjoyed four luxurious days relaxing at my parents’ place for the long Thanksgiving holiday.

But I did do some work on my book business. Did the whole ISBN registration thing and copyrighted the novel. Selected a web hosting company for my author’s website and started checking out the hundreds of customizable templates I can apply. And towards the end of the month I started editing my second novel for publication and brainstorming an outline for my fourth novel.

Excitement!

As far as my physical health goes, I walked 16.7 miles, kinda so-so for me. But I did take the girls out half-a-dozen times to kick the soccer ball around and lifted the weights a couple of times. During the Thanksgiving break I swam in the indoor pool with the little ones. I did clock in at the heaviest body weight in my life, but now I’m minus-five that, and hopefully that downward trend will continue.

My mindset has been rollercoastering in brutal fashion. Up and down, up and down, out of control. Worry, worry, worry, distraction, stress, stress. However, I’ve been finding much comfort in my faith, and have been spending a lot of time in the cool, dark, peaceful expanse of an empty church before the crucifix – maybe a dozen or fifteen half-hour sessions. Somehow, slowly, answers, inspiration and energy are coming.

Finally got around to reading a pair of books I’ve long wanted to conquer – Terry Pratchett’s first Discworld novel and Mervyn’s Peake’s Titus Groan. Both good reads, but neither lived up to the hype in my opinion. Read a great Heinlein and am currently re-reading The Crystal Cave, a very, very influential book from my youth that I haven’t cracked in thirty years.

So I grade November a B-minus. Would’ve been a C but I was legitimately focused on other things out of necessity. My goal for December is to make it through the holidays, make substantial progress on the Book Self-Publishing Project, and keep on an even keel physically, mentally, and spiritually.

Can be done, no?

Cut Loose

“I’m not suggesting you begin doing handstands on clifftops or risking life and limb. But I am suggesting that you must cut loose, in your mind, from your previous life. Getting rich comes from an attitude of mind. It isn’t going to happen if things drift on pretty much the way there are right now.”

   - Felix Dennis, How to Get Rich, page 257.

Something I just recently read that perfectly encapsulates the word of advice given to me nearly six months ago when I began this crazy self-publishing quest. For May, June, and July I steadfastly maintained this new mindset, and made tremendous progress. August and September entailed a little more backsliding to the Old Hopper that I felt comfortable with. But now I’m back on track, and New Hopper is in the final stages of uploading his completed novel onto Amazon.

Details to follow in the next few days.

Rubicon

Well, yesterday I crossed the Rubicon, so to speak. I bought ISBNs.

What’s an ISBN?

If you want to publish a book, you need an ISBN for it.

It stands for International Standard Book Number. It’s like a book’s social security number – a standardized number that identifies a work on any database anywhere in the world. For thirty or forty years, it was a ten-digit number, but with the proliferation of works and formats, it has been expanded to thirteen digits. Every different format – paperback, hardcover, audio book, every eBook format – requires a unique ISBN. You can see them usually on the back cover above the bar code, or on the first left page near the copyright information.

Unfortunately, ISBNs are not got for free.

As of yesterday, the going rate for one ISBN was $125. Ouch!

Fortunately, the company that issues them, Bowker, let’s you purchase blocks of ISBNs at a discounted rate. Ten ISBNs will cost you $295, or $29.50 a number. That’s a sharp discount! And a block of a hundred goes for $575, or $5.75 a number! So, they obviously want you to buy in bulk.

That can be a problem for the self-publisher.

So I bought a block of ten. At this stage I’m looking to publish my book in Kindle, Nook, iBook, and paperback formats. That’ll require four ISBNs. I have two other books in the wings awaiting final editing. When I get to the last one, I’ll have to buy another block of ten.

But, man, I get real uneasy upfronting money. Probably one of the major reasons I’ve put off researching paperback publishing, as I don’t want to spend a couple grand to have a couple hundred physical books sitting in my garage.

Thus the whole “rubicon” thing. Like Caesar crossing the Italian border river, marching on the Senate with his army, there is a feeling of no turning back. Gotta push forward, and make that $295 count. Not to mention the couple-hundred bucks I’ve invested in this thing.

It’s scary, but it’s also exhilarating.

Next up: Kindle and the Author Website ... 

Book Cover

This will be the cover for my first self-published book:

Hopefully I can get everything done and get the entire book out to you by the end of October.

Details to follow in the days upcoming …

Project Update IV

Ugh. September was a brutal month.

Failed to stay on task. In fact, receded quite a bit from those healthy productive habits I established back in May and June. Numbers don’t lie. In September I devoted 25.25 hours to the self-publishing project – 50 minutes a day, and a lot of that reading and research, not doing and producing. Compare this to 33 hours last month and 54 hours in July.

(All told, I’ve invested just shy of 200 hours into the project over five months. The guy who inspired me to do this last spring said you need to devote 16 hours a day for a full year to launch a successful business. So … I’m operating at 8 percent of the desired level of energy. He’d be twelve times further down the self-publishing world. 16 hours a day, however, is unrealistic for me in my situation, but I have to up that 50 minute mark significantly to succeed.)

As far as my physical health goes, same gloomy news. Only walked 12.5 miles, 2 miles less than August’s total, 8 miles less than what I logged in June and July, 16 less than what I did in May. And I only lifted the weights twice the entire month. Shameful. May, June, and July saw me lifting six times a week. And you know what? I really feel the difference.

Also, since we’re mind-body units (nothing is compartmentalized), I do feel that my decline in productive hours getting the business off the ground is a direct result of this inattention to the physique. Richard Branson, the head honcho for the Virgin conglomeration, was once asked what one thing he – or anyone – could do to increase productivity. After a moment in deep thought, he said: “Work out more.”

But there’s more to this than just me cutting corners with the working out. September was an insanely busy month for us. We celebrate three birthdays – and six birthday parties – over the course of two weeks. (If you’re wondering, it’s: Patch’s family party, my family party, Little One’s family party, the extended family party for all three of us, Patch’s friends party, and Little One’s friends party. Whew. That even tired me out just typing it.)

It’s the Back-to-School month, with adjustments to the girls’ schedules and, being their prime caretaker, mine. Back-to-School nights. Ice cream socials. Throw in a handful of soccer practices and games. I spent four afternoons staining the deck and throwing out my back. There was a second family get-together one afternoon for a cousin’s graduation. Two trips to the doctor. A day trip into NYC to see the Mets play. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

So my schedule wasn’t as open, carefree and moldable as it was back in May and June. Instead of doubling down to do the work, I looked for escape in time-wasting side projects and activities.

All right. Enough self-flagellation. I pledge to do better in October, and actually get things launched. What did I accomplish in September?

Well, the book, Oncewhere Walked the Whale, is finished. Completely. I’m satisfied – no, proud of it. I also finished a 19-page e-Book I’m going to send to everyone who joins my email list. I’m proud of that, too. I researched six self-publishing authors’ websites top to bottom, authors I’ve known about before I threw my hat into the ring. Of the six, three had outstanding websites – excellent and professional. Two were sort of average. Glorified billboards. And the last was absolutely terrible. Childish, ineffective, and downright embarrassing. I know where I want to be on the list, so I have quite a decision to make settling on a web hosting company.

The book cover is still throwing me. One of the many things I’ve discovered about myself this summer is that I am not a graphic artist. I can write, yes. I can jam out on the guitar, yes. In those senses I am artistic. But I can’t come up with a satisfactory book cover and translate it into a 1500 x 1000 pixel jpeg. And I’m using respectable photo editing software. Three days of work late in the month and nothing to show for it. I even had Little One help and try to design a cover on her own. No dice. So I decided that lack of a cover will not hold me up. Whale gets published in 30 days or less regardless. I can always add a cover the following month if need really be.

Read five books in September. Only one science fiction, Eon, reviewed a couple posts ago. A spiritual book, a pair of physics books. The last was The Warrior Ethos, a compact 90-page inspirational essay from Stephen Pressfield, which I finished in one day, and then proceeded to re-read each day for the next four days. Highly motivating, and probably helped me salvage this awful month.

Saw a couple of crappy movies (worse was the latest Mission Impossible, seen with my buddy one weekend) and a couple of good ones. Watched one of my all-time favorites, Limitless, and was pleasantly surprised by an enjoyable Riddick. And wasted a lot of time watching New York football. Oh well. I’ll have to multitask while the games are on I guess.

October can’t help but be better, and thinking about it as I write, I can’t help but reach my goals with a little application. To that extent, I must, on a daily basis:

– Resume waking at 6 and hitting the laptop keys for an hour.

– Get my walk in and then lift some weights after dropping the little ones off at their schools.

– Keep taking my supplements (basically a multivitamin, an omega-3 pill, and green tea extract … I really can feel the difference, too, when I cheat on these)

– Avoid my distractions during the workday (believe me, I have a list of twelve of them – the “Dirty Dozen”).

– Get three or four more hours of work in. I have a very ambitious long-term strategy.

– Then work on my honey-do list, which includes finding something that will bring in some cash flow on my behalf.

That’s it. If I can succeed at that, I can succeed at this self-publishing project.

Looking forward to a triumphant Project Update V.

Project Update III

Ugh. August was a tough month.

Lost twelve days of serious work on my self-publishing project: our annual vacation down to visit my in-laws in Hilton Head, a planes-trains-automobiles all-day affair to see the Yanks beat the Twins one day, and fourteen hours spent painting and rearranging my daughter’s bedroom (something I’ve been promising her I’d do all summer). All told, major momentum killers.

I also faced – and overcame – two setbacks of a personal nature that I won’t go into on the blog. Each effectively wasted one or two days in the time and effort I had to pay to deal with them. And micromanaging the girls fourteen hours a day without camp giving me a few hours of peace to work every day bit into my productivity.

All in all I devoted a paltry 33 hours this month to building my business (as compared to 43.75 in May, 41.75 hour in June and 54 hours in July). Should’ve been 20 more hours, at least. Thank God I was able to bang out 19 hours during a brief mini-vacation at my parent’s house in PA (where the little ones swam, played basketball, and roasted marshmallows).

So what did I accomplish this month?

I’m about 95% settled on a title for my novel: Oncewhere Walked the Whale. Problem is, half the time I absolutely hate it, the other half, I absolutely love it. Guess as long as I don’t feel lukewarm about it, that’s a plus. Hate it or love it, if you feel strongly about it, it will work. After all, there is no such thing as bad publicity.

I’m also 95% done with the following:

– The layout of my author website

– My official “biography”

– The lengthy “gift” I’m going to send you for signing up on my email list

– How my business cards will be designed

But it’s always that last 5% that’s the hardest …

The first format the book will be released in will be Kindle. Did some research on it and it seems to be something I can get done in two days of solid work. After that I want to set it up for Nook. iBooks and Print-on-Demand will have to be something I research in October, while beginning the final edit of my next book.

Also bought my domain name, which was kinda neat and surreal.

The cover for Whale is important and right now my biggest problem. I have a vague sense of what I’d like the cover to look like (it ain’t complicated, like an Attack of the Clones space battle), and Little One broke out her pencils and sketched it for me. Problem now is to redo it with photo software, downloading fonts and getting that sketch converted into a professional image. Need to research this from scratch and am guesstimating it will take a solid week of work for this highly critical aspect of bookselling.

Also, the whole purchasing ISBNs has me worried. That’s my project for tomorrow.

August held a little bit of backsliding for me on the physical plane. After working out nearly every day for May, June, and July, and working my body to the point of exhaustion, I took eight days off during my Hilton Head vacation. Problem is, I didn’t get back on the horse. My new routine would be three longer workouts a week instead of six shorter ones, giving me recuperation time. But I only had the discipline to stick with it for five workouts, instead of the nine or ten I scheduled.

I did walk 14.5 miles, as compared to 28 miles in May, 20.5 in June, and 20.2 in July.

Finished two physics books I had since my college days as a physics major, never completed way back then. Satisfaction. Only fiction I had time for was another blast from the past, Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. Currently I’m about a hundred pages in to Greg Bear’s Eon, a book that’s sat on my shelf for seven or eight years. Two books of wildly different spirituality I finished, read usually in the quiet of the deep night, after the ladies had all gone to sleep.

Drove a little over 2,000 miles this past month on our family trips to South Carolina and Pennsylvania and various trips around New Jersey. That’s a lot of thinking.

Applied, unsuccessfully, to nine companies looking for regular work. Lots of opinion about this, but that’s a subject for a future post, once I am working again.

So while August was not as successful as I had wanted it to be, it doesn’t look like such a wash now that I’ve put it all down on e-paper. Did overcome obstacles, which is worth double or triple the time had it been spent furiously typing at the laptop. And stayed focused, for the large part, despite minor bouts of depression and fatigue.

Goal for September: Get that book self-published!

Project Update II

Now July has just about come to a close. The sand piles up in the lower chamber of the hourglass, quicker than I would have expected. But, paradoxically, that I expected. Is it really July 31st already? Have I been working at this project now for nearly 90 days? Do I really have a day less than seven weeks before my self-imposed deadline arrives?

Yes, yes, and yes.

July was busy, but it was productive. Just not productive in the areas I planned. Mainly the month was spent preparing my first manuscript for self-publication. What I originally imagined would take a week or ten days wound up taking nearly five weeks. In 31 days I devoted something like 48 hours to fine-tuning it.

I wrote the first draft in 2005, then edited it (to what I thought was perfection) in 2010. I realized this version would not do if I wanted to offer a superior product to a paying audience. So I went line by line and rewrote it. Took out embarrassing stuff. Corrected typos. Made all the names match. Buttressed the logical framework. Got rid of those pesky passive verbs and substituted colorful action ones. Formatted it. Spellchecked it. Printed it all out to do a final eyeball of it in August.

The bottom-line: Like all authors and their first novels, I will never be 100% happy with it. I could probably re-edit it again and replace five to ten percent of the verbiage. But it is as best as I can do it, right now, all things considered. I am happy with it. I am proud of it. I think others will enjoy it, and come back for more.

I did spend a couple hours this month on a few other self-publishing related activities. Three hours working at the beginning of July on my business plan. An hour getting together a special article I plan on giving away free for those who subscribe to the email list on my yet-to-be-created author website. An hour researching the website end of it, my main focus of August’s work. All told, I put in 54 hours towards self-publishing in July. Not bad considering I am still applying to 9-5 jobs, have a daily honey-do list, and watch two children. And by watch children, I mean: feed, entertain, exercise, discipline, and referee an almost-seven and almost-eleven year old, fourteen hours a day.

Speaking of exercise, I walked a little over 20 miles this month (mostly during the hottest parts of the day) and lifted 42 sets of iron (two different groups of six exercises performed three times a week). While I do feel it is keeping depression and negativity at bay, it is also taking a toll … physical exhaustion. Tomorrow we are heading down to Hilton Head, South Carolina, to visit my in-laws for a week, and I don’t believe I will do any exercising down there, except for, perhaps, swimming. So a week off for recovery should do wonders.

Still reading very motivational stuff of a very secretive nature. Perhaps a post on all down the road a bit, for those interested. So busy that I only put away two fiction books (Red Storm Rising, Deathworld 2), plus a thousand-line play from antiquity, Prometheus Bound, by Aeschylus, at Nietzsche’s behest. Still nose deep in a quartet of nonfiction works, each of which touches this self-publishing project – more specifically, me, my mental outlook, and future material.

Throw in Fourth of July fireworks, a day trip to the lake, my cousin’s wedding last week, and it’s been quite a hectic month. Even more so for the Missus, who in the capacity of her new position has been working 16-hour days for the last two weeks. We’re becoming strangers to each other, so, again, next week’s vacation is just in time. We did manage to watch two quality flicks together (the suspenseful American Sniper and the suspension-of-disbelief-required Imitation Game).

My main tasks for August:

(1) Figure out how exactly to offer my book. The format (Kindle, Nook, iBook, POD), what’s involved with any upfront money and time, what needs to be provided, what needs to be processed (copyright registration, ISBN registration). Need to design a cover. Need to create a catchier, more exciting title (the book’s working title was never upgraded).

(2) Need to create my Author Website. Lots of research needed. I know a fair amount already, but I am a little gun shy here, when it comes to $ commitment. The website itself is about 50 percent completed in terms of my vision and pages I’ve actually written.

So that should keep me busy. If I spent 54 hours on the business in July, I’m thinking each of the above should take at least that much.

Wish me luck!

And check back! I intend to read Olaf Stapledon’s groundbreaking Star Maker over vacation, so will have a review of that, as well as the obligatory What I Did on My Summer Vacation essay, and hopefully it will be extremely weird and enlightening as only a vacation with the Hopper can be …

Project Update

Well, June comes to a close, quicker than I expected. The girls have already been out of school nearly two weeks and now go daily to their day camp. We’ve spent weekends at Pennsylvania and down in Washington DC. Day trips to the park and zoo. Saw a Yankee game. Ran the sprinklers and filled the backyard kiddie pool. Summer stuff. 

I’ve maintained an upbeat frame of mind over the past six weeks of unemployment. My resume has been professionally updated and I’ve applied to nearly 20 places and have only received two outright rejections. Physically I’ve been walking a mile or two and lifting weights just about every day without fail. Rising at six every morning. No booze, and keeping those pints of ice cream to a bare minimum (like celebrating Little One’s grammar school graduation). And when it comes to my great nemesis, that demonic pairing of pizza and Diet Coke, just once this summer. Once.

Now, how’s that writing project coming?

On schedule. My goal is to self-publish my best novel by September. To do that I need to build a writing platform, which comprises all my social media accounts and an author website. I also need to polish the novel to perfection as well as research what needs to be done and how exactly to go about doing it.

I’ve spent a little over 80 hours doing so, to date.

The “galley” phase of the novel is almost finished. After that I have another novel, a novella, and then four lengthy short stories I want to compile into one single work. I plan on releasing a work every three months or so. When a year is up, I’ll have the novel I currently have in limbo finished and ready to go.

The author website is generally sketched out; four or five more hours to get it to perfection. Then I have to research the best web hosting company for my needs. Register my URL. Get a professional picture done (and apply that all my social media outlets). Plan out some blog posts, start a mailing list.

As far as releasing the novel, I still need to research which form would best suit me for my genre and my economic situation. Nook, Kindle, iBooks, or POD (print-on-demand). Or something else? Still sketchy on many of those details. I have websites of writers who are currently doing what I want to do, so I need to research them, analyze what they’re doing, research the companies that publish these forms (i.e., B&N, Amazon), find out startup costs and formats, etc. I will probably spend the majority of July on this.

Then there’s marketing. Need to expand my contacts and acquaintances. Have a few ideas how to do this. For example, I want to give away something on my website for those who sign on to the mailing list. I also need to become more active on appropriate bulletin boards and forums (fora?). The one forum I was active on a few years back I’ve been quite dormant in recent months. Get business cards printed up. Etc.

Lots of things to do, but this project is keeping me sane during my bout of unemployment. Keeps me from feeling worthless – no, better yet, gives me a sense of power, a sense of taking my future and my destiny in my own hands. It’s a great and still unused-to feeling. As long as I keep on track, put in my 2-3 hours a day (in addition to hunting for that 9-5 job and taking care of the little ones), I should hit my goal of going live in September.

I’ve burned through two thick books on the topic of self-publishing (750+ pages), spent 20 or 30 hours reading online articles on the topic, bought a brand new laptop (from some unexpected unused vacation time the ex-company graciously paid me), read lots and lots of psychological motivational stuff, found all the electronic copies of my novels and short stories (save one I’m still searching for – may have to retype a hardcopy on to my laptop), and am slowly reconciling myself to becoming an Author.

Next update: July 31, and hopefully I’ll be light years ahead of where I am now!

Self-Published Authors

What do

Ben Franklin
Thomas Paine
Anais Nin
Walt Whitman
Virginia Woolf
Gertrude Stein
Edgar Allan Poe
Mary Baker Eddy

and

Carl Sandburg

all have in common?

They are self-published authors (as if you couldn't guess from the title of this post).

Add to that list

Mark Twain, for Huckleberry Finn
James Joyce, for Ulysses
Edgar Rice Burroughs, for his Tarzan series
Zane Grey, for his first (rejected) novel

And you have quite an eclectic, and accomplished, list.

Oh, you say, but these are all writers from years and years gone past. Most from over a century ago. Today the publishing world is different. No one really can succeed at the self-publishing game today.

No?

How about ...

What Color is Your Parachute?
The One Minute Manager
Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun
The Celestine Prophecy
Rich Dad Poor Dad
Life 101
Do It! Let's Get Off Our Buts
Eragon

all originally self-published during my lifetime, most during my adult lifetime.

My point to all this is that it is doable. It is even simple. Not easy, but simple.

I've spent the last month or so researching the process. Compiled a 200 item To Do list. Started chipping away at it. Spent many an hour frustrated, overwhelmed, doubtful, even depressed. But then, an hour after that, grew excited and enthusiastic, again, to get my three novels out there. Three novels sitting gathering cyber dust on a couple of CDs in a desk drawer here the past five years.

I estimated that it will take me a thousand hours to bring this project to fruition. So far I'm about 60 in. But I may be overthinking it (ED. - No! Not you, Hopper!). All I really need are some answers, some luck, and continued perseverance. And as far as luck goes, I'm a firm believer in the old adage that you create your own luck through your own hard work.

But work like this, while hard, never truly feels like work.

Science Fiction Reading Plan

Part One (which should take me up to my launch date).

Okay, since I am working diligently on self-publishing my two novels and have set a goal for this fall (for the first one) and Christmas (for the second), I have realized I am wasting a dozen hours a week.

How?

By reading.  Since both my novels are firmly entrenched in the science fiction genre, and likewise the trio I have unwritten yet on tap, what the heck am I doing reading

Westerns
Medieval History
Philosophy
Theology
Conspiracy-theory stuff
Baseball stuff

I realized that in the past year I've only read a handful of true science fiction (a Clarke, a pair of Silverbergs, and a classic or two or three).  Now, I appreciate the value in being a well-rounded reader and writer, but I think I have been neglecting my chosen field a tad bit too much.

So I went down to the shelf behind my writing desk and plucked a half-dozen shamefully neglected paperbacks and stacked them right next to the Dell monitor.  They are:

The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Morn kith
Tom O'Bedlam by Robert Silverberg
Hammer's Slammers by David Drake
The Deathworld Trilogy by Harry Harrison
Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson
The World at the End of Time by Frederik Pohl

Heavy on the testosterone, yes.  Heavy on the science fiction, double yes.

I intend to read all of them in my down time, one after the other.  Absorb them into the bloodstream and brainstream, and simultaneously recharge my energies and realign my voyage, navigating to these bejeweled stars.

Part Two comes this Fall ...

New Beginnings

Just a brief update …

Wrote just under a thousand words today for the introductory “teaser” of my new book.  It’s going to be a work of nonfiction, and I have a pretty good idea where I want to go with it and how I want to write it.  Problem is, I only have it about fifty percent researched.  But I figure I can fill in the gaps as I write it, and then re-write the whole thing.

Yay!

(Note: that was an non-sarcastic “Yay!”)

Grinder

Thinking about inserting a very important secondary character, known as the Lens Carver, into a novel I am outlining.  Then, I got to thinking, “Four hundred years ago, they didn’t carve lenses, did they?  Didn’t they grind them or something?”  (Note: the only crafty things I can do with my hands are type and play the guitar, so I need to research things like this.)

I like “The Lens Carver” so much better than “The Lens Grinder.”  In fact, every time I hear the word “grinder” I think of those legendary bardsmen from my high school days, Judas Priest …

Grinder! … Look-ing for meat!

Grinder! … Wants you to eat!

(Note 2: I am not making fun of Judas Priest.  I still love them, but you gotta approach them with a certain mindset …)

My Goal This Weekend

Is 2,000 interesting words, composed right here

at the Writing Desk of my mind, where I go for Dream-time.

Results to follow …

Three Junes

Little One, my budding writer, is struggling to finish the year with straight As.  Inexplicably – to me, at least – the hardest B for her to bring up to an A has been in Writing.  Since I’ve seen this child’s development as a writer, I can’t believe she’s not acing the subject (though her spellign needds a bit of work, unlik mine).  However, despite my admitted bias, I’m still blaming her teacher.

So last night I had the dream I was back in high school, and her teacher was now my teacher.  Being June 1, he gave the class an assignment: write three sentences with the word June in it.  Wouldn’t that be redundant, a literary faux pas, I asked him.  Apparently in my dream I was an annoying thorn in his side.  Just write three sentences with three Junes, he replied sourly, and I knew I would be called on first to read my work.

So here’s what I wrote:

Later that June Hemingway was obligated to spend three weeks with McDonald, whose wife happened to be named June.  Ernest had spent the past three Junes on safari in Kenya with his old friends Bookbinder and Doggett, both of whom had wives coincidentally – and ironically – named June.  So that entire month in 1937, as he stared at his June calendar, listening to June McDonald babble on and on while reminiscing of drinking binges with two other Junes during three previous Junes, Hemingway began his most famous unfinished short story, “June.”

There.  That’s nine Junes in three sentences, three times as many as the teacher called for.  Wonder what grade I got?  Maybe I’ll find out in tonight’s dream …

Nine-Year-Old Challenge

I’m blow-drying Little One’s hair last night when I decide it’s time for the nine-year-old challenge. She’s reading a book sitting in a chair while I’m trying to get her hair dry – still have to do her younger sister’s – before the timer on the stove goes off announcing that the noodles are ready for the cheese macs.

“You know,” I begin quite nonchalantly, “I was about your age when ‘the Event’ happened.”

Not much of a spark of interest. In fact, she turns the page of her latest book, volume nine of some fourth grade book series, and I’m not quite sure she heard me.

I clear my throat. “You do know what ‘the Event’ was, don’t you?”

“No.”

No eye contact.

“One day when I was your age, hundreds of thousand of flying saucers descended upon our planet, hovering a mile over all our cities, and took us over.”

Mild interest. Eye contact, at least.

“Yeah,” I say, matter-of-factly. “I thought I told you about this before. They came down from the skies and took us over … without firing a shot.”

Skepticism.

“You know how they did it?”

Disbelief. “How?”

Now I let the hammer fall. “They replaced every third person – that’s one in every three people – with an exact duplicate. Only it was an alien. And they loved to eat people. One out of every three people you saw on the street, or came across in everyday life, was a man-eating alien, watching us to keep us in line. And they could eat you at any moment, if they thought you were thinking up some funny business. What do you think of that?”

A shrug. Back to the book.

“Now, my dear, I know you are a writer, and if you want to be a serious writer, let me ask you a simple question.”

Now I have her attention.

“What do you do next?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t be so quick. Think about it. You’re the hero. What do you do next?”

I’m expecting things like –

Find a trusted friend somehow, find out how to detect an alien, find their weaknesses, escape to the mountains, something, anything, but instead I get –

“I dunno. Let me get back to you on that one.”

Okay! It’s a deal, future John Connor!

Chuck the Hyphen

No, it’s not an anthropomorphised punctuation mark.

Earlier today at lunchtime I was skimming through a book first published in 1926 and noticed that every “today” and “tomorrow” was printed / spelled like “to-day” and “to-morrow.”

I kinda like that antiquated way of spelling.

Apparently, hyphens in hyphenated words don’t have a very long shelf-life. Uh, shelf life. Seems I read somewhere the word “teen-ager”, with hyphen, was first coined in 1941 (can this be true?) but by the late 50s was routinely spelled “teenager.”

Similarly with other words. “E-mail” was the current spelling way, way, way back in the 90s when it first became widespread. Nowadays even the OED – Oxford English Dictionary – writes it as “email.”

And further research (eh, about two-three minutes on Google) tells me that American print tends to chuck the hyphen out a lot sooner than our older, stodgier British cousins.

That being said, back to regularly scheduled blogging

to-morrow.