Coffee heat rising

writing

Asked…again

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So today’s “If You’d Asked Me” post managed to get up before the crack of dawn: short, to the point, and guaranteed to enrage my two friends (that I know of) who are anti-vaxxers. This, after the mile-long doggy walk and before the pool guy showed up to provide an estimate for replastering the crumbling pool. Proposed price range: $7,000 to $10,000.

One could knock something off that by opting for plain old-fashioned plaster, which in the past had a life expectancy of around 10 years. But — wouldncha know it — my guy reports that manufacturers have cheapied down the product so it no longer lasts as long as it used to. The so-called “premium” plaster is said by its maker to last about 7 years; he said it would last around 10 if cared for properly. The regular plaster is now estimated to last 4 years(!!); his guess was it could last 7 years with proper care. Premium plaster is $4,970, which is a savings…but not if you have to replace it in 8 or 10 years. For comparison, what I have out there now is plaster that was expected to last 10 years but has survived 14 years. The PebbleTec and PebbleSheen products, he said, last 15 to 20 years, which is about as long as I expect to be in this house before I croak over or am dragged off to the nursing home.

So I’m opting for the PebbleSheen, a finer, slightly smoother version of PebbleTec. The price, we’re told, is the same.

There’s a fair amount of cash lurking in Fidelity, which I guess we’ll have to withdraw to cover this little exploit. Depending on how bad the damage behind the cracked tile is and whether I decide to try to reinstall the pipeline that would let me plug Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner into a dedicated port rather than sticking his tail into the skimmer basket, price could waver by as much as three grand. Oh, whee.

I’m having to take the next RMD before the usual September date, because I’m out of money as of…just about now. This is because I paid off the damn car loan…never did recover from that hit. For at least the next year, I’m going to have to maintain an ascetic lifestyle. No clothing purchases, no new shoes, no meals out, no travel, no driving from one end of the Valley to the other, no indulgences…  Blech.

Having the laptop off in Apple’s precincts is a real inconvenience. Thank the heavens for DropBox! All the projects I’m working on are easy to access. But sitting on an office chair in front of a desk still does make the back hurt. A lot. So that puts the eefus on getting much done. Hence, I’m putting off converting the “Asked” page to the same PDF offerings that now grace Ella and Writer.

That notwithstanding, this afternoon I managed to write about a third of Drugging’s chapter 3. Converting the stuff from Bloggish to more formal English replete with citation & documentation is quite the little job. The Drugging of America posts can only serve as rough outlines from which to spin upwards of 2,000 words per chapter.

Figure it’ll take about two more days to finish the draft of that chapter. At that point I’ll be ready to write the proposal. Meanwhile, my friend La Bethulia, who’s a psychiatric nurse practitioner, agreed to read chapter 1, the weightiest of the three chapters that will go out with the proposal. Actually, the NNT chapter is a little bracing, but I think it will be OK. I actually may contact the NNT website and ask if someone there would review that chapter, since I take their project’s name in vain repeatedly. If I can get them to vet it for facts — and do so promptly, not an easy trick for an academic during the summertime — I think I’ll have a lot better shot at selling the thing to a real publisher.

I hope.

This, That, and the ‘Tother…

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Drawing a bit of a blank about what to write about this morning. Yesterday evening I had some brilliant idea, but now can’t remember it. But of course I can’t remember my name, so…no surprise there.

Here’s an Abert’s towhee out here in the backyard, pecking up some bugs under the paloverde tree. They’re effective insectivores — the birds, that is; not the trees. Along with a thrasher or two and a passel of sparrows, they’ll keep your yard free of ants and any number of other little crawlers.

Most of the hummers have (wisely enough) migrated north. They’re leaving the Valley earlier each year, in response to the climate change that doesn’t exist.

The Anna’s hummingbird used to migrate with them. They stopped doing so, though, with the influx of human admirers who hang out sugar water for them. For many years they buzzed about the Valley all year round. But this particular variety of flying gem is also damn scarce this spring…summer, or whatever it is. Reloaded all the feeders but have only seen one or two of them. So presumably this is yet another loss to what was once a pretty spectacular quality of life in Arizona.

My son says he wants to buy 40 acres in southeastern Utah, park a Tiny House in the middle of it, and go completely off the grid. Just him and his golden retrievers.

I have to say…there are times when that sounds pretty damn good. Think of how many unpublishable novels a creative type could scribble under those conditions.

😀

But turning to the writing career, let us speak of cabbages and journalism…  The other day I picked up a sort of scholarly disquisition published by a Canadian university press. It is, shall we say, spare. Not to say “slight.” Which is, yes…that is what it is.

It’s only about 100 pages of copy, including a very lightweight introduction that does nothing but outline the book’s contents.

Looked at that thing and thought…huh! What I’ve already got in the “Drugging of America” series would fill that much space. Especially if, as this guy’s book is, it’s set in large type with wide margins. The guy has gotta be someone’s son-in-law.

So I decided to trick out a proposal. Preparatory to that, I took the first post and de-bloggified it yesterday. First step was to convert the links to end-notes.

Well. Naturally this led to another garden stroll through the Internet. HOLY shit, but this is a rich topic. Madly saved sets of links to a new Wyrd file, and came up with material for a good three more chapters. This would give the proposed book ten solid chapters, plus an introduction, plus a bibliography. And that would be one heckuva lot stronger than this little hardback I’m looking at now.

So over the next few days, I need to write an introduction, a chapter outline, a TofC, and a proposal. In a week or two, I hope to have that ready to send off. I’ll also send it to Columbia, which has published another of my books. And the UofA Press, where I have friends who have friends.

Step aside, Barbara Ehrenreich…

Choir season is winding toward its end. It’s been a splendid year with our two new musicians operating as director and associate director. The latter proposes to give voice and music lessons over the summer.

A friend and I have already imposed on her for the same, during the past couple of months. She (assoc. director) would like to be paid in the form of donations to the church. That would’ve been OK if I hadn’t used a large slab of this year’s required minimum drawdown from retirement savings to pay off the damned car. But having done that, I’m running dangerously low on money — have about four grand to last till the end of the year…and since operating this shack, eating, and maintaining the hounds and the car cost about two grand a month…well. Houston, we have a problem.

Really, I don’t know how I’m going to get through the summer, to say nothing of making it to the end of the year.

Complicating matters, the pool replastering job can’t be delayed much longer. There’s a crack under the coping that clearly extends through the shell, meaning the water that’s leaking through it is quietly creating some major structural problems. So that needs to be fixed.

Maybe it can be patched. But that will not fix the other issue: the plaster is flaking off because it’s almost 15 years old. That will cost four to six grand.

Ohh well…

Speaking of the writing career, I told myself I would finish (or at least make progress on) a chapter of Ella’s Story. Since I have to be out of here in an hour and a half to meet my business partner in lovely downtown Tempe, I seem to have procrastinated about as much as possible on that scheme.

And so, away…

So much for best-laid plans…

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LOL! Really, don’t you know this to be true? IT NEVER FAILS.

And yes, damn straight: Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.

😀

So you’ll recall I had this Grand Plan to get marginally in shape before tomorrow’s stress test at the Mayo. The 10-day lead time gave me eight or nine days in which to get out into the Phoenix Mountain parks and build up at least a marginal degree of stamina.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Lovely spring weather. Old lady who loves to hike. Good way to run off ginger and orneriness. And maybe even fake out a cardiodoc. Dontcha love it?

As an idea, it is lovable.

As reality? Well…

So I got several two-hour-long walks in, three times up Shaw Butte (about four miles in a fairly steep round trip) and a couple times around the back of North Mountain, on the flat (a little under four miles RT).

Then it rained. Used that as an excuse not to go out: very convenient.

One day down.

Then I realized I had to get off the dime and write the next chapter of Ella’s Story if I’m gonna keep posting stuff in the current long-term give-away scheme. This is a time-consuming proposition. Unlike journalism, unlike blogging, copy for works of fiction does NOT just pour out of the ends of your fingers.

Two days down.

Saturday, I eat something that I should have known better than to eat. Not surprisingly, it inflicts a roaring case of Montezuma’s revenge. Not only am I enjoying the collywobbles, but before long I’m in a LOT of pain. Like…should I go to the ER??? type pain.

After the fun surgery for the intestinal obstruction (kindly occasioned by scarring from an old appendectomy), the surgeon’s PA informed me that sooner or later the obstruction would recur. And the next time, fixing it will be a lot more involved and will not lend itself to laparoscopy.

Welp: several considerations:

  1. First, I would rather die than go through that again.
  2. Second, when you have the collywobbles, your innards are moving, indicating they’re not blocked.
  3. Third, I would rather die than go through that again.
  4. Fourth, the pain is not the same kind of pain evinced by the adhesive blockage. It’s all over the place instead of localized in one spot.
  5. Fifth, I would rather die than go through that again.

With this calculus in mind, I drop an Imodium. Then (it’s always then with me, dammit!) I reflect that might not have been the best of all possible ideas. Ohhh well.

The diarrhea ceases, not surprisingly. The pain continues. I crawl into the sack with the two annoyed dogs.

Three days down.

Next thing I know, it’s Sunday morning.

Our pastor has cooked up a tradition that he calls “Switch Sunday,” in which once a month the 9 a.m. service is a full Bells & Smells performance. The early service, which caters to families with kids, is the usual much more boring modern version…and it engages the services of the volunteer choir, which on other weekends  sings at the later service.

I feel slightly better (though the gut still hurts) and decide to chance showing up at choir. If worst comes to worst, I can always leave.

This means it’s out of the sack at the crack of dawn, feed the dawgs, bolt down breakfast, get washed up, paint face, throw on clothes, and fly out the door. I’m not happy, but neither am I terminal: manage to get there and stick out the whole shindig.

Back at the Funny Farm, I fix lunch/dinner, a halfway decent (read “time-consuming” meal), diddle around, waste time…and eventually realize…holy mackerel! I am really, REALLY sick.

But: the gut (now bound up tight as a drum, thanks to the Imodium) is marginally functioning. That being the case (sort of), I decide against yet another goddamn run on the Mayo’s ER room.

I’ve been up there so often they have a special cubbyhole reserved for me.

Note that during these escapades, no work is getting done. No exercise is getting done. But by about 9 p.m., I do feel enough better to take the hounds on their mile-long circuit. This was not what you’d call one helluva lot of fun, but I figured that if my theory is correct (i.e., I’m not really dying), a walk should help kick-start the innards.

Oh well. At least it doesn’t seem to make things worse.

I crawl back into the sack with the dogs.

Four days down.

Not altogether down. Sunday afternoon whilst I was huddling in the sack, I did manage to draft the last part of the current Ella’s Story chapter, providing a sequel to the chapter that I slapped online this morning. Was kinda pleased with the images that surfaced in a few searches. This great old guy looks a lot like I imagine Dorin the Overseer to look. I’m sure he’s actually an aging Romanian. But what the heck.

This image is yet to be used: the passages I wrote yesterday will describe the exotic landscape of Zaitaf, which sports a methane lake. And what might that look like? Probably somewhat like this:

😀 Can you believe I found that thing?

Now, just think how magical it would be if I could figure out how to make WordPress lose the goddamn fucking extra nonbreaking line spaces!

Oh. Well, that’s the sort of thing that keeps me from doing any creative work: killing time trying to force the code to do what I want it to do.

So, four days of eight were lost to the planned get-fit scheme. Tomorrow morning I will show up that the Mayo fat, flabby, and probably still sporting a bellyache.

Never. Effing. Fails.

Flyin’ Low…

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Wow! Last few days have fallen into the “Whirlwind” category. Yesterday — yeah, flyin’ low — I got through not one but two interminable scholarly emanations for our client journal, each about 30 pages long.

This has become do-able thanks to the machinations of The Kid, my ineffable and amazingly entrepreneurial young business partner. She has devised A System, and it works. First, she assigns Incoming Flak to her assistant, a.k.a. The Underling. This young woman actually enjoys performing tedious chores — sort of like some of us enjoy ironing in front of the television. And she’s pretty darned good at it.

The journal in question has not come unstuck from the 20th century. Instead of using Word’s “Styles” function to format MSS for the designer, the new editors still indulge in, God help us, manual mark-up! We have tried to persuade these folks to quit that, but to no avail.

Manual mark-up on a computer entails entering what we call “fake HTML” tags before and after every. single. god. damned. design. element. in. the. document. <i>Every</i> italic. <b>Every</b> boldface. <ext>Every indented block quotation</ext>. <pext>Every quoted passage of poetry</pext>. <t>Every Title</t>… and on and on and interminably, idiotically ON. It is an utter, total waste of time, given that a file set up correctly in InDesign will import a Word file formatted with “Styles” and convert the styles automatically to fit the designer’s layout.

We have suggested using “Styles” and even have gone so far as to create a Wyrd template for the purpose, to no avail. The last time we did that, for a variety of reasons the strategy proved to be more hassle than it was worth, and so we gave up.

So, where you are is where you’re at. Starting at that point, The Kid has created an assembly line.

  1. Copy arrives in our precincts (this also is stupidly complicated for different reasons, but I’ve gone beyond complaining here…)
  2. The Kid reviews documents for our purposes. Once approved,
  3. Copy moves to The Underling.
  4. Underling enters all the mark-up tags and checks formatting of references (another mind-numbing and annoying chore).
  5. Copy moves back to The Kid.
  6. Kid reads copy and does first edits, checking references section with some care.
  7. Copy moves to The Old Bat.
  8. Old Bat reads and edits copy behind The Kid, applying the benefit of an eye jaded by 40 years of academic bullshit.
  9. Old Bat generates “clean” and “edited” version; posts to DropBox.
  10. Kid gives copy a final read.

Great stuff, ain’t it? Foisting the tedious mark-up chore onto Underling eliminates a large part of the annoyance factor entailed in editing this content. When you’re not thinking about that ditz, it becomes relatively easy to edit language, style, and fact-checks. So much so that yesterday I read least twice as much content as I could normally plow through with that journal’s offerings.

In more altruistic precincts, on Sunday we — the choir — went over to the home of a member who’s knocking at Death’s Door, brought there by a case of pancreatic cancer. He has planned his funeral service, including his choice of music, and wanted us to sing it for him so he could hear how it sounds. So that was kind of a {gulp!} moment…

But in fact it was really cool and none of us started to cry whilst singing. Despite having reached the wraith-like stage, he was still able to walk around, sit in his favorite easy chair, and hold court with some élan. Would that we could all go out with so much class.

Friend on the choir came over afterward — we dined, consumed a fair amount of wine, and plotted the destruction of the Ruling Class. 😉 Actually, what we plotted was a scheme for the two of us to acquire voice lessons from the choir’s astonishingly talented new organist, who has a gorgeous singing voice, knows how to coach singers, and is classically trained every which way from (heh!) Sunday. Haven’t heard back from said organist since I e-mailed an inquiry, but it being a three-day weekend she probably hasn’t checked the job-related email.

In the interim, I managed to write a few words in the noveloid in progress. And tried to talk to our marvelous Web Guru about a multi-site WordPress template for Plain & Simple Press, which would allow me to publish several works at once, a passage or a chapter at a time. Then YOU, my fine readers, could sample them online and could buy the finished products as PDFs, paperbacks, or e-books. Whether I will bother to put these things on Amazon or not remains to be seen — Amazon embargoes the content if you market a book for less than $2.99, and since the only effective way to “sell” a book on Amazon is to give it away, I figure I might as well give it away for free to my readers than give it away for 99 cents minus Amazon’s share. WTF? I’m retired…I don’t care if any of these things makes me rich or not.

More likely not. 😀

Connie the Trucker calls to report that her dog, a Weimeraner that lives in the truck with her, has developed the same vehicle neurosis that almost killed Charley the Golden Retriever. Unlike my skeptical son, though, she decided to try a Thundershirt, and lo! It works. The dog is much calmed when wrapped tightly in a kind of canine straitjacket. Thereby, we may add, rescuing Connie from having to quit her job.

The blood pressure drug is working: it not only pushes the BP into the 110s or, at worst, the low 120s, it stabilizes the numbers so they don’t jerk up into volcanic spikes every time I lose my temper. Which is often. And — unheard-of miracle!! — it seems to have NO side effects.

And speaking of losing my temper, I have yet to re-wire the robo-call blocker. This will entail a call to customer service, since I cannot remember how to do it — it’s much more complicated than simply attaching it in line, because I have so many devices running out of the same cable connection.

And lookee here! The Kid has sent another pre-edited, pre-formatted article for me to finish off. And so, away…

Time Suck Control

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Okay, so after yesterday’s rant and after a full day of running from pillar to post around the city, I conceived the idea of building a kind of calendar to get a grip on the time sucks that have expanded to fill all available time and space. TS, I call it: it stands for “technological stuff” as well as “time suck.” And the technological stuff IS, by and large, the biggest offender in the time-suck department. Add to that to the fact that I now have to drive 40 minutes round trip to get free access to the PCs needed to format e-books, and you have some serious time suck.

One of the successful (s/he says) porn writers claims to allocate time like this: write a 5,000-word bookoid in two days; spend one day formatting and uploading it.

Well…it’s possible you could crank 2,500 words in a day, though it would be a bit of a stretch. Probably not very good words. But whatEVER. And it’s probable that once you know what you’re doing, you could format the result for Kindle, Nook, or both in a single day.

Realistically, I’m not producing anything like that much copy in a day. Most of the time, when I finally get a chance to sit down and write, I manage about 1,000 words, give or take. The second Biker Babe book is at about 3500 words right now, and the plot has barely begun to thicken. It will need a rewrite…as a practical matter, I’ve been so whipped by the time I start writing, I’m not thinking clearly and so the thing just isn’t coming out the way one would like.

At any rate, the write-write-format idea has some appeal. So yesterday afternoon (speaking of time sucks…) I created monthly calendars to cover the rest of the year, dedicating time for writing, for TS, and for my highly minimalistic social life. Videlicet:

Calendar1
As usual, click on the image to see details

As you can see, half of today will be occupied with two meetings. Tomorrow, the entire afternoon is gone: have to drive halfway to Yuma to the monthly chivaree of my fave writer’s group. The morning of the 5th will be blown by a dentist’s appointment (the prospect gets me so upset I can’t even spell it right!). And since I know I will be very upset after that meeting, I’ve scheduled the rest of the day for running errands an other time sucks. Tuesdays or Wednesdays are designated for errands (also disturbing, evidently…), because those are the days when Costco is at its quietest and so, incidentally, are most other venues.

Obviously, this pristine schedule won’t last: there’ll be, for example, at least two more dentist’s appointments in the near future, maybe more. I do get together with friends now and again, believe it or not. And there’s always SOME damnfool thing that scotches up the best-laid plans. But at least now I have a plan.

For August, it gives me four or even five days a week for writing, which is quite a lot. Sundays are ambiguous this month: writing or TS, whichever is most pressing, because a lot of stuff is still in the set-up stage, and I’m still climbing various unpleasant learning curves. But once all that stuff settles down, it means that in the summer I’ll have an extra day for writing (I hope) or for time sucks (as needed), compared with the rest of the year.

After choir gets started, we have this:

Calendar2a

In this scenario, half of every Sunday is occupied by choir, and so is every Wednesday evening.

The latter is significant because when I’m not falling over with exhaustion, I typically work until 10 or 11 p.m. So that excises several hours of work time — not very productive time,  by that hour, but still…things do get done then.

What’s left during the choir season, then, is three and a half days dedicated to writing, three and a half days given over to either TS or writing, whichever is most pressing, and four half-days of either writing or TS, if there’s time and energy for that on Sundays.

Now. The cool thing about this scheme (as unrealistic as it may be…) is that to meet our production goals, I’ll need to post something about once every three or four days. With specific dates already dedicated to time sucks (believe me, formatting and posting these things IS a time suck!), I can schedule exactly when I’m going to put the things up.

The 18 serials of Fire-Rider are now ready to go. Gary, the graphic artist, delivered all 18 covers, plus a high-res version of the original cover so that I can improve the image at the Fire-Rider website. If I start on that project tomorrow and only post on days that are already dedicated to time sucks, then the last FR story goes live on Kindle on October 3.

Since I’m not doing Kindle’s thing in which Amazon demands exclusivity and pays you not for the book but for the number of pages readers look at(!!!), then I also could post on Nook, once I figure out how. The figuring out will suck some more time, but actually it looks like it may be easier than posting to Amazon. In theory, I probably also could put it on iBooks, but the why of that escapes me.

At any rate, if all that’s going up is FireRider (plus an improved version of the cookbook, whose formatting I’m still wrestling with), that will give us a full month — all of September — in which to build an inventory. We already have six “racy” novelettes in hand. I’m working on two others right now, so that means I need to write only two and my freelances each need to write only two to meet our minimum goal for a single month. Ideally, we should have fifteen in hand, but ten will do the trick.

As it were. 🙄

 

Learn a Skill—ONLINE—and Build a New Income Stream

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This fall I’m teaching a fully online college course that will improve your skills as a blog writer and show you how to write winning articles for magazines and newspapers. Many people use professional-level writing skills to generate the sidestream income that we’ve seen is so important to paying off debt and building savings. And some have parlayed freelance writing experience into full-time jobs as magazine or newspaper editors.

In just eight weeks—October 18 through December 10—the course will explain how to structure, write, and market salable copy for commercial venues.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Types of feature articles
• How to structure an effective article
• Generating story ideas
• Finding markets that will buy from you
• Selling to magazines and newspapers
• Finding sources
• How to interview
• Checking facts
• The language and style of popular media
• How to edit your own writing
• Working with editors
• Legal and business aspects of writing for pay

When you write a blog post, you’re often writing one of the several types of the feature article. This is why some of the most engaging bloggers around are former or continuing magazine or newspaper writers and editors, such as this one and this one. If content is king, writing skill is the prime minister.

The course is offered for three credits through Paradise Valley Community College, in Phoenix, Arizona. PVCC is a fully accredited campus of the Maricopa County Community College District, and the course, which comes out of the English department, should transfer to many university English, creative writing, and journalism programs.

So, I invite you to join me in this little adventure. It should be a lot of fun, and it’s a great way to learn more about the craft of writing. If your blog is monetized or you use writing in other aspects of employment, the cost should be deductible.

The easiest way to sign up is over the telephone. Dial 602-787-7000 and register for English 235, Magazine Article Writing, Section 58235. The class runs from October 18 through December 10, 2010.

Because of state and county budget cutbacks, the Registrar’s office is open during the summer from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and from 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. PDT, Monday through Thursday; it’s closed on Fridays. Sometimes there’s a wait to get through to a registration worker, but eventually you will reach a human being.

Tuition: A reader asks how much the course costs. According to the registrar’s office, for nonresidents it’s $147/credit hour; for those living in Arizona except for Apache, Santa Cruz, and Greenlee counties, it’s $71/credit hour; for those in Apache, Santa Cruz, and Greenlee counties, it’s $96/credit hour. The cost of tuition and materials may be tax deductible: Check this discussion and this site.

The course materials specify that you must have a computer and high-speed Internet connection, and so these costs may also be to some extent deductible; check with your tax advisor about that.

Images: Vogue Magazine, February 15, 1917. Public Domain. Sunset Magazine, February 1911. Public Domain.