February in Two Days - Feels Like Early March
Just like that, all that clinging snow is gone and the ditches are filling up with rain water, as the frozen ground below sends it away. For now.
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Farming News - Winter back to being warmish, for now.
Writing News - Lots of progress on this new book - typical of my shut-in days.
Fiction News - The Hooman Saga continues. The wolf council met, Sue is still facing her probe.
Expectancy Factor - What Malthus got wrong and the Wright Brothers got right.
Farming News
Woke up to rain this morning. And the forecast is now for on and off rain all day. Meanwhile, they’ve pushed below freezing weather out almost a week, but we’re talking nights. The days will stay in the 40’s. Well, some of the forecasters, anyway.
You can see above how the snow is disappearing fast.
Yes, today is the tail end of January. The long range forecase says February hardly gets below freezing most nights, while we’re supposed to be into real Spring weather by the second week. It will be warm enough to start growing grass again.
No more “vortex” predictions.
Yesterday, I brought the last of the wood up to the house, just before it rained last night, so that was a smart move. My nephew-in-law has our chainsaw to get it running, so maybe this weekend I’ll be back to cutting wood. Nicer weather for it.
Cows have quit eating the hay. They prefer what’s left of a nearby pasture, now that it’s not covered up with snow. Now, they will dig through snow when then need to, but a tall bale of all you can eat buffet is better - until they find the better-tasting grass - and our fescue (an imported invasive grass from Russia, originally) stays green most of the year.
Andy is nicely chubby and enjoying his solitude. He’s still staying in the barn for now. Deep straw to sleep in, sunny open doors to warm up inside. And I’m feeding him a pound of mix morning and night. He’s getting insistent I don’t tease him, but drop it right into the pan.
Now the roads have cleared and everyone can drive (mostly) wherever they want, whenever they want. No more chauffeuring for me.
Tiny Home News
The cold has quit robbing our heater of warmth. So that spare heater will go back to it’s storage home until next year.
I got a refurbished Chromebook to keep up in the loft and work from in the evenings. Because I can keep something like ProWritingAid open there and here in my office and anything cloud-based will stay up to date. That’s helped get this book/course together (as below).
Otherwise, without cabin fever, life is continuing along. Yes, looking forward to Spring and setting our garden up again. Yet another story…
Writing News
I got a refurbished Chromebook to keep up in the loft and work from in the evenings. Because I can keep something like ProWritingAid open both there and here in my office and anything cloud-based will stay up to date.
And that’s made all the difference. When you’re dealing with public-domain works and orphans, you’re revamping it for our current day. And yes, that’s one of the most common ways writers find success. (That’s a big discussion for another day, and I’m right in the middle of that in my current book as I write this.) Their data is good, but there is usually a problem with their writing style. Academic-speak has never been popular. While their data can be updated, if the book was written in a stuffy style, it won’t have people recommending it to their friends.
Short of arduously re-writing it paragraph by paragraph, I use ProWritingAid to update the style of writing, and then do another revision to make it my own.
Right now, I’m into the sixth chapter out of eight. Two more and it’s a wrap.
This book will have three courses, each having eight lessons. And as each chapter is about 2200 pages (which converts to a TEDtalk audio) that will give me 24 chapters, plus that forward and any addendum. Count that up and it’s around 50K words, which is a decent-sized paperback.
This first mini-course just lays out the basics. This book is about how to study the classics and come up with everything you need to write your own perennial-selling versions of age-old stories.
It will leave off where the second course picks up - more details to that approach. And out of those 900+ pages of Campbell’s four textbooks, plus two from Foster Harris, there seems to be more than enough left for that third course, which will take up the finer points of polish.
What’s happened since the original layout is that I’m figuring you don’t need to be dragged through my reworking all that material — that organizing and laying out the core “forgotten secrets” would be enough to inspire people to dig up the original books for themselves.
Meanwhile, I train myself and write up yet another “bread crumb” book so others can trace my study trail on their own.
The general scheme is that the books pitch the courses, and the courses pitch the book. The economics of this is another discussion, but you can see this in my “Lost Books” volume in this Writerpreneur series.
The progess I’ve made during this cold snap is remarkable. I hope to squeeze out these remaining chapters this week and so have the course ready for promotion. Meanwhile, these lessons are coming out every Monday and will for the next couple of months - maybe more as I write the whole book this way.
That also then develops the model I’ll use in my next book, “The Expectancy Factor.”
Oh - here’s a study for you: Louis L’Amour was an early student of Campbells — pre WWII. Then he went to L. A. on his return and started writing short stories. His break came when John Wayne saw his story, “A Gift of Cochise” in Colliers. He bought the movie rights to it, and L’Amour converted that story into a full novel, his first. Both book and movie came out at the same time. L’Amour kept writing full novels ever since.
My idea on this was to get the short story, book, and movie to compare them against each other. That 1952 short story is a great one - short and to the point - with a nice twist. The book, at this point of reading, favors the movie. And is a remarkable study of it’s own. Something for both your and my copious spare time…
Also published this week (ICYMI):
Writerpreneur Guideposts
Forgotten Bestseller Secrets 01
I The genius keeps all his days the vividness and intensity of interest that a sensitive child feels in his expanding world. Many of us keep this responsiveness well into adolescence; very few mature men and women are fortunate enough to preserve it in their routine lives.
Here’s the Foreword to this new book and mini-course. It lays out the setting and main characters we’ll be involved with. And the basic “big idea” that’s been uncovered to explain all writing in terms of stick-it-together continuity.
Fiction Posts
The Hooman Saga - XIV - Serial Fiction
THE HUNTING COUNCIL WAS called by the Chief, to meet outside the Chief's den.
Sue’s now found her cuts, blisters, and scrapes have healed — without her first aid kit creams. Most of the first two days were spent sleeping. When she woke, the wolves had brought her a white deerskin dress to wear.
Meanwhile, the wolf-pack chief called a Council of the hunters…
(If you can’t wait to see how this comes out, Here’s the book link to get your copy.)
Expectancy Tips
(From a Note I posted on Substack yesterday, worth repeating: )
Malthus got a lot of things wrong. Mainly, his math was off.
What he decided was that people couldn’t keep themselves fed, and would always overpopulate if you raised their standard of living. In short, he considered that mankind’s population should be limited. Yes, a sociopath. Yet he held one of the first Chairs of Economics.
Correct math showed up when the Wright Brothers ignored people who said that the composite weights of materials made it impossible for heavier-than-air craft to fly. (And a government sponsored project at the same time, funded for the same purpose, literally never got off the ground.)
What the Wright Brothers knew was how to lighten bicycles fly kites, while retaining strength and integrity of their devices. So they build their gliders with that technical knowledge. After that, it was a simple matter of scaling everything up to hold the weight of a light motor and prop.
Ta-da! They kept their first plane aloft for about 12 minutes. And eventually flew into county fairgrounds to show everyone how manned flight was possible.
What Malthus missed was that humans are creative types, given a chance to develop the ideas floating around in their imagination.
Malthus put more weight on Entropy - which we know as the capacity of Nature to recycle materials. So Malthus’ math was 2+2 minus Entropy, equals three. He concluded that things were always doomed to worsen. So, the strategy of his logic said people should get all they could for themselves while they could, because eventually things were going to run out.
The Wright brothers used What-If math. 2+2 minus entropy, plus imaginative problem-solving equals 5.
They invented something unprecedented. They added to humankind’s culture.
People like the inventors of the integrated circuit, and its vaccum-tube predecessor - they did this as well.
The Crude Oil “problem” is like this. Apparently, it’s a natural function of minerals under intense pressure. Like diamonds. And for a long time, technology has known how to convert that oil into heat energy with little to no caustic exhaust. But people have been running on a Malthusian idea that it will run out one day. Conventional Wisdom says its because “there aren't any more dinosaurs that long ago died to make that oil.”
Yet, we keep finding more oil, and ways to get it out. Because — people have imagination and like to solve problems.
And fusion reaction is just around the corner, which will make our lives much simpler and affordable.
Oh - one thing that you can also see about overpopulation: when you bring people up to having a high enough liveable income, they have fewer kids. That correlation shows up over and over, when you look for it.
The trick, then, is to get these “overpopulated” countries to use their imaginations and study how other countries have solved family income problems.
We all need to start from an attitude of having plenty to go around - instead of only focusing on our self-imposed limitations.
As Earl Nightingale said, “We Become What We Think About.”
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I hope your life is not too interesting to be overwhelming, but sufficiently engaging to keep you amused. (Like some of us here...)
Robert
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