Rain Instead of Snow, Surprise Books Published
Snow is gone, I've opened enough pastures to keep the cows fed - and give them their choice. Meanwhile, side-tracked by two more "easy" study guides to publish...
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Farming News - Almost all of my pastures open to let the cows choose what’s best for them
Writing News - Two more books - study guides - now delay things.
Fiction News - The Hooman Saga continues its serial. No TOC page yet.
Expectancy Factor - A new model shows up for testing: a life has chapters, like a book. Finish one, start the next.
Farming News
A lot of rain this week - but not that slippery white stuff.
Warm days mean working on what you can when you can. Three warm days forecast this week, and as I write this, we’re into the third. So I’m wanting to clean up a cut tree in the front yard for the visitors coming in over Christmas. The Ash-borers got it a year or so ago, so it was threatening buildings. You can see the size of it’s stump - over two feet across at its base, it was well over a hundred feet tall.
The approach is simple. First, we block everything up. That means using a chainsaw to cut them to length. Anything fireplace-ready that I can’t fit on the car-port will wind up in a shed to the back of that picture. Anything that still needs to be split will be set toward the front of that shed, where I can split it by hand (good cardio exercise) and then store the split pieces inside that shed. Whole logs can get wet while their insides stay dry. The trick is to organize things so that you pick the logs up as few times as possible.
And that’s the reason you’ll see people with long piles of wood by their back door, closest to the fireplace. Our wood shed is a bit inconvenient that way, but it works. Because our front door is just a few feet from our “back” door, and they are interchangeable for visitors entering. Not enough room out there to rick wood for all winter. We’d tend to trip over it trying to get in and out. A compromise between dry wood storage and appearances.
I’m watching the cows graze as they choose, figuring they will know when they want more grass. Because I know those few that are good at escaping are the one which will lead the rest of the herd to better food. Right now, I’m having to keep from second guessing what’s good for them. All the grass is short right now, but I have one more section I can use to bring them into - plus the front and back yards by the house. But I don’t want to go there until January, when the holiday visitors have left. (Electric fences in the yards aren’t friendly to parking cars and naive relatives.)
Little Orphan Andy is doing well. He’s a bit independent. I find him by himself very often. But he is the one animal I look up first time when I do my pasture walks. Still a bit tubby now, but he’s going along.
Tiny Home News
Told my gravel guy to go ahead and do our driveway and level that ground out for the new shed base. He said the ground was going to have to dry out or freeze first.
I should get my personal loan this week. Just wanting to get the right time to have that conversation.
I pass by the site twice daily on my pasture walks, so it’s a practice in visualizing what’s coming soon.
Writing News
I’ve had to put off my next research and compiling - because I got an idea this week for two study guides. These are now published as ebooks on my aggregator (Draft2Digital) and making their way through the distributors. After that will be creating paperbacks, which is a lot more detail-intensive. They are about 400 pages each.
One point of these books is to introduce writers in how to dissect classic works so you learn how books are made. The perennial-selling classics keep selling because they duplicate the age-old plots and models we had since caveman days and still look for. But in those books are also the scenes and technical devices which made those great books great. Your new version is based on that eternal model and just updated. If you do it right, you have another perennial-selling book of your own.
The third member of the OU Professional Writing team in its heyday was Dwight V. Swain. His “Techniques of the Selling Writer” is still in print. What I found recently is that after he was hired on to that faculty, he kept writing and selling his pulp fiction in the early 50’s. So that makes a usable way to see his examples of what he was teaching.
I’ve got 8 of his novella’s, which will set into two thick paperback-sized books so the readers of my Writerpreneur Guides can now dissect his work to see how he walked his own talk.
Wrestling these two new books in addition to that “Lost Books” volume I was in progress on (and is also now published as an ebook) — well, it’s a fight between all the farm work and those.
That makes three books published this week. I’m catching up.
Another Breakthrough
I’ve been working on these Campbell books for some time. I want to use his texts to bring his stuff back to use. There are four books, nearly a thousand pages, and all out of print - but not out of copyright. So that makes it a revamp/rehash job.
Also, it’s writing style runs from near-academic to a modern style out of the 50’s. The idea is to bring it back into a more readable style.
Yesterday, I saw what I needed to do. There is no real need to bring all of it back. I really just need to write the book I’ve been needing - which is what I haven’t found anyone else covered. Essentially, what made this course so successful.
The bottom line is that their instructors collaborated with their students every week on what they were writing. Short of that, I can bring these text books out which students can learn on their own and self-critique their works, comparing them to other perennial-selling classics.
That was the reason for bringing those two Swain study guides out this week. And when you take them to study their craft, they are amazing. Sure, you have to get by your own genre preferences, as they are all 50’s pulp Sci-Fi, but how Swain gets you started and keeps you riveted is a good model. Plus, a pro writer can study any book in any genre (even academic) and improve their own craft.
After I get those books above pushed through print-on-demand (and my holiday visitors gone, plus an annual farm calendar I’d forgotten until 3am this morning) then I’ll be simply extracting, organizing, and revamping all this into shape. Then bring them out as 200-400 page paperbacks.
Most of my income comes from non-fiction paperbacks. But to write good non-fiction, you have to really master fiction writing and copywriting.
So the wheel turns.
Also published this week (ICYMI):
Writerpreneur Guideposts
This fourth lesson continues an 8-part mini-course covers the eight elements of getting your book marketed. Four more chapters to go. This one examines how you chose the models you use. And gives some time-worn models you can adopt to get your books selling well.
Fiction Posts
Sue is surrounded by Tig and his pack as they run the trail to the secret valley — where she is to get a “probe” to find out what abilities she has. One no human has survived so far. Not only does she have to keep up with much faster wolves, but also is learning from Tig how to survive in this strange Earth her forbears left long ago. Because the world has changed…
If you can’t wait to see how this comes out, Here’s the book link to get your copy.
Expectancy Tips
An idea has been rolling around in my mind that writing books — scenes, plots, characters and all that — may be an apt metaphor for living.
Characters have goals to achieve in their worlds. And when something finally gets accomplished, there’s a subsequent chapter.
However, we get to live with the “dull parts left in” so it can get a bit tedious and boring at times. What makes life really worth living is to go flat out and keep your vision top most in your mind’s eye. Then you always has a cliffhanger at the end of your chapter to keep you turning toward the next adventure coming up.
Sometimes, these are long story arcs. Other times, distractions show up. Mostly, entropy is your villain - things constantly have to be maintained and even improved to make forward progress. And there are some people who aren’t charitable and considerate. But these are minor inconveniences to deal with. And as you release them, then they become background characters. Or you may have to take a chapter to deal with them so you can get back onto the vision and expectancy you are setting for yourself.
Just an idea. Seems workable. Check it out for yourself…
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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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My books are found under: Robert C. Worstell, S. H. Marpel, C. C. Brower, J. R. Kruze, R. L. Saunders
Sounds familiar--minus the livestock. The emerald ash-borer....that ash, which has probably been here since about the 1701-beginning of the Penn-plot township, is going to come down. In a few weeks, when the ground is frozen, to minimize soil damage from equipment. Following the felling, we'll be able to accurately determine its age. A few decades ago, husband had arborist inject it with some compound (antibiotic?). No use. That's going to be a whopping lot of firewood and chips. A mountain of chips for my four little orchard plots. Very good thing I cleared the north corner of property this last year: now there's room for a mountain of chips. Firewood--which he splits with a maul, I with my own smaller sledge hammer and a wedge-- sits by our spring house, rather a distance from front door, nearest to the fireplace. Pile grew too large, so he started another, close to front door, under protection of a large Norway spruce. House was built in 1828, when fireplace was only source of heat: so our three, functioning (out of four) fireplaces were constructed to be very effective at giving heat. And this has been so valuable more than once, when a January ice-storm took down power for days to a week.