Why can't I write word problems?

Dear Reader,

It's been a hairy couple of weeks. School and the entire state shut down about two weeks ago. School is closed indefinitely. New York State is not playing around with COVID-19. We have been attempting to home school the boys for the last little bit. It's been alright, I guess. There's one problem, I suck at writing word problems. I can write a novel in a month but I can't write a word problem that my son can't solve in less than a minute. I am mildly vexed.

I have been struggling to find the time to write anything. The kids have been keeping me on my toes. Mornings have been busy with academic work. We fit in almost everything in the morning: English, writing journal time, social studies, math, more writing journal time, and art. It's when we hit lunch time that things go sideways. Just yesterday the boys had an epic screaming match while I was washing dishes. It seems that I have to stay on top of them to keep them occupied with stuff. The problem is, I am beginning to run out of ideas.

It'd be easier if I could just print off stuff from the internet but I don't have a functional printer. I am drawing out worksheets by hand. It's been a challenge. I am starting to run low on kid friendly writing prompts. It'd be one thing if I could let them just free write for the whole writing session. The problem is, as autistic children, they write about their special interests at the exclusion of other topics. So, it gets harder to get them to write opinion pieces, fiction, or pretty much anything other than what their focus is at that moment. This is why I have been giving them prompts for their writing journal.

We've been curating how much of the news the boys watch because they get anxious over things. COVID-19 was a huge source of anxiety for my eldest for a little while after the school explained that they might be closing because of it. It took us a solid week to explain that as long as we maintained good hygiene and proper safety procedures we'd most likely be fine. I, however, have been watching and journaling in my daily planner the progression of COVID-19 in my state. I am deeply concerned and doing my best to come up with as much indoor activities for the kids as I can.

All of this rambling aside, I am still trying to get Book 5 of the Umbrel Chronicles of Evandar ready to send off to the printer in a few months. Gods only know if the COVID-19 business will allow me to get the book out or not. Worst case scenario, it goes out strictly in digital format. I'm still trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with my interface for Lulu.com and why I can't get things going through there again. I keep getting error messages that I have the wrong version of Flash to use all their features. It's why I've been doing more stuff through KDP, even though I don't exactly like KDP's platform.

Going digital for now.

Dear Reader,

Maybe you have heard of this COVID-19 bug that's making the whole goddamn world sick. Aside from social isolation and doing my best to home-school my kids right now, I'm in the process of making sure that all of my books are available in digital format. While there are people all through the printing process and delivery process in need of work, their safety is of higher priority. As such, I exhort everyone to purchase digital editions of the books that they are interested in. The work of producing a digital edition is predominantly done via computer programs and far less people are physically involved with the product (and each other) which makes it safer for consumption right now.

The COVID-19 situation is making things crunchy and weird. As a medievalist, I was fascinated by the black death but I had (and continue to have) zero desire to live through such situations. And yet, here we are. I'm going to attempt to produce some short works and price them as low as I can manage to help you stave off boredom and cabin fever. Goodness knows I have a pile of notebooks full of story ideas. I may even share some of the stuff that my kids came up with. My youngest was inspired by my book writing efforts to make his own called The Sad Worm and The Happy Cat. His handwriting is illegible because he was so excited that he just scrawled random lines (or at least what looks like random lines) to go with the pictures.

If I can get things organized enough around here (which is a laughable idea at the moment as the kids are doing a terrible cover of The Beatles' Hey Jude at FULL VOLUME in the other room), I will share some writing prompts and ideas for writers of all ages. I have been logging the progression of COVID-19 in my journal. I have no idea what I'm going to do with this but I feel like it is an important thing to do for posterity. If you're inclined to keep a journal, consider using pens that are good on acid free paper. You're making a historical document, even if it doesn't feel like it, and it will quite possibly be important years down the road.

If I'm lucky, by the end of this situation, the kids will have learned how to carry a tune. Or I will learn to have the focus of a zen master. I suspect that I will not see either happen.

Stay safe everybody.

I think I'm done editing. I think.

Dear Reader,

I think I finally finished editing the little book that I'm writing for the Filianic and Déanic faith community that I am apart of. That was arduous and irritating. For some inane reason, each time I uploaded the document new errors appeared. Errors that were not in the original document. Like my table of contents completely disappearing. Like fonts getting changed or suddenly becoming unavailable (which was really weird because just about everybody uses Times New Roman). I was beginning to think the damn project was cursed or something with how many times I had to tweak and re-upload with the prayer that it wouldn't magically develop another issue.

I am having difficulty getting Lulu.com's site working with my browser. It keeps telling me that I have the wrong version of Flash for me to use all of their features. As a result, I am working with KDP's site. Maybe it was because Mercury was retrograde through the entire time I was working on this. Maybe it was because of demons. I don't know, but this was a  process that made me wish that I had somebody else fighting the computer and all I had to do was just write shit.

I suddenly understand now the pull of traditional publishing. Editing was painful and it was a small text. Uploading was a headache again and again. Then there was the process of making the cover and working out a decent blurb. It was ridiculous. I really think that there are bugs in the KDP platform and that's why things like random font changes happened. I'm trying to get Lulu's site to play well with my computer because I prefer Lulu's format. But until I can get it sorted out, I just have to keep kicking KDP in the teeth when it tries to alter my books with out permission.

Anybody with more experience using KDP's platform have suggestions to get its interface to be more cooperative please drop me a note in the comments. In the meantime, I have another book to edit and prep for release. Still also on KDP and it's still a headache but I'm closing in on being finished with that project too. It's another Filianic/Déanic book (actually the paperback of the digital book that is dropping on Saturday).

I'm urging people to go for digital copies because of the pandemic. I figure computers can't spread COVID-19. That way everybody in the chain of supply for the paperback books is a little bit safer with a few less books to handle.

Life is getting in the way of my writing, again.

Dear Reader,

It would be awesome if things like my dishes could take care of themselves and laundry just magically folded itself up. Bippity, boppity, boom! It's done. Alas, life isn't that helpful. My kids try to help clean things up but tend to leave a bigger mess behind than was there to begin with. As such, my kitchen's kinda a disaster. I still have a big ol' pile of laundry to fold (and I was folding laundry all day yesterday) and my bathroom is in questionable condition. But, hey, we've got a wide path for egress through the living room so we won't die if there's a fire.

Some days, I feel like it's going to take a small army of people to keep up with my family and the housekeeping so that I can stay on top of my writing. Then I remember, if I do a little bit every day, I have a hope of getting things to a maintenance cleaning level. On top of trying to keep up with housework that mushroomed out of control when I caught a cold, we've got school stuff going on. I'm trying to wrangle my youngest into sitting down and actually studying for his spelling test this Friday instead of drawing plans for space ships. He has decided he wants to write a book at some point because I write books. Maybe I can connive him into writing some kind of story featuring all of his spelling words. I don't know. This has a chance of going off the rails into insanity.

So, I have not forgotten about this blog or my books. I just have been eyeballs deep in laundry and housework. I thank you for your patience. Hopefully, in a couple days, I'll be caught up.

Editing is making me miss whiskey.

Dear Reader,

I am so close to finished with my edits on this manuscript. Now I have to deal with formatting issues. Each change I make, magically, undoes itself when I upload the manuscript to the self-publishing site. EVERY DAMN TIME! Font changes? Useless. Line spacing changes? Laughable. I'm beginning to think that there are dark forces moving against me and I'm going to have to sacrifice an animal or something to make this work properly. Also, is it me or does the self-publishing sites have a hate for Google Chrome? I keep getting error messages that I don't have the current version of Flash to use various features. (I have the most up to date version of Flash on this gods damned computer right now.)

I can only imagine how hammered Hemingway would have been if he had to go through this stuff.

Flora & Fauna: Roots are hard to draw.

Dear Reader,

I've been having some difficulty with my sketches. Roots are shockingly hard to draw. I thought feet were complicated and I knew that hands were challenging. I never dreamed that something like roots would be so hard to draw. I am currently attempting to draw something that looks approximately like Mandrake root and it looks gods awful. I now understand why they just took a shortcut and drew them to look like little people in the ground with leaves sticking out of their heads. I am quite tempted to do the same thing. Ugh. Why can't roots be like potatoes? Potatoes are easy to draw. (No, I am not going to post images because I am ashamed of how ugly they are. I should draw potatoes instead.)

Craft of Writing: Revise & Revise Again

Dear Reader,

I am currently in the process of revising a manuscript in preparation for self-publication. Revision is a long process and can lead to burn out. It is tempting to say after your first run through the manuscript that it is good enough. Don't give into that temptation! Resist! For the love of your book, resist the temptation to say that your manuscript is done after one revision.

Maybe you can get away with that in a high school English class, if you're teacher is overworked and is just skimming through papers. Get outside of that special life of writing that is for secondary school and you can't just skate through with out 'extra' revision. There is this myth that authors, especially the big name ones, write the perfect book in one shot and editors just breeze through them to make sure that the layout looks good. It is a terrible lie. Don't believe it.

Revision is a skill. It does not come easily. Let us be honest, here, none of the skills in this trade come easily. Sitting down with a work and searching out its weaknesses and flaws is painful, boring, and tedious. That's why I will let a fresh manuscript sit for a few months before I pick it up again to start the revision process. And I don't try to bang my way through the process in one month. If the manuscript is really short, I may get lucky and one month is how long it takes. Most of my manuscripts, however, are not that short.

It takes me at least three months to get through a NaNoWriMo project (50k+ words) for my first round of revision. Then I set it down for a month to work on something else. After that, I pick it up for the second round of revision. The first round is checking to make sure that the major story elements work and that I have character details correct in most of the scenes. The second round is where I start looking at the mechanics of the book and things like grammar. It is the nightmarish part of revising and editing that I don't particularly enjoy. Still, going through the book with a fine toothed comb is the only way you can get it ready for the third round of revision. That final round of revision is where I try to get things like pagination and font spacing right. I am still looking to make sure I didn't miss anything in the previous rounds of revision.

After spending most of a year on the three revision phases, I will have a manuscript ready for me to consider publishing. I stick it in a proverbial drawer for another month, sometimes two. Then I read through it. If it still works and still tells the story I want to tell, I proceed with the process of self-publication. Sometime, however, after the functional year of revision, I have to scrap large parts of the manuscript and rework. That puts me back at square one after I have done that. I usually want to light my laptop on fire and throw it out a window when that happens. It's ok to cry and eat that pint of ice cream when that happens.

After those feelings pass, come back at the writing desk and see what you have sitting there. It just might be worth spending another year on revision. Or, you might be insanely lucky and have something that is just right. Still do that first round of revision, just to make sure, though.