Completed

Well I did it.  I completely retyped a 348 page book.  There were many times when I wanted to leave out words and when I wondered why I had put so many in it.  The second book has only 229 pages.  I suspect that I won’t be so lucky with the third book.  Of course I’ve got to find the outline to it.  I know the gist of it, but I don’t want to rely on my memory alone.  I was helping myself out with dialog and action.  This doesn’t mean I’ll follow it word for word, because I’ve already changed my mind about the sequence of events.  What a job, but one must take the bitter with the sweet.                                                         

When October Calls again

I recently published a poetry book called When October Calls.  It started out as some musings in a Halloween notebook and then I decided to make the collection into a book.  They’re not Keats or Browning, but they’re fun.  I started on the second set of poems with that same theme and maybe I’ll have enough to publish another book.  One of the poems is about the time I went to Spring Valley church to look around and take pictures.  It was late February and I didn’t reach the church yard until about 3:30pm.  The light reminded me of the opening sequence to Night of the Living Dead and with all the grave makers around, I couldn’t help letting my imagination run away.  Here is the poem inspired by that day.                                                                                                                                                                                                
 

Visit to a Graveyard

I took the road to Zena

I went to take a look

I wanted color pictures

There were many that I took

The day was in late winter

The light, not so good

Enough to take the pictures

I wondered if I should

I thought about a movie

In which the dead did rise

The atmosphere was like that

Would there be surprise?

Lonely little cemetery

Upon a country road

Imagination, cool it!

No zombies in this abode

And yet I couldn’t help it

The grass above the graves

 I imagined zombie fingers

Poking through in waves

No monsters made an entrance

No vampires roamed the grounds

It was calm and peaceful

With all the usual sounds

If you’re hyper-sensitive

Or imagination runs amok

Stay out of lonely graveyards

And otherwise, good luck!

Edit, Edit, Edit

Don’t ask me how many times I’ve read my books.  Too many, some would say.   From conception to final edit, I’ve gone over my work hundreds of times.  And yet I wouldn’t trade those hours for the world.  The reason is that the process of creating the books and getting them to print has given me the greatest pleasure.  When anyone tells me that I’ve done nothing, I can swiftly contradict them.  I’m surrounded by notebooks and journals and sketchbooks filled with my ideas.  Some have been left for another time, others may find their way to other imaginations and then there are the books.  However, I must edit the first book again and prepare it for publishing.  It’s daunting, it takes days to finish, but the end result may be a masterpiece.                                                                                                                                    

Into The Interior

I haven’t blogged lately and I have a reason.  It may be good, or bad but here it is.  Last February I published a book called The Wizard’s Letter.  It’s the first of five books dealing with servant leadership.  I set it in fable form, really fable as in dragons and fairies.  Well I decided to self publish, and this was because I knew it would never happen otherwise.  One of the perils of self publishing is that one doesn’t have the support of an editorial staff.  It took me several years to develop the books and several months to type up the first one.  Through several struggles to learn the workings of the laptop, I finally had my book done.  Well the original word document had something imbedded in it that would sometimes allow me to made corrections and sometimes it wouldn’t.  I deleted it after ordering a second proof.  So now, I’m retyping it and on the fifteenth chapter.  Another week and I’ll have it looking the way I want.  Then it will be on to the next issue; selling it.