Author: Bob

Out of curiosity, I looked up the website of a writers’ group to which I used to belong (from 1996 to about 2007). They still seem to be meeting, but one detail surprised me. They no longer critique poetry in the group. I know good reasons why that is not good.

Many people don’t care for most poetry. Most modern poetry annoys me; I consider it whiny, humanist drivel and most of it fits into the category of “trying too hard”. Many of of the free verse poets I’ve encountered were only doing free verse because they did not have the skill or work ethic to do structured poetry, so the lack of form was a cop out from doing the work.

Those problems with poetry are why more people should write poetry and should get a thorough critique from writers who are not “poetry people”. Good poetry does take a lot of work; it is an exercise of words, images, and meter.

Compare writing formal poetic structures with weight lifting for football players. At no time during football does a player lay on a bench to raise and lower a weighted bar, but every football player engages in that activity as part of the training. Weightlifting makes the player stronger. Writing structured poetry makes a writer stronger.

Writing is a form of communication. Poetry must also be thought of this way. The poet puts words to paper to communicate an idea to the reader. Whether structured or free verse, the reader must be able to receive the message without the poet being present.

This is where the group critique helps. In an effective writers’ group, the author being critiqued listens, possibly taking notes, but never speaking. The other members discuss the work as though the author is absent, referring to the author in third person or just as “the author”. Doing this helps the group members speak more freely and prevents the urge for the author to defend the work. The author sees exactly which parts of the message were received by the readers and, hopefully, understands which parts were missed.

By reviewing the critique, the author/poet can revise the work to make their message more clear. With experience, the author builds a talent for communication so their audience will miss less of the message.

Again, poetry can be a bit abstract, or just flaky, and a good critique from friendly but honest group members can really help. For someone serious about their poetry, this is invaluable. They can develop beyond “why does life have to suck so much?” dirges to poignant little descriptions of the beauty of aggregate in sidewalk composed of clever but simple words. On the other hand, if the poet just wants to identify as poet to inflict their nonsense on others, a couple of good critiques may discourage them.

If you have a group, I hope you will critique poetry. Whether you have a group or not, I hope you will experiment with poetry. Just so you know such things exist, I hope you find one of the truly awesome poems by a great poet and that the poem has an effect on you.

I am starting to see a pattern. Fall of 2017 was almost as bad. In my day job, I teach software development and databases. This fall, one of my courses, the technology changed while I was teaching it. All of my preparations, my examples and so forth were invalid. This really cut into my writing time.

As I struggle to get back to my passions, I find a barrier. It is as though the busy beavers of my day-to-day have built a dam of daily responsibilities and mundane tasks. The creative flow, now blocked, built up behind it, building pressure at the same time.

Now I have to carefully disassemble the dam, piece by piece, to let the pressure out in a controlled manner until a healthy balance has been restored. My fear, though, is that I will pull out some important structural member, allowing a flash flood of creativity that displaces my daily tasks and the ability to pay bills they provide.

Hopefully, I will be able to get back into the swing of things and create some stuff. I also need to get back to promoting my novel, Cordell’s Rebellion.

One of my former students has asked if she can provide cover art for my next novel. She is a good illustrator, so I am excited to see what she comes up with. As a matter of propriety, I had to insist that I pay her for the work (she wanted to give it as a gift) because she is a former student. I will also make sure that she gets proper credit for the cover art.

The other side of that is the imperative to complete the second novel. The first draft is about four-fifths done. I need to finish the first draft, diagram the crap out of it to look for structural flaws, do all the grammar and spelling checks, and complete a few more drafts. That shouldn’t take too many more lifetimes. If I really crack down, it should be easy. I just need to do it. I also need to keep up with daily responsibilities.

I’ve always heard it said that good writers don’t find time to write, they make time to write. That is going to have to be my way of doing things. I have to shoehorn time to write and be generally creative. If I don’t the rest of life will take it over.

Walked I willy-nilly     on winding way when
I saw something settled      in the silt at the side
a beverage bottle      blindly be-thrown
by littering lout      with no love for the land
a wastrel without      the wisdom of the world
blighting the beauty      of my beloved byways
earning the enchantment      the elves can employ
to punish this person      polluting the paths
a curse coming to condemn      the un-cautious culprit
to terrors and tremors      and ingrown toenails

The changes to the layout of the novel seemed to work, at least as far as the title page and the other front matter. The actual content of the book still had an issue. This was going to take some exploration. I think it may now be fixed.

The trick had to do with using Microsoft Word Professional 2016. Barnes and Noble Press let you upload your work as a formatted Word document or as a PDF. Converting from Word to PDF proved troublesome, so I used Word. It occurs to me now that the issue with the transformation may have been the same on I had with the publishing.

The book has two sections. The first is the title page and assorted front matter. Those pages do not have page numbers in my case. The second section is the actual text of the book and should have page numbers starting on page one of the story. Word lets you create section breaks and start the numbering on the start of the section.

There is an issue, however, if you use the default sections. One of the most annoying things about any Microsoft product is that it tries to be helpful. In most cases, it is about as helpful as a four-year-old. In this case, the default section settings try to optimize your layout so that you have no extra blank pages. This can end up, like for my novel, starting page one on the even side of the paper.

To fix this, you have to go to the Layout tab in their ribbon toolbar and specify that you want a section that starts on the first odd page. They have several choices, but unless you know to look for them, you would sit with the same frustration that I had. (When the revolution comes, I’m sure the Microsoft people will be lumped in with politicians and other hated figures.)

My hope is that this will finally fix the issue. I need to get it settled so I can start real promotion of the novel. I also need to stop working on it because my day job has just gotten busy with the start of the semester. By whining here, maybe this will help someone else too.

When last we visited our newly-printed novel, all the pagination was effectively correct except for being one page off. That meant the title page showed up on the left side instead of the right and all the page numbers appeared almost in the gutter. With some simple instructions from the publisher, I made changes. Now to see what effect the changes had.

The process was easy enough. As noted in earlier posts, I’m printing through Barnes and Noble Press. They have a good website that makes it easy to submit your manuscript and covers for publication. The site is short on instructions, so there is a bit of a learning curve. However, the responses from Customer Service have been relatively prompt and helpful.

The steps for making a change to the manuscript are almost the same as the steps for creating the project originally. You simply go to the book project on the dashboard, click on the ellipses in the upper right corner for the item to be changed, and choose “Edit”. From there, the site walks you through the same steps as creating the project, but you only have to upload new things. Once done, the processing starts.

A side effect of this process is that your book is not available for sale during the processing phase. I did note that the edit processing did not take as long as the original processing. There’s no way to tell if that was because I was just editing or if the servers were not as busy. Be prepared for a wait.

My new set of promotional copies are on their way. They should arrive about Thursday. I can start my devious plan to get them into the hands of people who may be able to encourage others to buy. It’s also just cool to have a box filled with copies of your novel in your car; it makes the publishing feel less abstract.

Unfortunately, my day job starts up with the fall semester. The last two weeks have ran me ragged trying to get ready. One of the disadvantages of teaching technology is that it is never the same from year to year. At least I managed to outline and make notes for a horror short story involving sock puppets (don’t ask). As the term settles, I should be able to get back to more writing-related activities.