Holiday Weekends Give Birth To Books
September 3, 2010 by rtwsenior · Leave a Comment
Here it is, Labor Day Weekend already and I’m about to make a run to the beach to enjoy this very beautiful weather. I can’t take this ability to run around lightly any more, since things were buttoned up very tightly around here for about two weeks this month when my son became very sick. I needed to be right here, 24/7 and even a quick run to the grocery store had to be planned in advance. This meant that not a whole lot of life’s usual duties, such as this blog or the book production activities could move along as they usually do.
But now he is better and life is back to normal. So, I shall run out to the beach before the holiday crowds come in tomorrow.
In spite of the setback, my third book, And Yet A Little While, will be ready to send to the printers right after everybody returns to work from the long weekend. My sister, Ann Sargent, just finished the copy editing process last week and I have taken her advice and fixed things as she saw fit. Now, my recovered son, Randy, is giving the manuscript one last critical read-through. The cover design is in the hands of Creative Graphics, a firm right here in Dunedin and, I ran over there yesterday to check the work at the midway point. I love what they have done and everything is coming along swiftly and beautifully. It’s great not to have to plan a cover with a company in Argentina (my first book) or in Denver (my second book) but just a mile away.
I just realized that it was over the 4th of July holiday that I was submitting my material to Lightning Source Printers in Tennessee, when In Secret Diffusion was finally ready to go. And now, two months later, also a major national holiday, I’m about to finalize another book for publication.
What’s the next three-day weekend I can aim at for book #4? I don’t know, but I’m sure to land on it…. Thanksgiving? Christmas? I have that next manuscript (The Insatiable Sea ) halfway done already and the cover art is finished, so it could very well be possible. Someday maybe I’ll slow down on the cranking out of books and start marketing them. But since I can’t walk and chew gum at the same time or toot my own horn while I’m trying to think, I choose the important stuff. Get these books into life and worry about the small stuff later.
Happy Holiday!
A Bag Full Of Un-Cut Diamonds Hidden In My Suitcase
August 22, 2010 by rtwsenior · Leave a Comment
There has been silence in my personal blogosphere because my son has been very sick this past week. He’s still not feeling well, but things are a little closer to normal, so I will take a moment to report on another fine dream I had last week. As you might recall, a week before that, I was grappling with the dilemna of how to create an interesting piece of art with only dull white buttons to work with. Well, this dream is a lot shinier and much more promising:
I was out somewhere in some sort of a loose group setting in a community of acquaintences, although we each shuttled around alone a lot, within that setting. Actually, it was just like traveling the world with a group of semi-strangers, all of us carrying backpacks or suitcases and staying in hostels.
I had gone to a bank in one of the cities and taken out the contents of my safety deposit box. Or possibly, I had inherited the contents of someone else’s safety deposit box. I remember that the woman bank teller helping me, began to suddenly let me know how poor she was and how much her family needed money, the moment she saw what I was taking out of the deposit box. It was a clear, plastic mesh sack of uncut diamonds, each about the size of a large lime. They looked like clear glass baubles, not at all like the valuable things they were purported to be. There were ten of these lime-sized uncut diamonds and holding them in their see-through sack made me think of the many times in a grocery store when I had carried fruit in exactly this way. Except, that no one else would ask me for one of them as this bank teller was doing in her desperation for ready cash brought on by the sight of such a poundage of diamonds.
I thought about giving her one, but I never encourage the act of begging. However, it tipped me off to the likely reaction of others, if they should learn what I was now carrying around with me. I had to cross some field, dragging my suitcase and a pile of other stuff, in the course of our travels. In the hostel dorm sleeping room, I had to leave my diamonds behind in the suitcase when I came and went. This ownership was already inconvenient, because it was necessary to remain aware of my responsibility to protect these diamonds-in-the-rough and get them where they needed to go.
I wondered if, somehow, the others knew about the changed value status of my baggage and I felt vaguely sure that they did. Had the teller told them, perchance? Even so, I was extremely nonchalant with my stuff, only concealing the bag’s contents with a towel casually thrown across the top, figuring that they wouldn’t exactly suspect that I had diamonds with me. Who in the world would just happen to think of such a thing, in the middle of a group trip?
This sack of glass limes was a worriesome thing to me and I never quite got around to translating that into a mental picture of all the ease and luxury that they could, eventually, buy for me. I do remember shuffling through my mental roll-a-dex trying to figure out who to take them to for whatever operation came next. Where does an amateur start? Who would one get to cut such valuable objects? How do you know who to trust?
Maybe all these books I’m churning out are my “glass limes,” my diamonds-in-the-rough? My third book will go to the printer soon and then I will prepare the others, which are already written. Right now, only my friends and family know about them, because I can’t stop publishing long enough to do any marketing. So, they’re essentially hidden in my suitcase being dragged across the field.
Maybe I’m the Diamond-Cutter and that’s what I’m doing right now???
