Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Book Conservation, General Musings, Guns, Predictions, Publishing, RKBA, Science, Science Fiction, U of Iowa Ctr for the Book, Writing stuff
I spent most of yesterday re-reading Communion of Dreams, to make sure that all the little changes I’d made in the previous week were correct and to see if I could catch a few more typos. Once it was all checked and double checked, I created manuscript files in the format preferred by the publisher, appended an email, and zipped the whole thing off. If you would like to see the finished product, the CoD homepage has now been updated to have the final .pdf version.
So, now we wait and see what the publisher decides.
And speaking of the publisher, I have had a couple of queries about them. It’s a new enterprise, Trapdoor Books. I like their attitude and approach, though of course with something so new it is hard to judge. And if this works out, I hope that I can help them as much as they can help me. If it doesn’t work out, no hard feelings on my part – lord knows that I had to turn down a lot of talented artists in the years I had the gallery.
But it does have something of the same feeling as when I first started at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. That too was a new enterprise, and no one was really sure how it would work out. Now it is perhaps the most highly regarded book arts program in the country, and my almost 20 year career as a conservator has both benefited from the reputation and added to it in a small way.
So, we’ll see. It looks like things are moving again with Her Final Year, and that book could garner a lot of mainstream attention, since there is little in the care-giving literature from a male perspective. BBTI will cross 2 million hits later this month, and we’re currently planning another very large series of tests this spring which will once again generate a lot of interest in the gun world. It could be a very interesting year.
Jim Downey
As I mentioned the other day, this week I’ve been working very intently on the revisions of Communion of Dreams.
For those who have never tried to write book-length fiction, let me try and explain how mentally challenging it is to do it right.
You’re juggling the entire text in your head – and each of the pieces of conversation or narrative all has to ‘fit’ with everything else that happens in the book. Not just in terms of actual plot development, but also in terms of tone, or characterization, or even dialect. To do it, I spent four days just closely re-reading the entire book, to make sure it was all fresh in my memory. Then I spent a day just thinking about what changes to make. And each of the last two days I spent about 5 hours a day making the changes and making sure they all fit.
To give you an analogy, it’s something like being the organizer for a very large convention at which there are multiple speakers with different demands and needs. You have to make sure that everything is scheduled in such a way as to minimize conflicts. And that each speaker has the materials and equipment they need. Oh, you also have to handle all the registrations yourself, the morning of the event. And cook the banquet to be served that night. And make sure that all the toilets have enough toilet paper. Does that give you some idea of the mental juggling involved?
It’s do-able. And very rewarding. But it is also exhausting. And that’s how I feel after finishing it up.
But the manuscript is done. And it *is* better than it was. I just hope that it is good enough for the publisher, and the people who may one day read it.
Jim Downey
I’d mentioned in my 2009 review that I was still waiting to hear back from the publisher about the revised Communion of Dreams manuscript.
Well, I just got an email. Nothing is finalized yet, but it looks like the book will be published, perhaps in the second quarter of this year.
Huh.
They have asked about a couple of changes to the text (ones I will have no problem making, either emotionally or mechanically). I’ve told them that I can make those changes within a month, even allowing for me going to the SHOT Show next week.
So.
Huh.
Well, keep your fingers crossed – no contracts have been signed yet. But this looks like it’s going to happen. The editor *really* liked the book – one excerpt from the email I received:
The protagonist, Jon, was consistent throughout, and I think he provided a good center through which the evolution of the other characters occurs. The Sidwell character was a surprise, in that I expected him to be a static character, but he turned out to have much more depth. Even the commander of the Marines, Navarr, seemed non-stereotypical to me.
Nice.
Huh.
I think I need a drink.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Book Conservation, Guns, Health, Hospice, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, tech, Writing stuff
As I have done for the last couple of years, I like to look at the stats for my sites on New Years Day – numbers don’t lie.
But they can be a bit confusing. Here’s how. In 2009, I could say that 9,619 people downloaded some or all of Communion of Dreams. That would break down as 5,877 downloads of the original “complete” .pdf of the book, 156 copies of the revised version, 3,183 of the first mp3, and 403 copies of the first chapter. Or I could say that there were a total of 6,765 downloads, using the numbers for the “complete” .pdfs plus the minimum downloads of both the mp3 and individual chapter files (on the theory that those numbers reflect “complete” downloads of the book in those formats.) For my year-end numbers in the past I have used the latter formula, and I will do so again.
So, 2009 had 6,765 downloads. That compares to 6,288 in 2007, and 6,182 in 2008. How many people have actually read the book, I have no idea – I have heard from people that they have passed on the .pdf they downloaded to friends, and others have told me that they printed the thing out and gave copies to others. So that would boost the numbers. Then again, just because someone downloaded the thing, doesn’t mean they read it. Lord knows I have plenty of books I own but have never gotten around to reading.
Which brings up another item – back in August I mentioned that I was working on a revision because there was a publisher who was interested in the book. In November I mentioned that I had submitted the manuscript with the revisions, and was waiting for them to take another look at it. Well, I’m still waiting, though the publisher said that he was going to assign it to one of their readers and go through it himself, and would get back to me soon. I’m not complaining about the wait – six weeks or so is not at all unreasonable – but I do wonder whether he just didn’t want to give me the bad news leading up to the holidays. So, we’ll see what comes of that.
I’m also in a “wait and see” mode on my two other writing projects. My co-author on the caregiving book Her Final Year still has to finish his editing before we can proceed with that, and I haven’t had a chance to get together with my sister to really get started on My Father’s Gun. But now that the end of the year is past, I hope to make progress on both of those soon.
Other aspects of life in 2009? A mix. I did get a lot of good conservation work done, though losing the one big client in the fall due to the economy hurt a lot – I have other work, but nowhere near as much, so that has hindered my efforts to resolve long standing debt leftover from the gallery. My health is better than it was a year ago, but I still need to lose several stones. The BBTI project was a huge success through 2009, and I’m sure will continue to be a source both of work and pleasure in the coming year. Otherwise, well, if you read this blog you probably already have had your fill of my introspection.
So, goodbye 2009, and best wishes to one and all for a better 2010.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Feedback, General Musings, James Burke, Phil Plait, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Space
Happy Thanksgiving, to my American friends.
Perhaps thinking about giving thanks, and the question of my perspective from this vantage point in life, is what made this post from the Bad Astronomer pop out in my reading this morning. It’s about a scale model of the solar system hosted on the web. From the site:
This page shows a scale model of the solar system, shrunken down to the point where the Sun, normally more than eight hundred thousand miles across, is the size you see it here. The planets are shown in corresponding scale. Unlike most models, which are compressed for viewing convenience, the planets here are also shown at their true-to-scale average distances from the Sun. That makes this page rather large – on an ordinary 72 dpi monitor it’s just over half a mile wide, making it possibly one of the largest pages on the web.
Just for reference, the image of the Sun on my monitor is about 6″ diameter. Yeah, Pluto is a speck about 6,000x the diameter of the Sun away.
I love these sorts of things which convey the notion of deep distance (similar to the concept of deep time). One of these days I’d like to make it to Sweden to see the Sweden Solar System, which uses the Globe arena to represent the Sun, with Pluto a sphere about 5″ in diameter almost 200 miles away.
This question of scale – of the deep distance from one planet to another here in our solar system – is one which I tried to deal with honestly in writing Communion of Dreams. It’s why it takes over a week for the researchers sent out from Earth to reach Saturn (Well, Titan, actually) even using a constant thrust of about one-third gravity, and why there is a time-lag in radio communications of about 90 minutes (yeah, I researched not just the average distances between the planets, but where they would be in their respective orbits on the dates in the book – as well as what the intermediate time lag would be en route at various points). Which presented a problem in the writing – what to do with the characters in the book during this period? Which, in turn, is what I think made the readers at the publisher feel that the book moved too slowly in the first half.
Well, I still haven’t heard back from the publisher about the revisions I sent (and I didn’t expect to yet), so I don’t know whether I was able to address this concern adequately with the changes I made. And once I do hear, I expect that my perspective on the matter will change – as it always does, after the fact. Such is life. Such is the universe.*
Again, Happy Thanksgiving.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, tech, TED
Ah, yes, the first step into an integrated “expert” technology such as I envisioned for CoD:
Fascinating. And just about right on time.
Jim Downey
(Via BB.)
Communion Of Dreams 