Ideas About Starting And Writing A Book

Ideas About Starting And Writing A Book

I want to write a book.
I have not yet written a book.
I need all the help I can get writing a book because I simply do not know what I am doing.  I have, over a number of years, researched how I should proceed.  I am sharing with you my current proclivities toward this project that has risen out of my research.  You are encouraged to examine this approach but be skeptical of it because I am not an authority in any way, just a casual participant who dips into this hobby when he can.

You should first understand some economic basics of book publishing, that being the publishing industry does have some behind the scenes factors and methods that you should be aware.  No sane publisher will put in print a large page number book.  The publisher will be going to a lot of expense so try to keep your page count reasonable for both your sake and theirs.  Typically you need to be tested in the market and achieve name recognition before you can write larger books.  There are exceptions.  This advice is for you to better achieve your first success.

The following is guidelines and not rules.  Bend them at your will anytime but realize there may be a down side for doing so.

Your first book should not be that long.  It should have a target value of about 100,000 words give or take around 20,000.  This depends upon the subject matter.  Different types of books typically achieve different word counts.

Trick: go to any library or book store and select titles of books that fall within your book category.  Go to the last page and find the page number.  Go to a page in the book full of text and count the words.  That number is the average words per page.  Multiply the number for one page by the total number of pages in the book to get a rough estimate of how many words are in THAT book.   You can do the same with any number of more books to improve your view of how many words you just might consider writing for the book category you are thinking of writing.

Next, and this is very important, you will need to pace yourself to complete the book.   Only you know your schedule, your free time, and your writing ability so the following numbers are only rough guidelines that you are encouraged to slide and shift to your life circumstances.

I will next show you how to pace your writing.  Remember the total words that your book might have to reach before it is completed?  You are going to try to write one page of your book in one day, two days, three days, or in a week.  I recommend that you write a page each day!  This really does depend upon how much free time you have.  Let us assume that you calculated 300 words will fill one page of your book.  Just divide that number into your book total word count.

Example: 300 words per page / 100,000 total book words =  just over 333 days.  A year has 365 days so within a year you should have the book completely written.  Add time for the book jacket to be created.

When I discovered that writing a book might take roughly one year, I was amazed and ecstatic.  Up to that point in time I had no idea how long it would take.

I have another tip to help motivate you.  My favorite writing software is Scrivener.  It is especially designed for creative writing and large long projects.  It is excellent for people, like me that have a lot of ideas but have some difficulty linking them together.   My main point is none of that.  My main point is this software offers a writing odometer.  Scrivener calls this feature “Project Targets”.  You set where you want the writing trip to end, lets say 100,000 words.  You then enter how many words you think you want to write each session, lets day 300.  A window pops up if you activate it and you can see your progress in real time as colored bar graphs.  For me this was simply fantastic.  That window was my motivation.  I realized the first time using this odometer that writing one page really did not take me that long.

If you buy Scrivener, I recommend that you consider buying a book to help you figure out how to use it.  Scrivener is very mechanical looking.  It has a lot of cut up screens and different views and features that will take you some time to master.  I am currently using Scrivener For Dummies by Gwen Hernandez.

I can not here cover your next step, how to get the book published?  You typically have two routes, print publishing and e-books.  Each has its positive and negative points and those points are very, very important so choose wisely.

Good luck!

Problem Getting News That Matters To Me

Problem Getting News That Matters To Me

My wife and I were in San Luis Obispo June 23 on vacation.  That evening our room lights dimmed, a brown out.  A while later we lost power.  My wife looked out the window and reported not seeing any lights.  After finding two LED  flashlights I pulled out my hand held ham radio and turned to one of the local repeaters.  (146.670 MHz).  It took a while but within, I would guess fifteen minutes, we got a pretty clear picture that this was a very large outage.  Ham radio operators were reporting whether they had power or not.  One mobile operator reported at which freeway off ramp he determined the outage began going south on HWY 101.  We made a list of dark cities on a pad of paper and realized how extensive the outage was.

It seemed to take a while before there seemed to have an operator take charge.  My main criticism is this: I never heard any summary of what was reported by the control operator.  I think we need to be aware that media and some of the general public may listen to our communications.

Next morning at breakfast at Apple Farm Restaurant, I gave the complementary newspaper found outside our hotel room to my wife while I used my smart cell phone to read newspapers in California.  The San Luis Obispo newspaper, The Tribune, had by a mile, the best information.  All other papers were deficient or failed to carry the story.  I then realized that no major California paper had a California section.  You either have local or national news, both ends and no middle.

Wierd “Plane”

Wierd “Plane”

While walking with my wife May 19, 2013 in the morning, we heard a prop plane overhead.  My wife turned around and I did too to look upward to try to spot the plane.  I was amazed at viewing an extremely high speed delta wing type of plane with no prop, no windows, no wing or tail flaps, no exhaust, no markings, exceedingly smooth like a dolphin, very pointed nose, white plastic or transparent looking body going west to east over north Orange County California and maneuvering  exceedingly fast with slight corrections which were very rapidly made.  Because this object cut into small puffy clouds I would have to guess it was not a model plane but much large in size.  This object disappeared quickly out of view but the prop sound remained unchanged so I think we failed to spot the plane making the prop noise.  I suspect the flying device my wife and I saw was not the prop plane which means the mysterious “plane” made no noise that we could detect.  At the time, I thought it might be an experimental military craft. I went to the Internet to see if I could find any plane that looked like what we saw but could not find anything.

How Not To Win A War

How Not To Win A War

You should seriously consider looking at and consider buying the March/April 2013 issue of Foreign Policy magazine (How Not To Win A War).  It does an excellent job of looking back to how the United States has done such a poor job at waging war.  I used the word “poor” while others may substitute the word “incompetent”.  The issue mainly cites Afghanistan in its analysis.  As part of this issue, they reveal how President Obama allowed for  similar failed administration process as George W. Bush for sanitizing people working on the war effort (revealed in Imperial Life In The Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran) by stuffing under qualified individuals into positions of war and “nation building” buy having each individual pass the political litmus test of allegiance to their “leader” (in the case of George W. Bush that would be Chaney and his neocon ideology).    A whole lot of ideas come out of this issue that are not explicit stated but one can most easily pull out of the issue:

  • Evidently no one in high office even thinks of conducting deep choice analysis prior to invasions of foreign countries.
  • The US Military method of waging war is land grab.
  • The US always takes on the method of looking down upon the country being invaded and imposing our views and methods.
  • The US Military can really run it off the rails when it gets involved in deciding policy.
  • The CIA can really ruin the war effort when it gets involved in deciding policy.
  • The U.S. State Department expertise is not appreciated, under utilized as a result, because their business is seen as making sausage.  Presidents seem unable to comprehend political complexity, want it simple.
Govenor Brown Wants College Education To Take 4 Years Not 6

Govenor Brown Wants College Education To Take 4 Years Not 6

LA Times article, Thurs. May 16, 2013, LA Extra page AA, Brown urges UC to speed graduations.
By Larry Gordon

The California governor wants a college education to take 4 not 6 years.  There are some factors that are not readily apparent causing this problem.  I will list a few.  Please note that as I list each factor that factor in itself is a self sustaining problem that adds to the next factor.  To solve this problem, each factor should be dealt with.

Universities cherish research over instruction.  They thus hire some faculty that are deficient lecturers.

If a faculty member achieves tenure status, that person is protected from a culling process, if one exists, and I think the process is mixed from campus to campus in its effectiveness in getting rid of bad instructors.

Students compensate for bad instructors by trying to pick good or better ones by looking them up on evaluation web sites like http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/.

Universities fail the class enrollment process by listing “Staff” in course offerings.   This is simply an awful device that leads, in itself, to a slow education.  Departments hide who is teaching many classes.

Students counter the listing by “Staff”  by enrolling in extra classes.  They can thus find out who the instructor is when the first class begins and measure how competent that person is and how much work is required.  Students that work, to help pay education costs, not only want good instruction but can not afford to spend extra unnecessary time doing busy work.

Students who enroll in extra classes anticipating dropping ones with deficient instruction thus diminish the total number of classroom seats.  Students are signing up for classes that they know they will drop.  They are just not sure which classes until they attend the first or second class meeting.  This is a significant problem leading to making college a 6 year experience.

Education costs have risen.  Many students are working their way through college.  They only have time and money to take 4 or less classes a semester.  If education costs were lower, we might see students take more classes each semester.

Student anxiety is much higher today due to society and economic factors than years past.  These students, to minimize anxiety take fewer classes.  This is a significant problem that is getting worse.

What is being done by university officials to solve any of these issues?  Very little.  Governor Brown is trying to solve one problem but does he know that many factors are hidden from normal view and cause what appears to him to be a bigger issue?   Higher education has a lot of inherent problems and they all mainly seem to be concerned in raising money and not reforming to make their education business a better product.

Kayak DD Video Switcher Goes Down While I Watch It Happen.

Kayak DD Video Switcher Goes Down While I Watch It Happen.

I am at the end of my Monday proof of a million dollar TV studio and control room.  I run into snags every week and today is not any better.  Here are some examples for this day:  I can’t get the Deko character generator computer to turn on until I go through a special power up process.  It finally does power up very clean.  Camera one is divorced from the camera control unit because someone turned camera control lock off which means we have no way to communicate between CCU and camera head.  I find the switch and set it correctly.  All the camera head intercoms have been turned off.  I turn them on.  Camera two has talent tally light turned off.  I set the switch correctly.  The mouse for one of the in/out sources to the video switcher lost its mouse so I had to come up with a solution.  Well I am at the end of the proof process where I record on to video tape and computer hard drive output from the Grass Valley Kayak DD switcher and Yamaha D1000 audio board.  I just want this proof process to end and go and get my Starbucks Zebra drink and call it a day.  Everything gets recorded perfectly during this record test but I notice that I can not dissolve from preview bus either of the Ingest computers.  I can dissolve from the preview all studio cameras but not from Ingest one or two!  As I try to do more with the switcher its capabilities rapidly diminish.  This just does not make sense.  I have never seen this before.  As I look down on the switcher control head I see the lights on the rows of push buttons go out.  The switcher is going down!  Customers will come in any moment and productions start in two hours.  I do reset on the control head and later on the main frame computer.  I reattach each connector that runs between the control head and main frame.  The LAN connection does not look pristine.  I do notice that the LED light that normally flashes next to the Ethernet LAN connector is out.  Looks like the two boxes are not talking to one another.  The main frame LED lights all show which is good.  Both main frame fans are functioning.  I call Grass Valley start a ticket and ask for Art N, an authority for Kayak DD switchers.  He is not in.  About 45 minutes later Dave G. calls me and starts to tell me to check item after item.  I simply love Grass Valley technical support.  It soon becomes apparent that we have a major failure.  The customers will be walking in any moment and final semester productions are this week.  We talk the options over.  We discovered that the control head display fails to show the main frame on its menu.  I tell Dave that I noticed that the LED LAN does not light up.  Dave tells me of a secret method of forcing the main frame computer to communicate with the control head.  I am to turn the main frame off and then on again.  I am to rush over to the control head and watch for the Home and User 4 buttons to flash.  When they flash press down WHILE they are flashing and keep my fingers pressing down until the control screen shows.  This did not work.  Dave tells me that a bad LAN cable is a low probability for failure but he has seen it happen.  I tell him I will check my stock to see if I have an Ethernet cable and call him back.  I luckily have a Ethernet cross over type cable.  I install it and nothing happens.  I power down the main frame and power it up again.   I rush around from behind the equipment racks to the control head and wait for Home and User 4 buttons to start flashing.  They flash, my fingers press down on those buttons, and then the control screen starts to light up on the control head and the switcher begins its boot up process.  I stand back and watch.  It happens slowly but switcher buttons start to flash and light up.  Preview monitor shows image because I had a key set up prior to the switcher going down.  I look down and Black button on both preview and program are lit!  A lot of other buttons are illuminated!  I am getting excited.  I press camera 1 and see an image.  I am ecstatic.  I press camera 2 then three then Ingest 1, then Ingest 2.  I do dissolves between all sources including test and the switcher is working perfectly!  it was a LAN cable that went bad as I watched the switcher fade down and out – remarkable.

The lesson for me is buy American or Canadian.  Buy from a company where technical support speaks English.  Buy from a company where technical support will not charge you.  Buy from a company where technical support really know their stuff.  Grass Valley is all that.  I love Grass Valley products!  Their technical support could easily be used as a ruler for all others to be measured.

 

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