​This is my last blog for August.  I know that time is relative because as I age time speeds up.  I feel like August 1st was just yesterday.  Sorry, I digress as one month slips into history, a month I will never have again, to yet another month, which is destined to follow the same path as August.
A few weeks ago we took our oldest grandson tent camping.  In the afternoon he swam in Ottawa Lake, and built a small river with several sand dams.  We set up camp, had dinner, then built the wood fire for the evening.  He warned me to not sit too close to the fire as he pulled his chair further back.
Once the fire was roaring he pulled his knees up to his chest and looked at me with walnut size dark eyes.  “Is it time for scary stories yet?”
“Yes.”
“Gram, you start.” 
Gram read from a book she found at the library about a haunted house.   We should have read the story ourselves before dragging it to our campsite.  It was a horrible book filled with violence, not scary, just violent.  We passed the torch.
Our grandson told a very good story about two transformer characters who saved their human friend from a scary, evil transformer.  He was very engaged, used a lot of hand and arm motion and modulated his voice for affect.  The boy is a born story teller.
My contribution was a story of an Egyptian mummy that came to life in search of his killer.  For emphasis I walked stiff legged with arms outstretched toward my grandson and shook his shoulders screaming I found the killer.  He squealed with joy and laughed.
This experience had two lessons for me.  First, human beings are hard wired to tell stories.  A five year old is capable of telling complex, compelling stories based in imagination.   Second, we like to be scared.  Stephen King discovered that many years ago and has had a successful writing career and had many movies based on his books.  I don’t understand why we like to be scared but we do.
May we each continue to imagine, write, repeat stories for all of our days, its part of what makes us human.      
     

​On August 10th I posted an article about my experience working with my publisher to evaluate the first 2/3 of my manuscript.  If you recall my primary question to my publisher was on point of view and how to push the story along to its conclusion.
I learned that I needed to make major changes in the first ten chapters to ground the story and let readers understand the conflicts in the protagonist, Ian Murphy’s, life.  I gave myself a few days to consider how to best undertake this job.
I decided to print out the first ten chapters and give myself time for a read through.  I had to take on the role of a first time reader and use the notes from the publisher as a guide to what was missing.  I had to admit that the context needed was in my head, it just didn’t make it to the written page.
Next I found a red pen and left the house for my favorite coffee shop to read through the first ten chapters with the intent of adding detail.  I slipped into punctuation.  I just couldn’t help myself.  I worked very hard to reel myself in and focus on content.
With intensity and focus I did discover some gaps, especially in how Ian reacts to the death of his long time friend, Kieran Fitzpatrick.  Ian feels that Kieran’s death releases him from his past.  At the first writing I didn’t realize that myself.
I also examined the relationship between Ian and his wife, Mairin.  My publisher felt their relationship was too perfect that I wasn’t allowing Mairin to have real emotions and reactions to some of Ian’s issues.  Again, by reading the manuscript for content I had to agree.  My Mairin was only two dimensional and didn’t express herself.  With the re-write, Mairin has a distinct voice and doesn’t hesitate to let Ian know exactly how she feels.
It took about a week to complete the re-write on hard copy.  I completed putting the changes into the document in a single morning.  In the re-writing process I cut out a quite a few paragraphs but I also added new material. 
I checked my word count.  When I took the detour to re-write I had written 64,488 works.  With all the edits my word count was 64,561 a net increase of only 73 words.  In the editing process it felt like I was adding a lot of words – wrong .  That’s how it goes.       

​My friend, Sandy Kintner and I started bee keeping last year.  We began with one hive each.  The queen in my hive was overthrown and killed for mysterious reasons.  I bought a second queen hoping her social skills were better than the first queen.  No such luck.  Sandy’s hive also struggled they didn’t seem to have any interest in making enough honey to share with us.  In an effort to have one strong to survive a Wisconsin winter we combined the hives into one.
We followed the recommendations of the Dane County Beekeepers Association and our one hive survived one of the coldest winters in Wisconsin history.  We both bought new hives this year.  Our 2015 hive thrived so we split it so that we had four hives, but not for long.  We also put one hive at my house.  One of the “split” hives failed and we moved the bees to the 2015 hive.  Now we have three hives.
My bad luck with queens continued in 2016.  The queen for the hive at my house was ruthlessly banished.  I didn’t want to pay for another queen so I decided to take a chance to see if the bees would select their own queen from among themselves.  The process takes several weeks and works about half the time.  I watched every week and discovered “queen cells” so it was time to leave them alone and not interfere with their routine.
Meanwhile, the new hive at my friend’s house was thriving.  There were a lot of bees and by July had enough honey for themselves that we gave them a box called a “super”.  This is a small box with ten frames that are used exclusively to have the bees make honey for human consumption.  When Sandy was on vacation in mid-July I checked the super to find about half of the frames full of honey.  We waited several weeks and all but two the frames were gushing with honey.
We talked with our bee mentor from the Dane County Beekeepers Association and decided to harvest our honey using the squeeze and drain process, we also watched a youtube video giving us step by step instructions.  We tested the honey for water and it came in at 17.5%, just under the 18% maximum.  We worked for about two hours to scrape the honey and comb off and put it through a strainer and then bottle it.  We weighed our bucket of honey on a bathroom scale and it was just shy of 18 pounds. 
Eighteen pounds of honey! All the work, the frustration, the uncertainty, was worth the first taste of sweet, delicious, golden honey.               

​Several weeks ago I reached about the 75% complete mark with the first draft of my manuscript for the third book in the Ian Murphy.  My goal has been to finish the rough draft this year so being at this point in July was ahead of schedule.
Then it happened.  I ran into a stone wall.  I couldn’t figure out how to keep the story moving along in first person point of view.  I realized I needed help.  I submitted my manuscript to friend, author, publisher Christine Keleny and asked if she thought I should change the point of view from first person to third person objective;  just one question, one straightforward, simple question.
After about a week Christine sent me an e-mail asking if I had an outline for the book, the theme of the book and if I knew the ending.  I responded that I never outline, the theme was in the title – reckoning – from the nautical use to know where you are by knowing where you’ve been and I gave her a few lines explaining the ending.
A few days after that Christine sent me an e-mail suggesting we set up a time to talk on the phone.  Really?  I only asked one question.  I expected she would write maybe one page of comments, tips on craft, answer my point of view question.  No, she wanted to talk.  That was not good.  I was traumatized.  Family was visiting from Texas which gave me the perfect excuse to delay our discussion.
She thought the beginning of the book about the first ten chapters needed work.  I needed to explain why the events Ian experienced were important and what they meant to him.  She thought the point of view worked well.  On my problem with the stone wall she said to ignore it and concentrate on writing the conclusion.  So, there you have it.
When you ask for help you must be prepared to accept what you are offered in return.  I worked with Christine extensively on my second book, Out of Darkness, I trust her professional judgment.  When she comments she always says I can accept or reject them.  When I ask:  should I XYZ?  She responds with, that is your decision to make, she’s never directive.
I reflected on Christine’s comments and re-read my notes from our conversation for a day.  I’ve decided to re-write the first ten chapters.  Getting the start right will only help bust through that stone wall to write the conclusion of the story.  Of course, the moral of this experience is ‘to be careful what you ask for.’     

​I posted my last blog on Wednesday 6/29/16, thirty-five days ago.  My primary reason for not posting in July was in response to my inner writer, feeling the need for a break from writing a weekly blog.  As I closed the article I wondered what would happen to my readership if I didn’t post a weekly blog.
I have talked with many writers who have a blog as part of their website.  All agree that very rarely do we receive comments on our blog.  I do receive these bizarre automatic comments that show up in my e-mail, not on the comment section of my website.  The automatic responses are often nonsensical and clearly coming from some non-English as first language source.  If I could figure out a way to block them, I would.
About half way through July I lost the ability to access my website visitation statistics.  I felt the fickle finger of fate point as me, just when I wanted to learn what would happen to page visits, I couldn’t get the report.  I called the technical support staff at Ipage.com and thought we had agreed on a solution to the problem.  I received an e-mail informing me that the problem was solved.  I went to check the stats and I was still blocked.  As it turned out the person I talked with didn’t understand the problem at all.  I blamed my poor communication for the failure.
I then exchanged a number of e-mails with the technical support staff because, as a writer, I could express myself better with the written word than with a conversation.  Finally, toward the end of the month the fix worked and I had access to my numbers.
In June I had 7202 page visits and July 9461.  In the explanation of the metrics suggest is tracking page visits as the most accurate assessment of individual visitors.  From June to July I had 31% more page visits.  My assumption that blogs attract page visits is clearly wrong.  Who knows what attracts page visits?  I will continue to blog, because I enjoy the writing, not sure if it will be once a week.
It is a complete mystery to me who all the people are visiting my page.  I do know that they don’t buy my books, if only 1% bought books it would be nice, not a best seller, but nice.  Goodreads advertising suggests a response rate of 0.4%, so based on June visits that would mean selling 28 books.  My sales are zero.  Oh well, back to writing and no more WHINING.