Category: GKP Writing News

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GKP Writing News

Doing Digital and Print Versions

Normally I write my science activity books in a format for printing. “The Chemistry Project” is different as I’m doing digital and print versions at the same time.

There needs to be some clarification. “The City Water Project” does have an eBook version which can be considered digital. With “The Chemistry Project” there will be an eBook version, but the digital version is like a serial version where the separate parts are done as teaching units and offered as digital downloads.

cover for "The City Water Project" by Karen GoatKeeper
Unlike “The Pumpkin Project” or “Goat Games”, I tried to make this book more eBook friendly with my image placements. However, the pdf version is the best digital one.

Print and eBooks are Different

Even print and ebook formats have differences. The most obvious one is the lack of page numbers in ebooks. What these do include are hyperlinks making it easy to move around within the book or even outside the book to internet sites related to the book.

Images concern me. My science activity books have lots of photographs in them. In a print version, those images can be placed singly or surrounded by text. In an ebook version the image must stand alone with the text preceding and following it.

Keeping Track

Doing digital and print versions at the same time can get confusing. I’m trying to minimize this by keeping them much alike, at least to start with. However, each has a different file name.

Both versions have the same Investigations, Activities, puzzles and chem notes. Each Part is being done separately with a title page and equipment list. The puzzle answers are at the end of each part.

When the print version is complete, I will move the puzzle answers to the back of the book. The only title page will be at the beginning as will the cumulative equipment list.

doing digital and print versions requires a title page
This is what I think will be the title page for “The Chemistry Project”. The print version will use this only once. The digital versions, as this one is, will have one for each Part.

Getting It Done

The biggest part of doing “The Chemistry Project” is going over all of the Investigations and Activities. Yes, I did them, even have pictures for them, from ten years ago.

Now I am going over each one, rewriting and editing them. So I get to redo them taking new pictures.

That means doing digital and print versions of this science activity book will take longer than expected.

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Reality Check

Living in the Ozark hills can be challenging. The last couple of days have been a reality check for my novel.

Storms, especially big ones, can knock out the electricity in the rural areas. A derecho went by one year soaking the ground, snapping off trees and power poles. The power was off for almost a week. Intercounty Electric moved the lines up from the creek bed then so we’ve had little trouble with outages since.

Until yesterday.

Four inches of wet snow fell overnight. That’s not much. It did sit on wires, branches, everywhere. And the electric power went off about 8 a.m.

In the novel Mindy loses her electricity. I’d dredged through my memory to fill in details like having no water, a quiet house etc.

Another result is loss of the refrigerator. Here I’d goofed. I’d thought things inside would gather condensation as they began to warm. My surprise reality check showed they don’t. Instead, everything gradually goes from cold to cool to room temperature. I didn’t get into the freezers as I had a lot of frozen food and preferred it to stay frozen as long as possible.

snow brings a reality check
The snow doesn’t look like much. Its weight on branches brought down trees and downing electric lines, my novel come to life. The green patch is watercress which stays green year round, even under ice.

Waiting

The day moved on. It’s a bit unsettling how dependent we’ve gotten on having electricity as we didn’t up north. No computer so no writing. No fans so no furnace letting the house slowly cool off.

We did have some heat. Living in the country with wooded property, we have a wood stove. A fan normally blows the heat out into the house, but convection air currents do that too, although more slowly.

As evening moved in, there were no lights and no movie. Cooking by candlelight is challenging. Evening time was spent reading by candlelight.

The electricity came back on a little before six the next morning. My reality check ended with the roar of furnace fans and refrigerator hum.

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Science Basics

One of my professors told his students that, if someone read all the scientific journals in only one field of science twenty-four hours a day, they could not keep up with all of the changes and discoveries in that single field. My Chemistry Project activity book tries to stick to science basics and ignore these rapid changes.

A reminder of this professor was in “Science News” this week. It seems the 27th Annual Conference on Weights and Measures have added four new metric measures: the ronna, quetta, ronno and quetto. These extend the prefixes for both larger and smaller measures needed for some of today’s discoveries.

Why does a change in metrics matter to my Chemistry Project? Although these units won’t, science, including chemistry, uses the metric system.

Why Have a Metric System?

There was a time a few hundred years ago when every town and village had their own system of measurement. When these became part of countries, a countrywide system was used.

Science is international. Scientists in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Africa need to use the same system to make exchanging ideas easier. That system is the metric system.

Every major country in the world except the U.S. uses the metric system. Unknown to most U.S. citizens, we do use it every day as our money is a metric system. Any business doing business overseas uses the it.

Metric Is Part of Science Basics

The first part of my Chemistry Project is on the metric system. The only requirements for using the metric system are knowing the prefixes and being able to count to ten.

One of the puzzles in this part is a word skeleton for the various metric prefixes. Perhaps I should add the new ones.

However, I won’t. Devising a new puzzle takes time. And very few of these prefixes will be used in the Chemistry Project. I will stick to the science basics and leave those students interested to look up these new ones on their own.

cover for "The City Water Project" by Karen GoatKeeper
This science activity book has many investigations and activites about water. These use the metric system for most measurements.
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Winter Snow

Some winter snow is trying to fall. I watch it out the barn door, the house windows. Big clumps of flakes fall down to melt on the ground as it’s too warm to snow.

Snow was something special when I was growing up in southern California as it was so rare or meant a trip up into the mountains. And I was young.

That white stuff loses its appeal when chores take me out tromping through it. The goats and chickens are disgusted. Extra chores of hauling water and putting out hay need doing several times a day.

I am lucky. Winter snow is in the forecast a week in advance. There’s time to prepare.

winter snow on persimmon tree
Last winter in the Ozarks this wet snowfall sat on branches, fences, buildings and ground for a few days. This is an old male native persimmon tree, one of three growing in the barn lot.

Winter Snow of 1888

New England wasn’t so lucky in 1888. This wasn’t the biggest nor the worst snowstorm. It is the best documented as I learned in “Blizzard” by Jim Murphy.

Electricity was found in the cities in 1888. Every company had its own lines so every street downtown stretched under a forest of live wires.

If you were rich, you had a nice house with coal heat. If you were poor, you might have a tenement room shared with several families or you might crawl into a coal storage room under the street.

March, 1888, saw a winter storm come across the northern states heading east and picking up moisture over Lake Michigan. A southern storm with hurricane force winds was racing up the coast picking up ocean moisture. They met up over New England on a Sunday when the Signal Corps, an army attempt to predict storms, was closed for the Sabbath. Their last prediction sent out Saturday night was for warm winter weather.

By the end of the storm hundreds of animals and people were dead. Also dead were the old attitudes about government’s role in weather forecasting and snow removal and emergency aid.

This is listed as a juvenile book, but is well worth some time to read. It is filled with personal accounts and pictures from that time. At a little over 100 pages, it is easy and short reading.

And it makes me realize how lucky I am to watch only a few flakes fall for winter snow.

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Book Challenge

A book challenge isn’t really necessary to encourage me to read lots of books over the year. I love to read.

I love to write and don’t really need to have a writing challenge to keep me writing. Yet I love participating in NaNo (National Novel Writing Month) and Camp NaNo over the year.

Setting goals might not be necessary, but they do keep nudging me to make sure I set time aside for meeting those goals. They are like deadlines.

My reading goal on Goodreads is 70 books again this year. The number is doable and challenging.

Books are not the only thing I read over the year. Science and writing magazines take up time. The Sunday newspaper is enjoyed weekly.

That is why a book challenge matters. It’s too easy to read materials other than books.

Why does reading books matter?

As an author, I read not only for pleasure, but to see what works and what doesn’t in a book. Do I find the book enjoyable? Why?

What parts of the book bore me? Do the descriptions work well? How do they enhance the story?

These answers and more help me improve my own writing. There is no way I can ever copy some other author’s style or story because my background is much different. The answers tell me how I can focus my plot, bring a setting to life, increase the suspense or tension.

cover of "For Love of Goats" by Karen GoatKeeper
Do you like tongue twisters? The sound of words? I do. I’ve read books of these over the years and found the challenge of creating one stimulating.

What will I read this year?

I don’t really know. There are shelves and piles of books at home. And there is the library.

In fact, the library can be too tempting. I had to wait for someone at the library for ten minutes or so. First I browsed the table of large print books. Next I noticed the picture books on the bookcases. There is a table of juvenile books.

Yes, I brought home a book from each place even though I am half way through two books at home.

The juvenile book is “Virtual Currency” by Martha London. It was interesting. I like starting to learn about a complicated subject with a juvenile book as adult books often make the number one teaching mistake of assuming the reader knows vocabulary or other things the neophyte doesn’t.

So I have completed my first book of the 2023 book challenge. Only 69 to go.

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New Ventures

As of now I have published 14 books which sit on various platforms ignored by almost everyone. I’m not wanting to be a mega author, just one people like to read. It’s time for some new ventures in search of these people.

Time and knowledge are my two big stumbling blocks. The third is a dislike of the main social media platforms. How can I work around these?

Website Considerations

First comes my website. It’s still a work in progress as I am not that knowledgeable about building a website. I can set up pages, put up posts and monitor comments, if any appear.

Much of the background analytics and set up are beyond me. It takes weeks for me to puzzle them out. One of my new ventures will be finding someone to help with these.

Second come my various author pages too often ignored for months. Every platform my books are found on has an author page. This puts one on Kindle/Amazon; Smashwords; Ingram Sparks; and National Novel Writing Month. That leaves me updating each once a month.

cover for "The City Water Project" by Karen GoatKeeper
Water is fascinating, so much more than the water cycle. This science activity book explores this, yet is ignored. Would it be more used as digital science units?

Writing Plans

Third relates to my writing more directly. I love creating my science activity books. As a former science teacher, I target the entire book toward teaching the subject thoroughly. And they are ignored.

Another of my new ventures will be to break these science books up into units and offer them as science units on a teacher/homeschooling site. “The City Water Project” will debut in April or May. This includes “The Chemistry Project” now being worked on scheduled for July.

There are two novels I would love to complete and publish this year. I suppose these can be considered new ventures as well.

My target for the first is publishing in March this year. I’m trying to convince myself I can do this. It does still need a title.

“The Carduan Chronicles: Arrival” has a target of this fall, preferably October. That will leave me open to more new ventures in November for NaNo.

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Backing Up Files

My friend, Dr. Richard Rintz, was hard at work on his book on Asclepias (milkweeds) when his screen went blank. The file vanished and was never found. He discovered then the wisdom of backing up files.

Many programs periodically save documents automatically. It’s so easy to forget to save your work as you go. It’s so easy to lose your work.

Having a Plan

I generally have a flash key open as I work. Every so often my work gets saved to the flash key giving me a copy on my hard drive and on the flash key.

At least, that is the plan. In practice one copy or the other is the one most up to date and the copy is not done often enough. It’s so easy to let backing up files slide.

One of my biggest liabilities is the accumulation of plant pictures taken over the year. This year’s file is over 18 GB. None of it was backed up until this month.

backing up files of common hops
I’d seen this Common Hops vine before, even had a few pictures of it. This year I came across this year’s vine as it started to bloom. The hardest part is finding the plant again to get pictures of the fruit or seed pods. I had to search a couple hundred feet of creek bank, but I found the vine and finished up the pictures this year.

Image File Woes

Picture taking of plants is done for the year. I have one tree bud picture to go and will get it this week. Now is the time I take for backing up files of these pictures because the files are complete for the year.

I tried backing up during the season one year. Disaster. I added to some files, not others and couldn’t remember which. It took hours to find which files needed to be redone and which didn’t.

backing up files of ground ivy flowers
This little plant makes a great ground cover. It blooms for months and self seeds. I’d seen the plant in town and down by the river. My files had lots of pictures of the flowers. Somehow, I never found the seed pods as the plants disappeared under larger plants. This year I completed my round of pictures and backing up files of them was very important.

So now I am taking a break from the novel and going over the plant pictures. It is slow as I must go over each plant, check which ones are in the Dent County Flora books, add the new ones, then back up the file.

Some new ones were added to the Flora books during the summer. There were so many plants, so many pictures and doing entries for iNaturalist (citizen science site). Some plants were unknown and later identified.

By the end of the year all of my files will be backed up. Then I can breathe a sigh of relief as backing up files means I shouldn’t lose them, only forget which flash key they are on.

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Writing Continuity

A special person is on the set for television and movies with the job of seeing that an actor wears the same scarf, uses the same glass set in the same place in each scene. Continuity. An author needs writing continuity.

What Is Writing Continuity?

Tolkien spent years with his world building to ensure his writing continuity. The languages, the creatures, the landscapes had to stay the same not only in one book, but throughout all of them.

I’m not in his class, but I am concerned with this too. One draft I was working on had a character in the beginning reappear toward the end with a new name. Oops.

cover for "Dora's Story" by Karen GoatKeeper
Writing continuity became a nightmare in this novel. It takes place over several years and involves several goat shows with many of the same participants who grow older over the years along with their goats. I thought I was done only to find I had dropped a year and had to add it back in. Continuity involves time, setting, characters, events, in short, every aspect of a novel.

Outlines Help

In my present novel draft, there is a major storm lasting several days. Yes, storms have changes from one day to the next. Some things must remain constant.

The wind is a factor. At the beginning of the storm there are high straight line winds. These are hard enough to tear leaves, twigs and small branches off the trees. These diminish for a time to a stiff breeze that does not pull leaves off the trees. It then picks up again as the storm blows itself through.

When does each change happen? What effects does Mindy see at each stage? I set up an outline to track the storm factors.

Heavy rain falls throughout the storm. Mindy tracks how much. She adds it up as the amounts increase. Writing continuity insists that the amounts add up correctly and gain in a match to the stage of the storm.

After the storm, Mindy is left cleaning up the mess. Part of that is repairing the cow pasture fence. How fast can she work? She is one person, working alone, not a super hero. And, how many posts are there around this pasture? Which way do they lean? Why?

Reading a finished novel, the reader sees the writing continuity without realizing the work the author did to ensure it was right. When it isn’t right, the reader knows it. Back to my outline so my novel will get it right.

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Boring Storyline

A massive storm is headed north. It leaves flooding and destruction in its wake. Getting ready for its arrival is a boring storyline.

In my new novel, Mindy has three days to fill. One is spent stocking up. The second finishes up tasks and putting things away. Last is setting things up for the coming flood.

Routines Are Boring

Rural routines are normally a boring storyline. Each day has its routines. Excitement is not appreciated as it often means something went wrong. Mindy lives a rural life with regular routines and tasks. Ho hum says the reader.

Readers don’t read boring books. They don’t make it past a boring beginning. When I read over the draft for these three days, it was boring. How do I make these three days engaging? Suspenseful?

I know these days are important. They set up the rest of the novel. The reader doesn’t know this. How can I avoid having these three days being a boring storyline?

What is happening?

Looking for Suspense

The storm is coming. How bad is it expected to be? How bad has it been? Suspense? Morbid anticipation?

Mindy is making preparations for the storm. She has livestock to protect. There are buildings and equipment to secure.

These things are unfamiliar to most people today. Rural life is so far removed from city people’s reality as to seem alien, belonging to another country even.

More familiar perhaps would be the phone calls from Justin, her husband. He is working elsewhere. He wants to take her away from this life she has come to love.

Life is made up of choices. Many of these choices mean little. Some can change our whole lives.

From these beginning days with the boring storyline come the choices Mindy must make. They are choices only she can make. And she must make them alone. But first she must survive the coming storm.

cover for "Dora's Story" by Karen GoatKeeper
“Dora’s Story” presented some of the same problems the new novel does. It is in six parts, each separate, all related in a circular storyline. The new one has three parts, each building on the one before.
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Draft Considerations

The fun part of writing is doing a draft. I can make things up as I go. Afterwards, draft considerations descend with a vengeance.

November was my carefree, write drafts time. That is the great thing about participating in NaNo (National Novel Writing Month). Getting 2000 words a day down on a draft leaves no time for careful research, corrections or rewriting.

I worked on the ends of two novels. One is finished. One is not. I’ve discovered that 25,000 words is only a third of what is needed to complete the thing.

Nature Book? Scifi Book? Both?

The Carduan Chronicles has been challenging from the first. It was a simple survival scifi idea. A spaceship drops out of a worm hole in the middle of a February ice storm and lands in an Ozark ravine.

draft considerations include settings
Ship Nineteen in The Carduan Chronicles ends up in an Ozark ravine. The Carduans must find a place to call home. It needs to be defensible, have building possibilities as they would rather not live in their spaceship forever, have ready access to food and water and have growth potential. Since the spaceship is 30 inches long and eighteen inches high and wide (The Carduans are four inches tall.), a ledge such as this one along my road might be perfect. Knowing the setting is essential to writing about Ship Nineteen and how they learn to live in this alien place so full of dangers.

I wrote that draft one November. Except it wasn’t complete. There had to be a second ship.

This ship drops out of a worm hole about the orbit of Jupiter and must go over the sun to get to Cardua. There are many events happening on the ship during the fifteen weeks it takes.

I wrote that draft one November. Except the two accounts were two takes on the same time frame, the same people and they merged near the end. Enter another draft.

This is the draft I am trying to complete in between several other projects now that November is over. Reality has returned. Draft considerations are now top of the list.

How Many Manuscripts?

There is the completed novel draft. I need to do lots of research for that one and get it rewritten. My deadline is a March release, so I better get busy.

The Chemistry Project has taken a new turn. I need to complete the book, yes. However, my science books are mostly ignored. I hope to release them as units on a teaching site.

And the Dent County Flora needs attention. Draft considerations for this massive mess are mostly backing up the pictures from this year and identifying all the unknowns I can. Then I can fill in more pages.

But Cardua still calls. There are five weeks left in their journey to write about to finish this draft. The hardest part for it is yet to come. Draft considerations for this close to 200,000 word project will take months as I need more descriptions of Cardua, making sure everything is believable for four inch tall aliens and cutting down the size of this monster.