Category: GKP Writing News

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GKP Writing News

Fast Novel Writing

I came across an article about writing novels for Kindle. It seems this author was turning out a book every nine weeks. That is fast novel writing time.

Now, I can write a novel draft in four weeks. NaNo (National Novel Writing Month) has taught me how to do that.

The steps are easy. I get an idea and think it through. Then I write down a bullet point list of plot ideas which may or may not appear in the draft. The last step is writing the draft of at least 50,000 words.

This is a rough draft. The characters aren’t really fully developed until half way through. Sometimes they even change names.

The plot has holes I can drive a semi through, if I drove a semi. There are side trips to places totally unrelated to the plot.

Facts are made up. I plan to check them out later.

In short, this is a draft, not a novel. It may be fast novel writing, but it isn’t ready for anyone to sit down and read.

cover for "Dora's Story" by Karen GoatKeeper
It took eight weeks to write “Dora’s Story”. It took a year to edit the novel. The draft timeline was wrong. The goat shows needed linking. I needed an illustrator. Then the grammar and spelling had to be checked. “Dora’s Story” was definitely not a product of fast novel writing.

Finishing Writing a Novel

Rewriting and editing can take months. All those facts need to be checked out. If I guessed wrong, the whole premise may fall apart leaving me writing an entirely new draft.

There is another reason I will never do fast novel writing for Kindle. I have a life outside of writing.

An author in my old writing group wanted to make it as an author. She raised sheep at the time. She sold all of them. Her husband joined her as they went to conferences.

The last I heard, she had made it as an author. All she did was research and write for her novel series.

I like my life. Going hiking and taking plant pictures. Milking the goats. Gardening. Watching the chickens.

Yes, I like writing. But fast novel writing consuming my life is not the way for me.

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GKP Writing News

Teaching Basic Chemistry

Teaching basic chemistry was something I looked forward to when I was teaching high school sciences. Every year brought new challenges.

I suppose chemistry can be taught strictly from a book. That is so boring to me because science is hands on, experiments, seeing how things work. So my classes spent a lot of time in the lab.

There are lots of experiments available for a chemistry class. Most of them take lots of expensive equipment and chemicals. Small schools like the ones I was teaching basic chemistry in often don’t have lots of money for such supplies.

Some of those chemicals can be dangerous. Acids, poisons, fumes. These were not things I wanted to use a lot of in my classes. High school students aren’t always the most careful people.

Writing Science Activity Books

After I left teaching in a classroom and started writing books instead, science activity books seemed a good fit. Except I didn’t want a textbook, I wanted something more fun, more challenging.

I tackled botany first with “The Pumpkin Project” and found the concept of a science investigation, science activity, trivia, puzzles, stories and more fit the bill. But I also found writing such a book was a lot of work.

cover of "The Pumpkin Project" by Karen GoatKeeper
Fall investigations in “The Pumpkin Project” ask things like how to count all the seeds in a pumpkin (There’s more than one way.), just before you use the recipe for roasting them. How much water is in a pumpkin? Find out and make some pumpkin cookies too.

Instead of writing another book, I put chemistry projects first and motion physics later on my website. This brought up the challenge of how to do these without all the equipment I used to use from my storage closet. That forced me to take a good look at the experiments to find ways to achieve the same goals using everyday supplies.

This led to my second science activity book, “The City Water Project”. It has the investigations, activities, trivia, puzzles and stories I like to include. Lots of work went into doing all the investigations, activities and puzzles.

Tackling Basic Chemistry

Those chemistry projects sitting around bugged me. I started playing around with the idea for “The Chemistry Project”. Trivia and puzzles are harder for chemistry. Story ideas are harder too.

Still, there is the challenge of teaching basic chemistry for fifth grade up and all those projects using easy to obtain equipment and supplies.

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GKP Writing News

Writing Fear Procrastination

Many writers have this little voice inside that says their writing stinks. I have that plus a legacy of being told I couldn’t write anything worthwhile. These blossom into a writing fear procrastination that kills books.

At present there are four writing projects begging to be worked on. Two are nearly ready for a final rewrite as soon as I finish up another twenty to thirty pages of draft. One is a new attempt to finish up an old idea for a science activity book. The last is my Dent County Flora, a project I have little hope of ever completing.

I do love to go hiking and taking pictures. The Flora project encourages me to do both. It’s easy to immerse myself in this project, especially in the spring and summer when so many plants are blooming. This year alone has added at least a dozen new plants and completed the picture series for even more.

passion flower lure away from writing fear procrastination
Passion flowers are one of many Ozark wildflowers luring me away to go hiking and taking pictures instead of working on my novels. It’s so easy to justify writing fear procrastination.

Except there are 2,000 plants to find in Dent County. Many grow in places some distance away from home where I have difficulty getting due to time constraints.

This should be a fun hobby, not my main writing project.

All summer I have done little except the website posts and the Flora pages. My two novels have been ignored. Even worse, I see my writing fear procrastination in full force when I even think about them.

There is a cure, sort of. Nothing really makes those little voices go away. However, they can be shoved into a corner and ignored.

The cure? Sit down at the computer. Open the novel file. Find where I left off on the draft. And write 500 words every day. In two weeks the draft will be done.

Except today I have to finish the two posts for the website for tomorrow. This means downloading pictures. So much for another hour.

And writing fear procrastination wins for another morning.

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GKP Writing News

Choosing Fonts

Being a former science teacher, I still browse through several science magazines like Science News, Discover and Smithsonian. These normally ignore writing, except for a little article this month on choosing fonts to keep the readers’ interests.

What does font have to do with helping a reader remember a piece of reading?

Who Wanted to Know?

A psychology study compared how fonts affected a reader’s learning and memory when reading an article. I know. A psychology study. Highly subjective. Be skeptical.

However other experiments confirm this study’s conclusions.

Comparing Fonts

Anyone with a computer knows there are certain favorite fonts, default fonts. Times New Roman and Arial are very popular because they are easy to read.

These flunk the retention test.

Instead, fonts such as Bodoni, Comic Sans and Monotype Corsiva increase retention. They are harder to read and force a reader to pay attention to what they are reading. That gets the mind to focus on the article more.

choosing fonts has a new twist
Do you recognize these fonts? Each line is a different font. In line order: Ties New Roman, Georgia, Arial, Bodini, Lucinda Cartography, Old English, Comic Sans and Montype Corsiva.

Unfortunately, my favorite font, Georgia, is not the ideal font to use. It’s similar to Times New Roman only slimmer, cleaner looking to me. I happen to like serifs on the letters.

Perhaps I should change to Monotype Corsiva. It too has the serifs. And there is that hint of italic slant. Even better, people pay attention more when reading it.

Dressing Up Fonts

The study did check into Bold and Italics. Both did increase retention when used sparingly. It seems using these to emphasize something makes the mind pay more attention to the words leading to better retention.

Choosing Fonts for Me

In spite of this study, I will stay with my favorite font. When originally choosing fonts to use both on my website and in my writing, I looked at all of the ones available on my computer at that time. Georgia is still my favorite. Although I used Lucinda Calligraphy on the pages of my Dent County Flora project.

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GKP Writing News

Finding Book Readers

All of my books are special to me. That doesn’t mean everyone else will find them special. Finding book readers interested in each book is part of marketing books.

Saying a book appeals to everyone is dreaming. No book appeals to everyone. How do you find those people a book does appeal to?

Determining Book Audiences

Finding book readers for my books will take some thought. Let’s focus on these four: “Waiting For Fairies”, “Capri Capers”, “For Love of Goats” and “Asclepias: A Study of the Living Plants of the United States”.

The first step toward finding book readers is taking a good look at the book. What kind of book is it? Who might want to read it?

Looking at “Waiting For Fairies”, I see it is a picture book to be read to a young child. It has a number of Ozark night creatures in it. And it has a bit of whimsy with fairies in some illustrations.

cover for "Waiting For Fairies" by Karen GoatKeeper
Fairies capture people’s imaginations. They do lure this young child out one night to watch for fairies at a ring of mushrooms called a fairy ring.

This book might appeal to parents of a preschool child, if the family is interested in nature along with fairy stories.

Both “Capri Capers” and “For Love of Goats” have goats in them. Both are humorous. The first is an over-the-top melodrama complete with dastardly villain, heroine and hero with lots of action. The second is fun short selections about goats, many filled with tongue twisters and alliteration.

These might appeal to people raising or wanting to raise goats. The first might also appeal to a reader who likes a fast-paced, humorous story. The second might appeal to people who like words and the sounds of words.

Nonfiction Poses Challenges

“Asclepias” is far different. It is a serious botanical work on milkweeds covering how milkweed flowers work, growing milkweeds along with the history and detailed descriptions of each species of milkweed found in the United States. It is highly illustrated with diagrams and photographs.

cover of "Asclepias: A Study of the Living Plants of the United States" Volume 2 by Dr. Richard E. Rintz
These are large, full-sized books with a total page count near 900 necessitating breaking the work into three volumes.

Dr. Rintz wrote these volumes so the serious amateur not necessarily familiar with botanical terms could understand what he was describing. The readers for this book might be these serious amateurs along with professional botanists interested in milkweeds.

The next step after finding book readers in theory is finding them for real. For me that presents big challenges.

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GKP Writing News

Marketing My Books

As a self-published author, part of my writing task is marketing my books. That is a challenge for any author trying to get their book noticed among the thousands of books published every year.

Those who claim to know how to do this tout social media, getting book reviews, paid advertising and taking part in various book promotions. All of these take time and a different mind set than writing.

Marketing my books takes me not only wanting, but actively doing promotions about my books. This is very hard for me.

marketing my books includes "Asclepias: A Study of the Living Plants of the United States" by Dr. Richard E. Rintz
Milkweeds are popular now because of the monarch butterflies. Some are. Most are not as they are small and little known. They can be hard to find. Dr. Rintz found them all and included them in this three-volume set.

When I was young, girls had very few options in life. All of them were subservient to men. Promoting any of your own endeavors was frowned upon, even actively despised and discouraged.

Times have changed, supposedly. My mind set has not. I can easily promote someone else’s book, but not mine. I do try by putting on an act and talking about my books, but inside I cringe at such unseemly behavior.

People are starting to think about buying things for gifts. Marketing my books as gifts is so tempting. Which of my books will I focus on? There isn’t time to promote my fourteen and Dr. Rintz’ five.

Perhaps I can focus on three of mine and one of Dr. Rintz’. “Asclepias: A Study of the Living Plants of the United States” is an easy choice. Even though the botanical world has either not noticed or ignored this work, it is an important one.

cover of "For Love of Goats" by Karen GoatKeeper
I dare you. I double dare you to read these tongue twisters and alliterative stories aloud.

Which of mine will I choose? Picture books are popular. That would be “Waiting For Fairies”.

Among all my books, I do have two favorites. “Capri Capers” was such fun to write and is a romp of a book, a crazy blending of 1930s movie serial and melodrama. Thinking up all of those cliff hangers and goat antics was challenging and sometimes made me laugh.

The sounds of words, the cadence of spoken words as in Poe’s poem “The Bells” or Noyes’ “The Highwayman” delight me. Tongue twisters and alliteration abound in “For Love of Goats”.

Marketing my books is difficult both in time and determination, but I will try.

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Novel Boring Times

It’s happening in my Mindy novel: novel boring times. The run up to the storm and the storm had happenings every day. Now comes the clean up.

Mindy is all alone. The road is washed out. The phone and electricity are out. Water is in short supply. The fences are down and need to be repaired.

So Mindy’s days become much alike: checking for the road crew repairing the road and repairing fences. After one description, this is boring.

I suppose I could toss in a few snakes, broken posts, snapping chain. It’s still the same old stuff over and over. Clear the debris off the fence, back the tractor to the post, attach the chain, ease the tractor forward to pull the post back up, tap the post with the sledge hammer to secure it, release the chain and move on to the next post.

Novel boring times. They bore the writer. They bore the reader.

Novel boring times can use friendly faces like Nubian goats
Mindy is isolated from the human world, but not her place. She has her cat, her chickens and her goats to keep her company. Sometimes telling your animals about a problem helps you make sense of it.

This is an important time. Mindy has lots of decisions to think about and make. Thinking is really hard when a person is bone tired.

There is the livestock. Most of the routines were written about already. Little is changing other than not doing chores in the rain.

Up until now the novel has gone one day at a time. In these novel boring times, do I continue to do a day-by-day account, only hitting a few highlights? Or do I lump several days together?

And right after these pages comes lots of happenings. Writing advice sometimes says to write these events first and fill in the other later. It’s tempting.

My problem is me. If I write the end of the book, it will be that much harder to come back and fill in these novel boring times. I will be impatient and skimp.

Boring as these days are, they are important. Skimping will break the flow of the novel. Off to do the drudgery writing telling myself the novel will be worth it.

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Dent County Flora Books

I started taking wildflower pictures when I got my first digital camera. That was when I wrote Nature Notes for the Kaleidoscope, a local ad paper. These first morphed into “Exploring the Ozark Hills” and now are the basis for my Dent County Flora books.

Plants are interesting subjects to photograph. The best part is that they don’t disappear while I am setting my camera up. I can also get up close to most of them. (Water plants, stinging nettles etc. are given space.)

If you haven’t looked at plants much, you should. They come in a wide range of sizes, colors, scents and uses.

Plants are usually some shade of green. Indian Pipe, Pinesap and Coral Orchids aren’t green.

Wildflowers range from less than an eighth of an inch across to six inches around here. Some don’t have petals. Flowering dogwoods have white bracts (special leaves) with yellow green flowers in the center.

Dent County Flora books photograph of nodding spurge flower
Notice my finger tip compared to this flower. Many flowers are very small and difficult to photograph. There are two flowers in this picture. The white, four petal one is the male producing pollen. Below it is the green female with pistil sticking out. This plant is the Nodding Spurge, Euphorbia nutans, and will be in Dent County Whites.

Wanting to know what these plants were named, I needed several pictures of each. The flower, the back of the flower, the leaf, under the leaf, the stem, the fruit or seedpod and the plant adds up into a lot of photographs. And more than one of each thing is a good idea.

Every year I took more photographs and stored them. The stash got bigger and bigger, filling a 16GB key, then a second one. I hate having them sit unused.

An ulterior motive was an excuse to go hiking. This would add even more photographs to my stash.

A second motive was a challenge. How many kinds of plants could I find and identify? This had to be in my county as the goats keep me close to home.

Enter the Dent County Flora books. My list of plants found in Dent County has some 2000 plants on it. One book will not work. So there are the Dent County Blues, the Dent County Reds, the Dent County Whites, the Dent County Greens etc.

Will I ever find them all? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s enjoyable looking for the plants, getting the pictures and creating the pages of my Dent County Flora books.

I have assembled some pages from the Dent County Blues into a pdf found here.

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Admitting Mistakes

Admitting mistakes is hard to do. It’s especially hard when it is a public mistake, even when it was an accidental mistake.

I’m not a botanist, only an amateur. I study books, pictures, descriptions to identify the plants I find. There are huge folders of pictures labeled unknown on my computer.

Sunflowers are notoriously difficult to identify. I came across one that seemed so different, it had to be easy to identify.

Texas Green Eyes flower
I suppose I had wondered why these ray petals were spaced. The Helianthus sunflowers like the Ashy Sunflower have closely spaced and overlapping ray petals. Texas Green Eyes has the spaces between the rays.

Overconfidence breeds mistakes.

I studied various sources and decided this plant was the Ashy Sunflower and have believed this for ten years. And been mistaken for ten years.

There is an old saying that none are so blind as those who will not see. That was me.

The sunflowers are coming into bloom again. And I am taking pictures of them again. And putting most into the unknown folder again.

Meeting this old friend was pleasant until I took pictures and realized something I had blindly overlooked: the leaf arrangement.

reason for admitting mistakes
So many of the sunflowers blooming in mid to late summer have opposite leaves. I assumed this plant did too. But, if you look like I finally did, these leaves are alternate. Texas Green Eyes has alternate leaves. Ashy Sunflower has opposite leaves.

Simple plant leaves are grouped into opposite where the leaves stick out across from each other, whorled where more than one leaf sticks out across from each other, basal where the leaves are from a central ground source and alternate where one leaf goes off followed by another in a different direction further up the stem.

Ashy Sunflowers have opposite leaves. My familiar plant has alternate leaves. It is not an Ashy Sunflower.

Texas Green Eyes leaf
What’s really pretty about the Texas Green Eyes leaf is the scalloped edge. Most leaves have points on the teeth on the edges.

Admitting mistakes believed true for years is very hard. I didn’t believe what I saw. I checked other plants. The leaves were alternate. I was wrong and I had posted this mistake, insisting I was right.

My plant is a Texas Green Eyes. The pictures on www.missouriplants.com make this obvious. I have fixed this mistake in my botany project.

Everyone makes mistakes about lots of things. We can believe these mistakes for years. We blindly believe them even when presented with evidence we are wrong.

Admitting mistakes may be hard, but changing our mistaken beliefs seems to be even harder.

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Library Beach Story

The summer reading program at the library was about the ocean this year. This year one of the activities was to write a beach story.

Although the program is mostly for the younger set, some of the activities include us older people. Writing a beach story was one and a picture involving water is another.

Dangling a writing prompt in front of a writer begs for a response. I tried to ignore it. I was going hiking to photograph flowers, not plan out a story.

Walking is a good excuse for my mind to wander. After all, I grew up in southern California and spent lots of time at the ocean. There are so many memories.

At El Capitan State Beach one fall I found a mermaid’s purse. It was rectangular with the look and feel of a piece of kelp. Mermaid’s purses are eggs laid by a shark or ray. My tenth-grade science teacher set it up in a tank and it hatched into a six-inch swell shark a few months later.

There were two students I helped with snorkeling as part of their science project.

On yet another visit, the sand was covered with butterfly clams. These are wedge-shaped clams up to an inch long with lots of color patterns.

I’m not interested in doing memoirs. The memories were only to provide a stepping stone into a story. None of them seemed to work until another adventure came to mind.

Not all beaches have sand or rocks. I had visited two mud beaches. When the tide is in, there is a bay small boats can cross. When the tide is out, a vast expanse of mud is revealed. Under the mud live clams.

And I had my stepping stone to a beach story.

People often ask where a writer gets their ideas. Memories are one place, memories long forgotten until a writing prompt brings them back.

My beach story along with others will be posted on the Salem Public Library page. This is the Salem, Missouri, library.

Time to write is another factor. Read more in this post.