I had hoped to post this earlier, but we have been living in interesting times, according to that old curse. The greatest distraction has been a major health issue. The prognosis is very good, but it’s going to take three months or so for the issue to resolve itself. 

I have, nonetheless, started work on my next project. I will use ‘The Baron’ as a working title, even though the hero is not a baron. It’s a very old idea, going back decades. I have no record of that time. It has frequently been a part of my idle fantasies, thinking about it whenever I had nothing else to do — waiting at airports, in doctor’s offices, trying to go to sleep, for example. I am recently more semi-aware of it in the back of my mind, which is why I decided to go ahead and write it at last.

It takes place in the same world as A Thing Forgotten [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0998546798], but it is not a sequel or prequel, just another story about that world and its people. Not all stories which are set in Los Angeles, or Chicago, need to have anything to do with each other. They are just settings. New York is a common setting for I don’t know how many separate stories. But I really like the Thing Forgotten world, and I’ve always wanted to go there again. I began to develop that world and it’s culture in my imagination when I was first thinking about ‘the Baron’, though I didn’t write anything about it. I used it for Thing because, by the time I started working on it, that world was fully developed, in notes and maps and sketches, and in my mind.

Just to make it clear, I use the word ‘hero’ to signify the protagonist of my stories, whether male or female. For me, the ‘heroine’ is a secondary character who needs rescuing or something (what if the person who needs rescuing is a guy?) while the ‘hero’ is the man or woman who moves the story along (as well as doing the rescuing, if needed.) Lara Croft is the hero of the Tomb Raider series of games and movies. In my The Black Ring (volume one here: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0998546739], my hero is Jeanette Delgado, twenty three years old, almost five feet tall, maybe ninety eight pounds, overly protected growing up, and recently widowed by a freak accident. She is chosen by powers she does not understand (neither did I at the beginning) to make a heroic choice, becomes the hero in fact, and eventually accepts that role. (She does, in fact, rescue several guys.) Her story lasts for the first five volumes of The Black Ring, and then she learns that a new hero must take over to finish the story in volume six. Jeanette’s story has been just a small part of something that has been going on for about 1700 years.

My hero in ‘The Baron’ has been discharged from the army (in A Thing’s world) after serving nine years in a terrible war, and is physically and emotionally scarred. He is looking for a nice quiet place to pull himself together, but is told that he is needed in another country, as he is the only survivor of an ancient household, and must take it over so that it can continue. Being the kind of person that he is, he goes there, even though he really, really doesn’t want to. He learns a lot about his role in the household, in the county, in the state, in the country, and grows into the kind of ‘baron’ he is supposed to be, and becomes content with that. Or something. I’ve got sketches of seven chapters so far. This is going to take a while. 

I have, throughout the years, told myself many parts of this story, and now I have to get them all down into editable text. And then arrange them in the proper order. And discover for myself any other events or situations or settings which deserve a chapter of their own. I enjoy doing this, despite unavoidable outside distractions which cut my time short.

A cousin with whom I am corresponding wrote, in response to something that I had told her, that she hoped that I would find something that I really wanted to do. I told her that writing my stories was what I really wanted to do, and getting them published is kind of nice too. 

And there may be another story later. Story 23. Maybe.

Thank you all for your comments about Allen Wold’s Books. I will migrate the site from the provider which hosts it now, to the provider which hosts this blog, Allen Wold on Writing, so that it won’t go down as often. I’ll have to do it when I have some spare time (ahem), but sooner rather than later.

I was ready to publish my current project back on October 9, but I didn’t have a cover. I mentioned this to Darcy, and she took five seconds to make a promising start. Then I told her that I had changed the title from The Empty House to That Which Dwells Below, with the subtitle, A Greater Evil. Her inspiration, based on the idea of a house, evaporated, and she couldn’t go further. That Which is not a book that she would ever want to read, so she had no inspiration for it. This is perfectly natural, and I understand it completely, having experienced it myself. That, and that she did not feel well for the next few days, meant that I had to do my own cover. I’ve done it before (The Gift and the Price for example), but this one was going to have to be different. And it wouldn’t be up to Darcy’s standards.

I used a number of different graphic applications to finally achieve something which I felt comfortable using. I used Live Home 3D Pro to create the image of the doorway which the heroes dared not enter in the last chapter. I used a fractal generator, Chaotica, for the image of what was beyond the door which they slammed shut as soon as they opened it, and used Chaotica for the fractal images which I layered over each other for the background. I used Graphic, (a poor use of a generic name for a specific program), a vector design application which can leave transparent areas, which I used to convert title and author and so on into graphic images rather than using live text on the cover, which wouldn’t justify. I used Nisus Writer Pro for that text, as well as to prepare and format the text of the book itself, which I had written using Scrivener, which is best for creating and assembling the individual chapters of a long work, before combining them into a complete manuscript, uh, typescript, uh, processor-script? Using Scrivener, I could jump from one chapter to another, which I had to do with the continuity check, without having to scroll through a lot of pages.

I had used the graphics applications before, but that had been a while ago, and I had to learn them all over again, which took more time than I had hoped it would. And, like the text of the story, the cover picture needed several drafts, revisions and corrections, and final polishing during, which I discovered other things which needed fixing. I used SketchbookPro for the assembly of images and words, getting it all to fit the cover template with which I had been provided, so that I could produce the 300 dpi pdf that I needed for the text edition, and a simpler image of the front cover for the digital edition. All this is why it took more than six weeks to do the cover, and why I am so late on uploading this post. The final cover was version 11c. 

Bowker provided the isbn, and I registered my book at the U. S. Copyright Office, a branch of the Library of Congress.

And now it’s done. Darcy approved it, and I have gone through the rather complicated publishing process. Both paper and digital versions are now available on Amazon.

I recently finished editing and cleaning up the text for what I used to call The Empty House, making it ready for publication, but I don’t yet have a cover for it. (I have changed to title to That Which Dwells Below, because that more clearly suggests the nature of the story.) My artist had some good ideas, but she hasn’t been well enough lately to be able to do any work on it. It’s nothing serious, but it blunts the sharp creativity which makes her covers work so well. I found something else creative to occupy me while I was waiting for her to feel up to the job. The delay wouldn’t have been long, and Saturday, October 5, though she was not quite ready yet, she began to work on it. 

But earlier that morning I got emails from Jetpack, which is a service that monitors websites, and sends a notice if they go down, or have a similar on-line problem. My book site, Allen Wold’s Books, was down, then back up, then down, then back up, then three more times. After a while, it went down again, back up again, then down again, and this time it did not come back. 

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This is the site where I have a list of all the books which have been published, with a thumbnail of the cover, a blurb similar to the one on the back cover, a link to an essay of how and why the book was written, another link to a sample of the first twenty to thirty pages, and links to each of the books on Amazon, (or on ReAnimus Press, which republishes out of print books). Some of my older books are not otherwise easy to find on line.

I tried to go to my book site, but the server could not be found. Then I tried to go to my site provider, but it, too, could not be found. It would seem that the provider which hosted my site no longer existed. I spent over six hours trying to find out how to recover my site, or what had happened to my ISP, but there was nothing I could do. Even the service which can recover a down site couldn’t do it, because the site was not just down, it no longer existed.

The rest of the day didn’t go very well either. 

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Fortunately, I have copies on my computer of all the text and graphics which had been on my book site, so though the site is gone, I still have all the content. But I had no screenshot of the home page, so I couldn’t rebuild it to look the way it used to. I just now took one of my blog site, since the two sites had similar designs, and I’ll use that to help me recover.

I’m hoping that my provider just had a problem with their servers, which, being a small company with five-star ratings, could easily have happened, and that they will come back after a while. But in my research I learned that my host had, since 2022, shrunk from fourteen employees to four, then to one. I am fairly sure that my host is gone forever, taking my site, and hundreds of others with it. I received no notice that this might happen, my last email from them was a receipt for my monthly charge, and that was in 2022, shortly before I notified them of a change of email address, which they acknowledged.

I will have to build my book site all over from scratch. Or maybe pay to have it done for me. This site is important, because I direct anybody I talk with to it, so that they can see what I have written. Some of those people actually buy books, which they might not have done otherwise. But either way, getting my site rebuilt, whether by me or someone else, will take some time. I’ll have to relearn everything so that I can do that, or find someone whom I can trust to make it the way I want it to be.

This is not the blog post I intended to send out. But it will have to do for now.

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At six thirty this morning, October 8, my ISP and my site came back. My ISP had, indeed, suffered from being unable to access their servers. Gasp! Sigh! The relief is almost painful. My next post will report on the publication of That Which Dwells Below.

I finished reading aloud for typos, punctuation, and spelling; to make sure the story flowed without interruption; and for readability, so that it could be read aloud to an audience. I managed to do this all in one pass, instead of three. Despite all the reading and editing I had already done up to that point, I found that there was still much to be corrected, adjusted, rearranged, and so on. And that done, I have now begun, as in the title, the formatting for publication. 

I compose using Scrivener, a word processor which allows me to have each chapter in a separate folder, listed in order on the left sidebar. This makes it easy for me to, say, jump from chapter twenty three to chapter seven, for whatever reason, without having to scroll. The right sidebar is for for sketches and notes for each chapter. Scrivener can then compile all the chapters into one PDF document for printing. But I don’t do that, because I’m concerned about widows and orphans, and Scrivener doesn’t allow that kind of editing, because the chapters do not have page numbers, and the margins sometimes change, and editing a PDF offers it’s own challenges, and, as far as I know, cannot adjust pagination. Some writers use Scrivener for everything, but Ogden House requires that I do the page layout, formatting, and final editing myself.

To do this, I copy every chapter into an RTF Nisus Writer file, another word processor which enables me to attend to the fine details, so that I can make the script to be the way I want it to be.

Widows and orphans. Widows are when a single line of a paragraph is by itself, at the top or the bottom of the page. Orphans are a single short word, such as “it,” or final syllable, such as “ducing” from “introducing,” which are the last line of a paragraph. 

Some software allows you to click on Widow/Orphan Control, and takes care of that for you. Very roughly, as fixing one widow can affect the pagination of the whole text, and may introduce more widows that weren’t there before, whether the software does it or I do it. Even if those are taken care of in turn, the text, as “Controlled” by the software algorithm, looks clumsy, at least on some pages, which can sometimes take a reader right out of the story. 

That kind of work is best done by a live copy editor, who prepares a document for the printer. There is more to fixing widows than can by done by an algorithm, and more ways than by just moving the single line up or down. Which is why I do it myself, so that the page, when it’s printed, looks good, not just “correct.” It takes a while. I have seen books, by major publishers, which have too much or too little line spacing from page to page, the bottom of a page looks like an unmarked scene break, and some lines have too much white space between words. But then, an algorithm is cheaper than paying an editor to do it.

I won’t describe what I do, it’s really not very interesting, other to say that I have a number of methods with which to make a printed page look good. And that is important to me.

And, at the same time, I am doing one more read-aloud. In order to correct some widows and orphans, I may have to I change a word, or a phrase, so that the correction will be invisible. These changes inevitably make the story better. Sometimes, on this slow reading, word by word,  in a low-pitched voice, I discover things which I should have changed before anyway. 

In a sense, every text, no matter who the author, can be improved, even if just a little bit. Ernest Hemingway, who was very particular about his chosen style of writing, took as much time as he needed in order to make it just the way he wanted it to be, and to make it consistent through the whole story or novel. That is a good part of his success and popularity. If you liked one of his works, you could be pretty sure that you would like others.

It’s going to take me a while to get my story to be exactly the way I want it, not the way some editor thinks it ought to be. While I hope that I’ll have readers who enjoy my novels — and, actually, some of them do — I am writing my stories for myself first. If it were only for myself, I could finish them much more quickly. Or not finish them at all. But when I read them as if I were someone else reading them for the first time, I see how much needs to be done to get the story right.

M. A. Foster drove a truck for a living. He spent his time thinking about the book he was working on, while driving for eight hours or so a day, and when he got home, after supper, he’d roll a white sheet, a carbon, and a yellow sheet into his typewriter (oh, such a long time ago), and type up the two or three pages, which he had composed and polished in his head during the day. His books sold well. He was exceptional in is working methods as a writer. 

But then, every writer works differently.

I finished one pass of polishing The Empty House a short while ago. When I edit by reading silently, I see only what I think is there, not what is really there. Polishing means reading aloud slowly and carefully, word by word, which lets me see small things that needs fixing. If my voice rises in pitch, I know I have to slow down. 

I had thought that I would have to make four or five polishing passes, each one with a different, specific objective. I won’t have to do that many, because this time I was able to read not only for text, but also for my style, which has changed over the years; for punctuation, which is to indicate how to read aloud, not necessarily according to the rules of grammar and punctuation; and for clarity, that is, would a reader actually understand what I wrote. There were places which I didn’t understand what I wrote, and those places took a lot longer to fix. I was very pleased with the results when I finished. 

But as I neared the end, I realized that there were other objectives that needed their own attention, such as the mood of the story; the narrator’s voice; a character’s thoughts without using ‘he thought;’ making sure that I and the reader could visualize what was there and what was happening (a special form of clarity) since sometimes even I couldn’t visualize it; and sometimes, if necessary, a kind of stage direction instead of a full description of certain actions, a kind of tightening.

And now I need to take another long break, to distance myself, so that I can read with fresh eyes. During this break I will be rereading an old novel of mine (working title The City Will Get You) which I finished for submission in 2008. I got some good rejections back then, which helped me to understand what could be improved. 

I had put it aside, intending to get to it later, and lost track of it while working on other projects. Darcy thinks that now would be a good time for me to pick it up again, and so far (only the first forth pages), it looks like it will be worth the effort, even though it will take more work than I had hoped, and is rather more dark and grim than other things I have written. I don’t have to finish it, but even just a reading will take a while before I get back to The Empty House.

My earliest documented date for The Empty House is November 3, 2014. That is the date of the computer file, which at that time I considered to be a final draft, as I had been working on The Empty House for a long time before that, mostly on paper, all of which is lost. 

I can remember first thinking about a Lovecraftian story as told by Shirley Jackson while I was on a train, on a business trip with Diane, in about 2004. Darcy was in college at the time. I had a notebook and wrote down a lot of story/chapter ideas, producing a good sort of outline/sketch. 

But I had no real characters, just stand-ins as it were. I worked on the story off and on for a long time, mostly on paper the way I used to do it, using just temporary character names. Then I got a new edition of the Call of Cthulhu table-top game, decided that I would tell my story as if my characters were playing the game, occasionally interrupting their developing story with player comments, and I created my characters with that in mind. And then I realized that these characters would not be playing a game, they would be the major characters in the story itself. And that’s when I created the file on the computer, dated November 3, 2014. 

I finally got back to it on May 21, 2023. Some if the 67 chapters were only notes, others were clean second drafts. And now, after more than a year, including breaks, of bringing the whole thing up to being ready to be polished, I need another break to refresh myself, as I have done before. 

Many of the chapters now give me chills, or thrills, and I want the whole book to do that. Not just for the chills, when it is properly scary, but also for the thrills, when my characters come alive as real people, and their relationships with each other evolve.

I said some time ago that I hoped that I would finish by Christmas. Christmas came and went, and I began to say that I hoped that this time I really would finish by Christmas. But now I don’t know. It will be done when it is done.

 I will never write the second and third volumes of what I imagined would be a trilogy. I will, instead, work on The Reluctant Baron (working title) and The City Will Get You (maybe Into the Weird) and other unfinished stories which I have discovered in my archives. And on any new ideas that may come along. And I do get new ideas, even now.

I spent over two months bringing many of the story/chapters of The Empty House up to their next level of development, revision, and completion. Then, a few weeks ago, I decided that it was time to take another break, in order to refresh my objectivity. I left the file open on one of the twelve desktops on my computer. Every morning I click through them to see if anything needs to be done right away, and to remind myself of non-writing projects in hand. Which meant that every morning I saw the open file for The Empty House, where I had left off. 

On the fourth morning of my break — not the fifteenth as I had intended — I saw very clearly what needed to be done with that particular chapter. I did it and, without thinking about it, I spent the next three hours bringing two more chapters up to their next level. I should have put The Empty House aside then, but, since I had already gone back to working on it, I thought I might as well finish that pass, and then take a break, and to really do it this time, for at least three weeks. 

But I was tired, so, instead a full pass, I thought I would just read aloud those chapters which I had marked ‘read aloud’, just to get them out of the way, and to finish out the week. It shouldn’t take much more time than that.

‘Read aloud’ means to just literally read the chapter aloud to myself, so that I can hear and not just see what I’ve written. The purpose is to find typos, misspellings, punctuation errors, bad word choices, other simple things that require no creativity, and frequently need little thought. This kind of read-through is not a directed polish. Only after that ‘read aloud’ through the whole book would it be ready for polishing. 

And for continuity checks. 

So I read the ‘read aloud’ chapters. Some of them needed more work than I had anticipated. The later chapters were too familiar, since I had worked on them a only a few days before, and that made it difficult for me to be objective about them, but I finished reading them anyway. And now it really was time for me to back off, and to take a longer break before working on the twenty eight chapters which still need to be made ready for polishing. 

And for continuity checks.

Isaac Asimov complained about how hard it was for him to write more Foundation and Empire stories, because he had to make sure that nothing in the new story was in conflict with what he had written before, and which was already published. In other words, he had to ensure continuity. I now know what he was talking about. Because of the complexity of interwoven plots and the number of characters in The Empty House, I will have to do extensive continuity checks, through all sixty seven chapters. That will be another long pass before I can polish. And after that will be formatting for publication. 

I will never write anything as complex as The Empty House again. 

It doesn’t help that I’m getting slower now, and that I run out of energy sooner, and that I frequently have things to do which have higher priority than writing. Things like that sometimes make it difficult for me to get to work every day. The most important thing this time was dealing with a death in the family. 

I used to joke about getting done by Christmas. That was last year. It’s not a joke any more. I hope to be done by this Christmas. I may, after that, be able to work on other stories I want to tell. They run through my head, with beginnings, endings, and whatever is needed in between, every time a little differently. 

But I have to make myself take the longish break which I had cut short before I go back to The Empty House again. I need to become objective again. And I’ll have to be more disciplined about this break than I was the last time I tried to refresh myself. It takes discipline to make yourself get to work every day, but it also takes discipline to make yourself stop when you should. At least, that’s the way it is with me. 

And besides, I need to do my taxes. 

My break from The Empty House took longer than I expected. Then there were interruptions, things that were more important, minor illnesses, and ever diminishing energy. This is not intended as an excuse, it’s just an explanation. Writing science fiction, fantasy, and mostly in between is what I do, as if it were a kind of calling. I find that, being able to do less, is not only frustrating, but depressing.

This is about writing. Other writers have difficulties like this, some more severe than mine. My longest pauses were the three years I took off when my daughter was born. But I came back to it. There was a three year hiatus when I felt that my career was over for a variety of reasons. But I came back to it. There were the almost thee years my wife was seconded to London, and we went with her, all household and parenting responsibilities fell to me. But I came back to it.

And here I am again.

Some of the chapter/stories are extremely complicated — descriptions which I don’t do well; sequence of events as they are experienced, not as I think of them; continuity checks between the current chapter and the previous in that plotline some twenty chapters ago; deciding what a character sees first, rather than what I thought of first, by getting into my character’s head. It can take three or four passes, which means, given my reduced endurance, three or four days. Some chapters can go from rough to ‘third draft’ in one pass. There are some of those.

I gave a speech once on what it took to be a writer. (Or creator in any format, really, whether words or music or paint or mathematics.) It included six things:

Talent, which isn’t really necessary, by my understanding. Talent is what comes easy, and you don’t have to think about it. For me, characterization and dialogue is easy, and takes very little revision, mostly to make sure it is in a readable form.

Acquired skill is far more important. You can learn how to use the language well; how to describe a thing or place so that the reader can almost see it, without going into too much detail; how to put plot elements together, how to leave out what isn’t necessary, how to find where to begin telling a story, how to know what the ending is about. 

Time to write has to be made, it can’t be found. If you spend all your time looking for the time to write you get very little written. At least that’s my experience. Making time means, getting up early, going to bed late, giving up some activity such as an amateur sport or going to church. And setting aside that time every day. (If your child becomes sick, then that takes priority.)

Patience, to take as much time to get your writing right as it needs. Rushing through to the end means your writing isn’t as good as it could be. When it comes time to submit, the patience to wait for the response. (You can work on something else while waiting.) If your story or novel is accepted, the patience to work with the editors. If your story, long or short, comes out in print, the patience to wait until your publisher finally pays you. And that can take time.

Discipline, to actually do the work every day, at whatever time you have set aside. (If your child becomes sick, then that comes first.) The discipline to do as many drafts as it takes. The discipline to finish, and sometimes that take a lot more discipline than you might think. A special discipline to learn what you do well and where you can improve, to put aside the favorite and accept what is better.

You can get help with these five things,  from friends, understanding family, books sometimes though most of them don’t help much, from teacher if they understand what you are trying to do and there aren’t many of them. But that last thing any creative person needs is completely up to you, and no one can help you with it.

And that is Determination. The Decision to Actually Do It. Not someday, but now. You can’t be a creator of stories or images or technology unless you really want that. Dedication is another word for it. And no one can help you with it. If you aren’t determined, if you aren’t willing to dedicate some significant part of you life to it, then you just won’t create much, even for just yourself. 

So, despite needed breaks, despite other obligations, despite unwelcome interruptions, despite creeping (galloping) old age, I’ve come back to The Empty House. And I will finish it. Maybe by Christmas.

My last post was August 29. It has been a complicated and sometimes difficult time since then. There have been commitments to other people, minor illnesses, slowly reduced creative energy, the needs of my family, and so on. I can usually get three to five hours writing done in the morning, but if I am interrupted by anything that demands more than a moment’s attention, it breaks my concentration and I can go no further. You might say these last few weeks have been just a little frustrating.

I have, fortunately, been doing good work on those days when there were no interruptions — updating story/chapters from sketch, to rough, to first, and so on, but just one level at a time for each, instead of trying to finish each one all at once. I am working now on chapter sixty. I’ll take a break after I update the last chapter — sixty seven — by one level, then I’ll  go back to those chapters which are not already at what I call ‘third draft,’ updating each of them one level at a time as I have done before, until I finally get the whole text at that ‘third draft’ stage. Then I will take a longer pause, maybe a week or so, then start the three polish readings and the text to speech. I feel like it is — and it is — taking a long time to do this.

Old age is not for sissies, as someone once said. It’s preferable to dying young, of course. I have known some who have. I intend to keep going and writing for as long as possible. When I can no longer write, I’ll get my rescued English Bulldog, name it Mike (for Michael or Michelle), and retire.

But not yet. Each chapter gets closer and closer to how the investigators close the gates to evil and shut it out. Every morning of good work gives me chills, which means I’ve been doing it right.  

When The Empty House has been published at last, I will start work on one more book, an idea that has been rattling around in the back of my head for decades, taking place in the world of A Thing Forgotten, but at a later time. It will not be a sequel, any more than two stories in set in New York are prequel/sequel of each other. If I am able to finish that, I may try another.

What I am hoping, with this post, is to assure you — and myself — that I am still in business. I do not intend to quit, unless my muse (so-called) retires first, leaving me with no ideas and nothing to write about. I’ve seen no hint of this yet. Every morning I find my muse (my unconscious creativity) waiting for me, and it is sometimes so strong that I am surprised by what I have accomplished.

I’ll be back as soon as I have something to report. Or, you could stop by and we could just talk for hours.

I sketched out The Empty House in 2015. It’s a rather ambitious book, an experiment to see if I could write stories like Lovecraft’s gothic cosmic horror, but in Shirley Jackson’s much more subdued style. She wrote The Haunting of Hill House, which is truly scary, though there is no violence or bloodshed. The original movie, The Haunting, is excellent. The remake is garbage.

I started with a list of sixty seven linked but semi-independent stories, and I tried to finish each one before going on to the next. But after nine stories — notes, sketch, rough, first draft, second, ‘third’, and reading aloud once — I got tired, so I put it aside to work on other things for a while, so that I could come back refreshed.

Which I did in 2018. I developed more of the stories, but this time I didn’t try to finish each one. I wrote extended notes, detailed sketches, roughs, first drafts, and so on. This was a lot more productive than before, but by the end of the year I was tired again, so I started working on another project. Then another, and another …

Finally, in May of this year (2023), I got back to The Empty House, and spent over two months of intense work on those stories which were less finished. I brought each of them up a level — from sketch to rough, from rough to first, and so on. That kind of work takes a lot of focused concentration, which is exhausting, despite great satisfaction — as anybody who does original creative work of any kind will understand. And at my age, I’m lucky if I get four or five creative hours a day. 

Many of the stories toward the end had only titles and a single-line note of what the story should be about. The last six stories had neither title nor note, just what characters were involved. When I had first created this list of stories, I had left those all but blank, knowing that when I came to them I would have a better idea of how to get to the ending that I wanted. Those last six stories, taken together, would be about how the evil in the house would at last be vanquished. 

When I got to those ending stories, I was able to write sketches without being handicapped by what I might have written eight years ago, which would have been completely wrong, after all that I had written since then. (I know some writers who can’t free themselves from an outline or a sketch, and can’t let the story lead them in its own direction. I actually heard one writer say that she hated outlines, because then she was forced to follow them.) 

I reached the point where I needed another break, so that I could see the book with fresh eyes. I decided that this time the break would be for only two weeks.

I learned how to use a graphic application for designing settings for D&D table-top games. I have a first edition, second printing of the original D&D boxed set, signed by Dave Arneson, but I had been designing settings for underground adventures for many years before D&D came out. 

My graphics application has a not-too-steep learning curve, but it took intense concentration and focus (of a different kind from writing fiction) in order to create a ‘draft’ of something that might actually be used in a table-top game, and it wasn’t always easy to figure out how to make the application do things the way I wanted it to, instead of in the way for which it had been designed. I have certainly done that before. Doing this drove The Empty House so far into the back of my mind that I wasn’t even aware of it any more. Which was just what I wanted. 

I finished what I had set out to do with Dungeonfog and put it aside. It was the perfect distraction from the very different problems of The Empty House with its sixty seven stories, and I started working on it again, looking forward to exploring the nightmares in that empty house, and making them work. 

It was going well, until I discovered that my email client wouldn’t let me send anything. I still receive emails, but I can’t reply. It took me three days searching on line to discover that it wasn’t my fault, but that my provider, without letting anybody know, had decided to not support email any more. Since then it’s been a nightmare of a different sort, trying to contact about four hundred websites that require passwords, trying to let something like five hundred fifty friends know that I have a new address. I did discover that hundreds of these could be scratched off my lists. There’s still some clean-up to do, but three weeks of this business is more than too much.

Do I sound just a bit miffed? Hmm. I wonder why (he said sarcastically). But last week I finally got back to The Empty House. 

And it was as if I had never been away.

This post was supposed to have been uploaded on June 4, but though I wrote it, edited it, and started the new post, somewhere along the way I failed to take a critical step, and it never appeared. I’ve edited it slightly to be more in tune with the late upload.

The promotion for Slaves of War started on May 2, 2023 and ran through May 5. When I checked on the results on May 27, I found that 2,487 people had visited my Amazon page, and 1,580 orders had been processed, including the free books offered during the promotion. It’s hard to get precise numbers, but by dividing my estimated royalties by the actual price of the books, I may have sold six copies.

If I were to try doing this again, it wouldn’t take so long to learn how, but the promotion service refuses submissions which have too many errors or typos. Though I edit my work quite thoroughly (I have read professionally edited books published by standard publishers which have typos and homonym errors), I still would need to use text to speech to find anything I had missed, and that could take a week or two, or a lot more, if it’s something as long as Dead Hand (160,000 words, 350 pages).

As of June 3, no books were actually sold, and none since then.

I have continued working on The Empty House, which I posted about previously, a Lovecraftian cosmic gothic horror as if written by Shirley Jackson. It consists of sixty seven semi-independent stories, each climaxing with a moment of horror only implied, or the realization of some equally horrific truth. 

Some of the stories which I had already worked on were in first draft form, others in rough draft, some were well-developed sketches, others were brief sketches, some were preliminary text, many were just two or three lines of what the story would be about. Some had no story lines, and some did not even have titles. But they were on my story list for reasons which were clear to me in 2015. I had to trust myself.

I started at the beginning, taking each story to the next level, instead of trying to do a full final draft all at once of each one. The pause until I get back to those stories will let me see them fresh, and I’ll understand more about what needs to be developed or tightened or even changed. I did two good if brief sketches, a day or so ago, when the story idea lines told me only a person and a place. Doing those sketches was pretty good for starting from almost nothing. I have done full roughs, extended sketches, and brief sketches some of those stories for which I had no information. It’s going well, but will still take some time.