I Got Stuck

A xeroxed letter dated 1856 and some 

painted macaw pins on my work table

September 15, 2012

I didn't get writer's-block stuck, as in "I don't know what to write," but I have stopped writing for most of the past few weeks. I was proofreading the transcript from this 1856 letter (what you see on my work table here is a xerox of the letter), when several things happened: 

1) I don't enjoy the minute proofing as much as the writing, initial transcribing, and research. I learn from these things.

2) I started thinking about money and immediate expenses, and I began working on my online store again. I would like to get all of the pained animal pins put up well before Christmas, and there are hundreds left to do. You can see a few colorful macaws above. They are beautiful, fun to work with, and I am excited that people will have a chance to find them. (I suppose this does not mean I couldn't spend SOME time proofing, but it has indeed become a block; therefore, I will blog about it, dumping some of my innards, engaging in the creative process, and avoiding the proofing a few hours longer.)

3) I started working on other online potential-income things and also working on various blogs again.

4) My parathyroid illness is temporarily worse again. "Another story for another day."

5) And this may be the one excuse worth looking at. The letters I am avoiding working on are not especially germane to this book. The critic on my shoulder says it's a waste of time to labor over them. The believer/supporter on my other shoulder disagrees, but the critic at this moment is SO much louder. It has no need. There are many good reasons to "waste time" taking care over the "dead ox incident" described.

As part of the task I set for myself, I wanted to transcribe and make available to readers and researchers every letter and document in my collection, whether they all end up in the final published book or not. I also find the details of the lives I'm exposing extremely interesting to ME, and maybe others will enjoy them, too. It does sometimes become tedious to try to discern whether an "A" is capitalized or not, whether a dash is a period, or whether a new paragraph should be started when the writer ended a line short, but did not indent the next. These decisions sometimes drive me crazy, but oddly enough, they can help form insights into what the writer was thinking, whether something was important to them, or whether they were in a particular hurry. I also want to be accurate, because the transcript is all most readers after me will see.

Back to the letter at hand. The writer is incidental. He (they, for it is a letter enclosed within another letter) do not appear again in the story. But what they bring in their cameo appearance is a touch of the reality of daily life in 1850s Iowa and tells us what a lawyer of the day might be dealing with. A lawyer in Iowa writes to Nathaniel, who is also a lawyer, but in a different town in Iowa. The first lawyer encloses a letter from a man in Nathaniel's town who needed help. The man had borrowed a team of oxen from a friend in eastern Iowa to move his family and goods to Sioux City in western Iowa. He was supposed to have sold the oxen on arrival and sent his friend the payment. But he didn't. 

I don't know why photos taken by my phone won't orient 

correctly some of the time . . . sorry about that.

The settler used the oxen for awhile to work his new land, and then one of the oxen apparently got "dry pneumonia" and died. What good is an ox team with only one ox? The surviving ox was fat and salable for beef, but would the owner settle for proceeds from only one ox? 

In addition to the legal question, I am reminded of the importance of that animal that has all but vanished from most of our lives, and even from the scenes in my imagination. When I think of the 1800s, I think of transportation by horseback, carriage, stagecoach, and I think of horses. On a farm, I picture cows, pigs, and sheep. The ox does not come to mind. Thanks to an old letter that my inner critic said was a waste of time, I have broadened my mental landscape of life in 1850s Midwestern America and my understanding of what these times were like for my ancestors. As an animal lover, I also like to think the oxen will be remembered. It's probably time to proceed.

Come visit my home page at tapirback.com.

To "Sic" or Not to "Sic," Ain't That the Question?

When writing these long early chapters, I used the word "sic" hundreds of times. "Sic" = "thus" = "this is the way they wrote it, folks, I'm only the messenger." But it does become a question, sometimes agonizing. In the last line, N.C. Hudson says he thinks the bridge is over a hundred miles wide. Of course, he doesn't mean that. Does he mean feet? Yards? To which direction is he referring? One could make an educated guess. But more importantly, I enjoy passing mistakes like this along to the reader. N.C. Hudson loved to travel. He loved the vastness of the open country. Perhaps his mind was in "vastness" mode rather than focused down onto small details. Maybe it was the feel of great size of the bridge that impressed him rather than an anatomically correct rendition of the dimensions.

When I transcribe, I use "[sic]" all the way through the material at every misspelling, every doubled word, every serious mistake in punctuation. I do that because I want to make an accurate typed (electronic) copy of the letter that can be more easily read than the handwriting and can be copied and edited for publication, but I don't want to lose any of the details of the written version. That's really not a problem, because the transcripts are for reference. I remember one of my cousins reading a transcribed letter and telling me, "There are too many 'sics' in it." For reading, this is true, so what does a writer do? I'm still working on that.

When I edited the journals my grandmother and her family wrote on a trip around the world in 1910 and 1911, I will never forget a change I made in favor of "political correctness," although I'm sure I had never heard that term at the time, I simply didn't want to be offensive toward a race of people. One of the journals described events as the family was preparing to boarding a ship to start the first ocean part of their voyage: "Exploring further, we ventured into Steerage, and there surprised two Chinamen still in bed, the Chinese crewmen not being allowed to go ashore in Seattle." I changed "Chinamen" to "Chinese men," and have regretted it since. It lacks the flavor of the time, and it withholds information about the words that were considered proper usage by my ancestors in those years. It doesn't sound authentic, and I didn't footnote it. The edited journals ended up as a book that I put together and my grandmother published, entitled All Eight Went. I do plan to put it online one of these days, as all of the printed copies are gone. That will be my chance to reverse that choice, anyway.

When a person transcribes letters without using "sic," nobody knows whether to attribute the mistake or variation to the letter-writer or transcriber, and that's why I would rather litter the page with "sics" at the outset and think about changing them later. A transcribed letter can be used as historical reference material, or it can become the basis for story. It's fascinating to me to be given the gift of these windows into the past. There was a time when "ain't" was used within the context of more proper grammar, although I don't know if it was used in fun or seriously. It may have been a fad, or maybe not, but I'd have to find those letters again and read them in the context of other years. (Well, hopefully I may have footnoted it!) Perhaps the grammarians were still in the process of deciding whether the word was proper or not. Another interesting side note is that the letters from the generation I'll be dealing with most sound positively modern next to the letters from the generation of their parents. How does this happen and why? Maybe we see it today, and maybe history will note the demarcation.

You can also tell a lot about the education level of a person from his or her letters. The person may be self-taught or well-schooled, and that in itself is of interest. Some of the writers with lower levels of formal education spelled certain words phonetically. It's interesting to "hear" them speak through their letters. They had a slight accent that I don't have. I learned that from their uncorrected writing. And there were conventions of the day that tell us more about the time than about the person.

Once you get to the stage of publication, some of the "sics" can be left out, as I know beyond a doubt that I have gone over it enough times that what you see is what was there. In other cases, maybe a writer wants to "clean up" the spellings and punctuation so the meaning can be understood. But it does change a reader's perception of how the individual might talk or how fast they might be trying to put words onto paper. All of these things I found to be of interest. This is why I felt so much life breathed into people whose lives had passed into history so long ago. The connection was real, personal, flawed, expressive. The trick is in figuring out how best to convey that to a reader without leaving the material in an awkward state.

So, these are some of the thoughts I have while embarking on this project. At first it's easy - keep it accurate. And then what?

Footnotes vs Endnotes

This choice was a no-brainer. I love footnotes, as anyone knows who read the first material I wrote based on these old letters. They are easy to make in writing programs like WordPerfect or Word, and they help me keep track of what I've learned or still need to research. They help document oddities and facts along the way, or bring enlightening extras to the table. They also inform readers. I'm of the opinion that footnotes are fine. If you don't like them, you can ignore them, as I've done many times while caught up in the flow of other peoples' books. If this book should turn into a historical novel rather than a history, I'm not sure what I'll do about footnotes.

Some writers or publishers are fond of endnotes, and I can't imagine why. While they theoretically serve the same function, they are hard and distracting to use. Usually, they're organized by chapter at the end of the book. This means you have to first figure out which chapter you're on, then find them at the back of the book. You then need to search not just for the number of the note, but for that note within the chapter (which is usually not indicated on every page). What a pain. I suppose that some time in history it was easier for a compositor to put the notes all in one place, and thus not have to adjust the spacing for each page. Nowadays there is software specifically to create them. But let's get real. Computers make the notes for us, and they do it with little work on our part. Here's to the end of endnotes forever. Thank you.

There will be footnotes as I write this book. Probably many.

Technology Is Great Until It's Not

I love technology when it works and/or when I understand it. My first computer was a Tandy from Radio Shack. It came with a 10 meg hard drive. But when I found out I could get the additional 10-meg upgrade, I knew I wanted that. "Ten megs is all you'll need for a lifetime," the salesman told me. "I write a lot," I said. "I want the extra 10; I want 20 megs." He thought I was nuts, but I took it home with, effectively, a 20-meg hard drive. We all know what happened to that figure.

I made some nice maps in CorelDraw for those first "chapters" of the Hudson-Joy epic I printed in the early 1990s. I also produced camera-ready print for the entire project using WordPerfect 5.1. Who knew that I'd produce 14 small booklet-to-book sized pieces and then shelve the project for 15 years? Along the way I stopped using WordPerfect, CorelDraw went through many expensive upgrades that I didn't keep up with until I bought a new program recently, and hard drives tend to crash - more then than now.

Some of the intermediate versions of Corel wouldn't open my old-version maps, some of the old WordPerfect files became corrupted or wouldn't open in Word, and it seems the crashes may have damaged files. When moving, I threw out a number of the printed chapters to save on weight and space, but fortunately I have at least one of each. I thought I had more, but these things happen, especially moving under any kind of duress, as can happen during a divorce (for example).

Well, here I am. It looks like my latest version of Corel (thank you, CorelDraw!) has been made backwardly compatible with the maps. I haven't checked them all, but I think so. I can scan any of the pages I really need to, or just grab the info I want to use and type it.

So, I'm regrouping here. I've figured out where I want to start, which is roughly where I left off with a certain amount of picked-up backstory from the old chapters for clarity. The style will be different. It will evolve. I may start in a similar vein, because that's what I know. For this first book, I will start with an interesting chunk out of the lives of one man and one woman, although it's mainly his story. My goals are to keep it fairly simple, keep it interesting, show the reader things they didn't know already, no matter how much history of the place and time they've already read, and to get the basic draft done in about a year. I feel sure I can do the first things on the list. We'll see about that time element. It depends a lot on how things go this year in my business. I've started by dumping segments (the recoverable ones) that I want to edit from into a new Word doc. I'll pare it way down, re-word, and keep on going.

Focus

I figured out where to start and how much background material I want (minimal, at this point). Instead of watching a movie, I located the quotes and information I'll type up or copy/paste tomorrow. I've started a file in Word. I'm glad I wrote the first 14 chapters (13 1/2 or 14, depending on how you count them) the way I did, because they make a superb chronological reference. If I live long enough, or make enough time, I'm tempted to write several "story" type books from this material and also go back and finish the work the way I started it. And also do a readable overview. And an updated disposition of the pieces.

But for now, I'm thrilled that I know what words I want to start with and what backstory I want to include. I'm also thrilled that I'm learning to pare down. This is a challenge for me. I'm sure that posting my Astoria, Oregon, Daily Photo (part of the City Daily Photo family) is helping, because the rules are, you post only one photo per day. It wasn't easy for me in the beginning, but I'm loving it. I've got my other blog for posting multiple pix in a day. I read recently on a photoblog that someone's writing teacher had instilled in them the concept of ONE. When you stay focused on one thing, your writing is better. Reading about it just at this moment helped me know that it was OK to focus on N.C. Hudson, as interesting as the other characters are. Their stories can come later, or their material can be given to someone else. From the begining, Hudson was the hero of this story. Others felt it, too; and yes, it's OK to leave him fully and completely at the center. I know it's going to make the project better. I love the way it's falling into place.

Scope

The books shown in my last post were dated 1610-1984 (the dates were part of the title of the series). However, the bulk of the collection of original letters and documents that found their way to me in 1983 were dated from 1844 through the first decade of the 20th Century, with a notable exception in 1826 of my ancestor's certificate of military induction. Some decades were more abundantly represented than others. It became clear to me that the scope of the story from beginning to end became too big to deal with as completely as I wanted to in fewer than about 3,200 or so large-format pages. I'd already written 883 pages, and had only begun to reach what I felt to be the strongest part of the story, or the most interesting part of the letters. The original letters and documents from the 1840s through the 1860 comprised a well-woven fabric of people and the events, feelings, and thoughts that made up their lives.

It is hard to imagine a sphere of history more wonderfully preserved than that contained in the material I had at hand. Certain of the characters (my ancestors and others) had become so real to me that I lived with their thoughts every day. I wanted to share them. If I'd had nothing to do but write, I might have changed gears and gone forward, but my life contained so much more. Besides that, I was torn: should the materials simply be archived? While they SHOULD be archived, one question was where, and another question was, would the pageant ever be told? I wanted to find a compromise. Actually, I wanted to do it all. Some letters have been archived, some copied, some filed in one form or several forms. Some are available to the public now and some not yet. Eventually, I shelved what I had left, keeping a way to find all information until I could sort out a way to present it.

Finally, I believe that the story has to be told in parts, or at least begun in parts. It may be that someday an overview will be warranted, but for now I intend to begin to tell what is for me (and I hope for others) a compelling true tale of love, adventure, industry and friendship, success and passion, dreams and choices, awakening and flights of the spirit around the life of one man and the woman he vowed to love forever. The tale will begin at an emotional and physical turning point, and will conclude when a particular desire has been fulfilled, but so much of his industrious life is still to be played out. I feel and hope that there are several books on tap. I feel ready to start on this one, and I hope to complete it in a year. The provisional name is Love on the Prairie, but that doesn't cover the scope of the contents. I've become a product of the SEO mentality, where the title needs to include those words that Google can spider to return the desired results to searchers. So it gets a little complicated, not to mention wordy. But, Love on the Prairie is what came to mind. It can be changed, and it sounds better than Love and Law on the Prairie. We'll see what happens.

My plan is to keep this blog as a diary of the work, a place to sort out questions and hopefully attract some interest in my subject. I plan to post excerpts from these remarkable letters and some of my writing as well as discussions about both; we'll see what comes of it all. I always like to begin a blog post with an image. After awhile that may prove to be a challenge, but I'm resourceful :) If you happen to read this and have any questions, let me know.