Monetizing the Return on Mechanical Ventilation

Insulating a house saves energy and that saves money. However, using mechanical ventilation causes conditioned air to be removed from the house only to be replaced by air that requires energy to condition - to warm it or cool it. Utility programs are reluctant to pay for adding mechanical ventilation to the house because it can’t be justified in terms of energy savings. DALYs (Disability Adjusted Life Years) provide a means to monetize the savings in health and productivity. One of the difficulties is that DALYs are population aligned and not individual aligned - although populations are made up of people.

Tight, energy efficient homes must have well designed and well installed mechanical ventilation systems for the health of the occupants as well as the health of the building. So what’s a DALY? DALYs represent the total number of years lost to illness, disability, or premature death within a given population. There is a growing population of people who live in air-tight houses. We’re sealing everything up from windows and doors to light fixtures and heating systems. And not only are we making houses tighter, we’re spending more time in them - closing in on 100% of the time.

If you click on this button and enter your zip code, it will provide you with the number of years of life expectancy at your location.

There are a lot of elements that impact our life expectancy. All the diseases that we face growing up like mumps or measles or COVID-19. There is mold and soot from roads and furnaces. There may be rodents and maybe the range hood or the bathroom fans don’t get used.

And then there is cigarette smoke. Tobacco smoke contains more than 7,000 chemicals.Thirdhand smoke is residual nicotine and other chemicals left on indoor surfaces by tobacco smoke. People are exposed to these chemicals by touching contaminated surfaces or breathing in the outgassing. This residue is thought to react with common indoor pollutants to create a toxic mix including cancer causing compounds, posing a potential health hazard to nonsmokers - especially children.

EXPOSOME

The exposome, conceptually and practically, provides a holistic view of human health and disease. It includes exposure from our diets, our lifestyles, and our behaviors. The human exposome is the environmental equivalent of the human genome . It is a representation of the complex exposures we are subject to through our lives. The exposome encompasses much of what we refer to as nurture - in the old battle of nature vs nurture.

What we are particularly concerned about here are the pollutants that are floating around in the air that can be ameliorated with good ventilation. The ultra-fine particles - PM2.5 in size - have the greatest impact on DALYs. Much of the acrolein and ultra-fine particles come from cooking and those can be removed from the house with a range hood with an effective capture efficiency. Common sense clearly shows that air quality has a significant impact on human life. In fact, it has been estimated that the most common diseases cause the loss of 2,129,090 years of Europeans’ life.

But we don’t want to cut off the connection in bacterial diversity between the inside and the outside of the house. There needs to be a balance. Microbes are all around us. Many species are beneficial to us and help our immune systems to function and control and compete with pathogens and pests. We can’t thrive in a purely sterile environment. We need the air exchange that ventilation provides.

PRODUCTIVITY

Productivity is the key source of economic growth and competitiveness. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker. In the United States it’s about $34.02 per hour.

HEALTH CARE COSTS

US employers paid nearly $880 billion in health care benefits for employees and dependents. However, illness-related lost productivity costs them another $530 billion per year. That amounts to 60 cents for every dollar employers spend on health care benefits. In the U.S. almost 1.4 billion productive days are lost annually because of absent employees.

ADDING IT UP

Clearly indoor air quality has a direct impact on the health of the occupants. Changing the air - diluting the pollutants - will improve health.

Make some assumption:

• Outdoor air is generally 75% better than indoor air;

• Choose an effective air change rate of 0.35 ACH;

• Multiply those two numbers together: 0.75 x 0.35 = 26.25%

• Lost productivity in the U.S. per year is about $1,608 per person

Attributing 26.25% of loss of productivity to poor ventilation: 26.25 x $1,608 = $422/person/year.

This is not perfect math, but the assumptions are reasonable. A well designed, well installed, well maintained residential mechanical ventilation system will pay for itself in less than a year, particularly if there are two people living in the house. And it will keep on paying back year after year after year.

Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead - Sara Gran

Genre: Mystery Thriller & Suspense

I discovered this at https://crimereads.com/the-10-best-crime-novels-of-the-last-decade/  Is there a mystery here? Absolutely. Is there a detective? Claire Dewitt claims to be the world’s greatest detective. At least in her own mind. And her mind is exceedingly complicated. But if you’re looking for a crime novel, that is not the main track of this story. A crime does indeed occur and Claire unravels the mystery, but the story is as much about the mysteries of life as it is about this particular crime.

While she is in California, Claire gets a call from a new client in New Orleans who wants her to find his uncle, Vic Willing, a prosecutor. The story is set a year or two after Katrina when the city was devastated by flood waters, and the city of New Orleans is one of the main characters in the book. There is none of the buzz and pulse and bright lights of touristy New Orleans. Houses are falling over. Buildings are abandoned. Garbage and death are everywhere, and it is a war zone populated by gangs and drive-by shootings. And Claire has little respect for the police or the criminal justice system. “New Orleans’ labyrinthine legal system, based on the Napoleonic Code, didn’t help matters. Put it all together and New Orleans had both the highest murder rate and one of the lowest conviction rates in the country.”

She is haunted by memories of her mentor, Constance Darling, who introduced her to Jacques Silette. “Jacques Silette was a genius. So I thought.” Gran does such a good job developing this fictional character that I had to do a Google search to determine if Silette or his book Détection was actually real. One of the numerous threads in the story is learning to see the world and its accompanying clues as Silette saw them. Détection magically permeates many parts of Gran’s story - levels removed from reality by Gran to Dewitt to Constance Darling to Silette. The dominant characters in the story are Silette and New Orleans.

This is not a cozy, quick read, comfy chair crime story. And it’s definitely worth reading.

Social Media For Authors Review

Social Media for Authors

There are a lot of very good sales people touting their services to us poor, independent authors who are doing our best to try to figure out this crazy, crazy world of writing, publishing, and marketing a book. Some independent authors appear to be outrageously successful. You don’t hear as much about the millions who aren’t. There are services and then there are services to help with the services. There are organizations who offer help in sorting through the services. But I suppose, the same thing is true with colleges and universities. You really don’t know what you’ve got except by reputation. Unfortunately many of the services, schools and individuals who offer help and guidance to struggling authors, have no reputations except among themselves. So you have to do whatever research you can, test the waters on social networking, and then jump in and try. So that’s what I did.

I’m not very good at social networking. I always loved those advertisements that showed the father sitting outside his housing torturously typing in, “I’m sitting on the patio”. I could never see the point of telling the world everything that I am doing. If I was living an adventurous life, I wouldn’t have time to type that information into my phone.  I wouldn’t be able to pause and type one letter at a time, “Well, the squirrels are back in the attic.”

So I signed up for “Social Media for Authors” from the Self-publishing School”[1] I want to start out by saying that the promotions for these kinds of courses are remarkably good. They know how to push the right buttons, the buttons that you and I are looking for, answers to your most pressing questions like become a bestseller, sell more books, become a top selling Amazon author today, sell a 1000 books in the first year. I listened to one person who said, “If you’re making a five figure income with you books now, I want to get you to a six figure income. And if you’re making a six figure income, I want to push you to a seven figure income.” Really? Where do I sign up? And another thing, it is amazing how similar these pitches are. It’s like they all went to the same school to learn how to do this stuff. Well, they better be good at it, I guess. It’s what they’re professing to teach you how to do.

The young lady who teaches this Self-publishing School course is very enthusiastic and bubbly. It must have been hot where she talking from because she seemed to be sweating. The audio was good. She scrolled through things like my kids do – at a rapid rate, which was okay because since it’s recorded you can go back and figure out what you missed as it flew by. There is a lot of hype at the beginning talking about how important an author platform is which I knew because that was why I plunked down the money (or the credit card) for the course. There was a lot of fluff when there could have been substance. “Show don’t tell.”

The description of the course says that it will cover all the fundamental social networking platforms – Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. She starts with Twitter and spends the most time there. She provided information about cleaning up your account. (I think it looks pretty good: https://twitter.com/paul_raymer  ) She did a good job of showing how to search through hash tags. She talks about following people and using the daily Twitter hash tag “games” like #1linewed and #slapdashsat, things that I would never have known about.

When she moved on to Instagram, she related that the content that performs best are stories, your real face, your real life, and use of aesthetically appealing images of your book. Quotes do really well. She talked about Linktree (https://linktr.ee/ )which is a really cool way to squeeze in a bunch of connections when you only have one link to connect with.

Facebook, she said, is an older audience. I didn’t need to take this course to hear that. My kids have told me that! But that’s fine for me since the profile of my average reader is an older, well-educated audience. She provided guidance in how to clean up that profile as well. But there were little pieces of information missing like how do you set up a page as opposed to a profile. She said Facebook needs to be a very professional snapshot of what’s going on in your writing life.

When she finally got around to LinkedIn, the information was pretty thin. She made it clear that she didn’t think it was the place for fiction. I have had a page on LinkedIn for my professional profile for years and have many more followers there than on any of the other social networks. So I have taken it as a challenge to make it work for my fiction efforts. And that’s okay.

★★★☆☆

So in the spirit of the star rankings, I would give this course three stars, both for content and for value for money. I learned stuff, no doubt, but I’m not in a hurry to take other courses from these folks no matter how many times they bug me to do so. I am hopeful that there will be better places to spend my scarce, hard-earned writing dollars.

Oh, and one more thing. In the Master Class program, I love the way the instructors talk to me. They address me as ‘you’, as though it’s just the two of us sitting there talking. The instructor in this course talks to ‘you guys’ as though there are a dozen of us sitting here in front of my computer. Well, I certainly hope not.

[1] https://students.self-publishingschool.com/courses

In the Ground by Jeff Carson

Jeff Carson’s In the Ground is the 14th book in the David Wolf mystery thriller series and I have to tell you that I came into this series with this book and that was a problem for me. Both going into this story and coming out of this story there are a whole lot of connections to other episodes both in the past and to come in the future. There were lot of people who were only connected to this particular story because the protagonist knew them. I didn’t know them, and I wondered who they were and why they were there.

It’s a fascinating thing about characters in a series. Some authors manage to get the books to stand clearly on their own pages. Paul Doiron does that. Patrick O’Brien, Dudley Pope, and Dewey Lamdin do that in their sea stories. Elizabeth George does it well with Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley. Some authors don’t write their books in sequence but use the same characters like Agatha Christie with Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot.

But it is a challenge to write the books in series, having the character age as the pages and books turn, with the risk that a new reader (like me in this case) is going to walk into the middle of it. My wife has a big family, and the first time I walked into the room and they all looked at me, I knew that I was never going to remember who they all were and how they were connected. But that was okay, because I knew that I was going to have time to get to know them. They were family and that was a reason to care.

It takes a powerful writer to rope a new reader so tightly into a group like that and keep their interest. All the characters have to be memorable. All the characters have to be interesting. The risk is that all those characters are in the author’s head, and they may be in the heads of faithful readers as well, but as a newbie to this series, it didn’t work for me. And looking through the reviews on Goodreads, Jeff Carson certainly has a lot of loyal fans.

It’s a good story. Wolf is the sheriff of a county in Colorado and he gets called into a murder scene when a body appears on the top of a gigantic machine in a mining operation. Wolf has all sorts of issues with his job and the people around him, while he tries to sort out who did the deed and why. In the process, another body shows up. Added to the mix is a female deputy that Sheriff Wolf finds attractive despite some disparity in their ages.

I wouldn’t call this a ‘thriller’ in the ilk of Robert Ludlum, David Baldacci, or Ian Fleming. The scenery is great and the main characters do have substance, but I felt that the plot line took a back seat to the ongoing story of the characters. As in all good mystery stories, the why drives the who. In this story, Using a maze of clues in following the how, Carson does a good job of burying the why until close to the end in an explosion of revelation and gunfire.

Carson’s writing is solid and the editing is good. This might be a story line that would be worth turning back, and following from the beginning.

One Last Lie by Paul Doiron

One Last Lie is the eleventh in the Mike Bowditch series by Paul Doiron. Mike is a Maine game warden but this book starts in Florida where Mike has been sent to perform his due diligence on the background for a new chief pilot for the Maine Warden Service. Mike’s friend, Charley Stevens, told him, “Never trust a man without secrets.” This is one of Doiron’s promises to the reader. He promises that he will tell us what the lie in the title means. He promises that he will tell us why Mike is in Florida and not Maine, and who the person might be that doesn’t have secrets. That’s a lot of promises before the reader makes it through the first paragraph.

Doiron is a solid storyteller and his books are a pleasure to read, and Mike is a wonderfully imperfect protagonist. Doiron follows through on those early promises and makes and answers a bunch more along the way. This story is a treasure quest that begins with a python hunt in the swamps of Florida, proceeds to a flea market in Machias, Maine, and then a plunge into the woods and a northern trek to the border with Canada. Mike seeks to find his friend and mentor who has mysteriously professed to disappearing forever, leaving a note which in itself is mysterious. Why leave a note if you want to disappear forever and not have anyone try to find you?

There are some great lines like, “Florida is the world capital of unintended consequences”. And “My love for the old man was close to unconditional. But this day signaled the end of my apprenticeship. I had no doubt that Charley Stevens would continue to teach me life lessons, but only small boys and fools worship other men. The point of life is to find heroism in yourself.”

There are some great action scenes like in the Florida swamp wrestling with a gigantic python. Doiron puts Mike on an island in a rushing river where there seems to be no way out. Threats all around - to him, to his friend Charley, to a partially innocent bystander with an evil, Dudley Do-right character changing his skin from good guy to villain. Nature plays a role - as it should in the wilds of the Maine woods.

This is not a major Don Quixote fable, but it is a solid backwoods yarn. Mike does have problems with his girlfriends, and it seems that Doiron is undecided about which way to go with that issue. It reminds me of the Lovin’ Spoonful song Did you ever have to make up your mind? Say yes to one and leave the other behind. Mike finally ends the story by lying to himself. And that is the last lie.

Roseanna by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

Roseanna was published in 1965. It is a wonderful example of what appears to be a true police investigation of that era. I was not a police officer in Sweden in 1965 so I can’t say that for sure, but it seems real enough. There is a lot of waiting. There is a lot of down time when nothing happens. And the protagonist police officer, Martin Beck, gets a cold, doesn’t get enough rest, and doesn’t treat his wife well. But the authors carry it off and managed to retain my interest even through the quiet times. Slow moving stories like quiet singing can be difficult to execute well.

A naked and abused female body is found in the Göta Canal, during dredging with no way to identify her. With dogged investigation work and little bit of luck her identity is finally established as Roseanna McGraw, a tourist from the American midwest.

Besides the complexity of the lack of identity and the fact that the victim was on a boat with other tourists from all over the world, all of whom have to be tracked down and questioned, the world in the early ‘60’s was very different in terms of communication from what it is today. No cell phones. No internet. The fastest communication was a telegram and a telephone. Evidence was mailed and carried by plane across the Atlantic and then had to be translated into Swedish so Martin Beck - the lead police officer - could read it.

The story unwinds slowly and carefully. A couple of scenes near the end of the book as Martin Beck seeks to trap the killer are somewhat contrived, but that may be the distance of years.

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were the authors of the 1968 novel Laughing Policeman which was made into a movie in 1973 starring Walter Matthieu and Bruce Dern.

Review of Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

Mystic River

The praise has been effusive for Mystic River since it was published in February, 2001. The movie version came out on October 3, 2003, almost exactly 17 years ago. The movie was directed by Clint Eastwood and starred Kevin Bacon as Sean Devine, Sean Penn as Jimmy Markum, Tim Robbins as Dave Boyle, Laurence Fishburne as Detective Sergeant Whitey Powers.

Lehane draws a clear social line between Boston neighborhoods of what he calls The Point and The Flats. He paints scenes of family life of both comradely and combative relationships and sets the story up with Sean, Jimmy, and Dave playing on the street as boys when a strange event occurs that will bring the three of them  - Jimmy as a former felon, Sean as a police officer, and Dave as someone very deeply scarred by the opening event who never figures out how to fight off his internal image of the Boy who Escaped from Wolves. The story involves several mysteries that seem to be intertwined, and Lehane does a masterful job of disentangling and resolving them.

Lehane paints vivid descriptive pictures of his characters such as this description of Annabeth’s father, Theo Savage. He “entered the house, came down the hall with a case of beer on each shoulder. He was a huge man, a florid, jowly Kodiak of a human being with an odd dancer’s grace as he squeezed down the narrow hall with cases of beer on his boat-mast shoulders.”

Sean’s thinking as a cop with a cop’s intuition, “You felt it in your soul, no place else. You felt the truth there sometimes – beyond logic – and you were usually right if it was a type of truth that was the exact kind you didn’t want to face, weren’t sure you could. That’s what you tried to ignore, why you went to psychiatrists and spent too long in bars and numbed your brain in front of TV tubes – to hide from hard, ugly truths your soul recognized long before your mind caught up.”

Lehane takes liberties with the control of his POVs, shifting from the inside of one character’s head to another, but it works for the story and for the atmosphere he created. These people are in a world they’ll never escape from. The neighborhoods themselves as they are moving from long term communities to yuppy havens getting gentrified and raising rents – the neighborhoods become characters in the story, characters that will clearly outlast the occupants because they are changing and the occupants are not.

It makes a good story, one that leads the reader on. I found the ending a bit slow and I found myself wishing that Lehane would just wrap it up. I can see why it was made into a movie as the tale has a depth and complexity if you want to pursue it or filtered down to its key elements that would fit into 137 minutes.

I would rank Mystic River as a Keeper.

402 pages

Wonderful Words

Sometimes a word in a book looks wrong, like a misspelling, like the copy editor made a mistake. And sometimes it is. But there are a huge number of wonderful words in the English language that we rarely run across. Chirk is a word like that.
“He emerged from the water, surged ahead, and caught up to her. Grabbing her, she chirked, emitting a happy high-pitched squeal.”
Chirk means to make a shrill, chirping sound.
Or how about mephitic: “Some of the players were returning to their cars, lugging bags filled with mephitic athletic attire.”

My son played football in high school and when he would climb into the car with that huge bag of sweaty jerseys and socks and the cowboy collar, the air in the car reeked for days even with all the windows open.
Procacious means insolent or arrogant in attitude or tone. “The twin, sloped, two-color taillights procaciously blended into the small tail fins on either side of the curving top of the tiny trunk, barely large enough to hold the spare tire.” This is part of the description of Jon Megquire’s MG Midget.

These are a couple of excerpts from my latest novel, Death At the Edge of the Diamond. Sometimes these words just seem to appear. Sometimes they come from Roget’s Thesaurus - a truly wonderful reference. I haven’t been able to make an electronic thesaurus work half as well.

Sometimes an author is just showing off and doesn’t truly appreciate the words he or she is messing around with. I might have found a simpler word than procacious, for example, but I was trying to evoke the almost sexual attraction of a first car to a new driver.

Sometimes a word is just wrong, misspelled or misused. A good copy editor will pick up most of these minor typos, but good copy editors are expensive and most self-published authors can’t afford them so unfortunately many hurriedly printed books even from reputable publishing houses have typos in them. Personally I think that this is strongly influenced by fast fingering small keyboards and reliance on auto-correct.

“If you read Death at the Edge of the Diamond carefully you may uncover other interesting words. If you send me what you find, I’ll put you on my list for a free, signed copy of my next book!”

— Paul H. Raymer

Part 4 - Entering the Self-Publishing Jungle

There’s likely to be a Charlie Brown sort of story here!

The next step in the mechanics of the process is typesetting and formatting for ebooks and print books. I tried a variety of approaches for the process. I tried Joel Friedlander’s Book Design Templates which is pretty cool. He’s got a lot of good information and the instructional video on formatting the book is great.

But then you have to go through another step using something like Calibre to convert it into Mobi or Epub, and I could never make that work cleanly.

This time I found Vellum https://vellum.pub/ . This thing is more expensive than most, but it works great. It makes a beautifully formatted book for both print and electronic publishing. It’s not a place to do a lot of editing. You need to be down to your final step for the most part. You need to review it to make sure you have everything in the right places before you pull the trigger, but the final result looks professional.

In my particular genre, I am inundated with information about air quality in homes so I want to say a bit about that here not because it is directly related to self-publishing, but because it is directly related to health in homes which is an important issue.

The fact is that we have been forced to spend almost 100% of our time in our homes - and not because we are sitting around binging on TV programs (although that may be happening as well). We are forced to breathe the air in our homes so you better make sure that it as good air as it can be. You might want to check your CO alarm. By the way, CO alarms that are listed by UL 2034 are just that - alarms. If it goes off, get out of the house. Do Not try to defeat it by removing the batteries or waving a dish towel at it. CO is colorless and odorless. Check the date on it. If it is more than 3 years old, you might want to replace it. CO is a killer - the weapon of choice in my novel - Death at the Edge of the Diamond.

There are way too many trees in this neighborhood to fly a kite anyway!

You can add Death at the Edge of the Diamond to your reading list. Check it out and add it to your Goodreads shelf here >>

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54473532-death-at-the-edge-of-the-diamond

Part 3 - Entering The Self-Publishing Jungle

Chances are good that you’re not going to write your novel with a quill pen, dipping it into a bottle of ink, and scratching the letters on parchment. Most people write on computers these days. So how do you do it?

You can use software such as Microsoft Word or something similar. That’s great software with lots of capabilities that most of us never use. (One thing I have found useful is to use the Style menu and convert titles and subtitles into Heading 1, 2, or 3 and then use the Navigation pane. It will automatically make a list of all those elements and when you are ready for a table of contents, it can automatically do all that for you.)

There is writer’s word processing software, however. Now there may be others, but I have been using Scrivener from Literature and Latte https://www.literatureandlatte.com/ . This thing will do everything a writer might need. It does so many things that it takes a bit to get familiar with it. It does have some good tutorials, however.

When I’m working on my novel, I can go to the Notes section and set up a Diary where I can jot down all my developmental thoughts. There are template sheets for Characters and Settings. You can outline sections and pin them to the virtual cork board and more them around. I can load in images of scenes I am working on and put that in the background and remove everything else so I can just focus on the things I am interested in and don’t get distracted. You can save whole web pages in the reference section and download music to play while you’re working. You can set project targets to keep you pushing forward if you need a bit of a shove.

It has great editing features as well that allow you to split the screen while you’re work, cut things out but keep them available in case you want to put them back, and it goes on and on. I confess that I have trouble remembering all the features of the software that I use if I don’t use it every day. But this thing is worth learning and relearning if necessary.

There is a separate Scapple program that allows me to diagram the plot elements and connect them together.

It’s not expensive - $49 for Scrivener and $18 for Scapple. It was originally just for the Mac OS, but there is a Windows version. I bought that too a few years ago but at that time it was as satisfactory. They may have improved it.

And once your draft is complete, you can compile it and move over to Word if you need to. Then you can start cleaning it up for pre-readers to review.

#deathattheedgeofthediamond

#CapeCodNovel

Have you added Death at the Edge of the Diamond to your reading list yet? Check it out and add it to your Goodreads shelf

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54473532-death-at-the-edge-of-the-diamond

Part 2 - Entering The Self-publishing Jungle - Editing

So there you are with this pile of electronic pages that you think is pretty good. The next step is to find out if it is any good and to sweep up all the typos, misspellings, mis-punctuations, and all the other detritus that falls out of your brain and onto the page as you squeeze the words out. It is absolutely shocking how many mistakes we make as we write. No matter how many times you go over and over it, these little errors hide in corners and camouflage themselves into what look like what should be there.

Anyway that’s what editors are for. Editors and beta readers. Beta readers are usually friends and family. Couple of things there: you can’t push them if they’re free. Maybe they’ll get to reading it. Maybe they won’t. They have the best intentions, but they do have other lives! Believe it or not your book is not at the top of their to-do list. And that’s certainly fair. Beta readers are also encouraging. At least someone besides you has read the book.

Editors are paid to find all the gotcha’s as well as a lot of other stuff depending on what kind of editor you hire. So that’s like the first professional decision you have to make: Do I need to pay an editor and how much can I afford and will they make it all better? No. They won’t. It’s my book. I’m not perfect, but I should know what I’m doing otherwise I shouldn’t be spending all this time pushing these buttons.

Well not necessarily. When I was in school, and the teacher used his red pen on all my words, and disagreed with my literary analogies, I couldn’t ignore them or he’d fail me. But when I am paying someone, I don’t have to pay attention to their comments. Their observations may very well be right, but they might be wrong. Imagine editing James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake or Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

There are a lot of different kinds of editors. The website Elite Authors has some good information on the subject.

Developmental editors delves deeply into the story and can make significant changes.

Line editors pursue the basic writing mechanics and strengthen the higher level elements.

Copy editing editors focus on grammar, spelling and punctuation. The book should be ready for the final launch.

Proofreaders read the final, laid-out PDF.

A good editor has to be able to tell you when something sucks . . . in a nice way . . . in a constructive way that makes you understand it. I have to confess that although I had some great editorial input on Death at the Edge of the Diamond I haven’t found my long-term developmental editor for the next one.

Part 1 - Entering The Self-publishing Jungle

It’s not that hard to write a novel. Frankly it’s a personal struggle between your head and your hands. Control is yours. It’s personal.

Getting the novel published is another thing entirely. I don’t have a printing press in my basement. I don’t have cozy connections with bookstores or Amazon. I have to turn to other people to do that. The question is: who? There are seemingly millions of people and organizations out there eager and willing to take my money and make my dreams come true. It’s like coming out of a tunnel in some fantasy story and being faced with a thousand Gandalfs who all want to take my hand and guide me. If Frodo had stepped out of Brandy Hall and been faced with a thousand Gandalfs, he would have turned around and never come out.

So that’s where I am. I have written what is actually my fifth novel. (In draft form, I call them by their number - “Call it Five” was the working name.) And it has been in the works for five or six years. I self-published “Call it Four” which became Recalculating Truth so you’d think I’d know how to do it again. I have my notes, but things change a lot in five or six years. So it’s like starting over.

The first thing I settled on was writing on my computer. Seems pretty obvious these days. Not may people write with a pot of ink and a quill pen. Many years ago I wrote on an IBM Selectric II typewriter. (Personal computers did not exist in 1972.) I thought I was going to live my life writing so I needed the best tool I could find at the time. I bought the typewriter directly from IBM because there really wasn’t any other way at the time. The salesman at the company was surprised I was going to use it in my NY apartment and insisted on coming to the apartment to set it up! I wondered how hard it was going to be to plug it in and turn it on.

I had a friend also living in New York who wrote on a continuous roll of paper that he fed into his typewriter. He didn’t want to be distracted by changing the pages!

Time passed and technology changed and I went through a bunch of computers from an Apple II to Macs to DOS machines and back to Apple. But that’s a different story. This is a Mac Mini so that’s where I am.

By the way, CallItFive became Death at the Edge of the Diamond and was published in July, 2020.

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