Craftsman

I love craftsmen.  By 'craftsmen' I mean anyone who is skilled at their craft - male or female, artist or truck driver or paper pusher.  Craftsmen take pride in what they do not because they have to but because they actually enjoy what they do.  I have watched a person behind a counter in a sub shop put a sandwich together with skill and dexterity and flourish, working with a team who dance around together from the coffee pot to the refrigerator to the cash register.  Simple movements.  Simple ballet.  I've watched a glass blower extract a bird from a molten piece of glass with a few simple twists of the wrist, twists that took a dozen years or more to master.  I have listened a builder explain with joy the solution to a complex structural problem and make it look easy.

Finding the joy in any task is not easy.  Some tasks are so mundane and so repetitive and so seemingly meaningless that it is hard to master the artistry.  Making a thousand sandwiches a day could be pretty boring.  A nurse in a hospital rehabilitation program who has to work with continuous groups of overweight elderly people who don't care enough to take care of themselves could be a chore.  Distributing the mail day after day could induce ennui.

It is easy to be in awe of Michelangelo or Shakespeare or Einstein.  Noticing and appreciating and recognizing skilled, everyday craftspeople gives color and artistry to the tapestry of my life.  And if you say to a ticket agent at an airport as you watch him handle the paperwork and bags and dance through the turmoil, "Wow.  You're really good at this!"  he'll probably think you're kidding, but then a smile might just grow on his face as he recognizes that you are serious followed by a pause.  "Thank you . . . next!"

Mentors

As we go through life there are amazing people who touch us, touch our minds and our attitudes about life and living.  They are teachers.  They are mentors.  They mold us into who we are and often don't even know it.

I have been lucky to have a number of such people in my life such as the man pictured here.  His name was Hector Romulus Demell.  He was a French Canadian whose mother loved the classics.  Her children had very remarkable names!  I wasn't even a teenager when I met Hector.  He was one of those quiet, unassuming people who know how to do everything just because . . . how hard could it be?  Hector's family lived in a cabin in the Canadian bush.  One day, one of the children had severe pains in her side.  Hector's mother got on the radio telephone and called the doctor who was about a day away.  She laid her daughter out on the kitchen table, and by the light of a kerosene lantern and long distance guidance from the doctor, extracted her appendix with a kitchen knife.

He could paddle a canoe without dripping on the surface of the water because that would disturb the fish.  And while he was paddling he rolled and lit a cigarette without losing a beat.  He didn't like to eat the trout that he help us catch, but he could cook them over a camp fire so that they would melt in your mouth.  He could cook some of the tastiest French pancakes or 'Crepe Suzette' filled with jam and dusted with powered sugar.  He could cut down a tree with an axe and drop it on a dime.  One night he heard scratching on the roof of his cabin, and went out to find a bear sitting there.  Bear meat can be tasty, he told me.  I don't know why he just didn't talk the bear down! 

My grandfather built a house in the woods by the side of the lake.  You could only get to it by walking or by boat.  When the house was built, he decided that he needed a basement underneath it for a cold cellar to store stuff since there was no electricity.  He and Hector got some dynamite and blew the rock out from underneath the house without disturbing anything or killing themselves in the process.

I always thought of Hector as one of those people inherently knew the meaning of life and the essence of the natural order.  He didn't talk about it or brag about it.  He just lived it.  The way it should be lived.

Finding a particular grain of sand

All those lives!  All those people, thoughts, ideas, loves, hatreds . . . stories and readers.  When you write a book you are all by yourself, staring at the page or computer screen.  It's a one on one experience.  And it could end there.  But when someone else reads the book and if you have done your job well, the characters and the tale come alive in another mind.  And maybe that person will tell another person that the book is worth reading and it will come alive in another mind as well.

When Gutenberg printed his bible, there was only one book, one title on the market.  Then there were other presses and other books.  Now there are millions of presses and millions of books and millions of people who write, almost as many as there are grains of sand on a beach.  How can a writer get a reader to pause, bend over, and select a single grain of sand from all those others?

You have to take a deep breath, believe in your writing, and believe in your friends.  It's the old pyramid plan - two friends tell two of their friends tell two of their friends . . ..  And there is the vast social network where that plan can touch thousands of people in an instant.

Amazon has a page for authors where they can put up information about themselves.  If you would go to my author page http://amzn.to/1BqNBVK and click on the "Like" button in the upper right, that would help my Amazon ranking, making my grain of sand a little more obvious on the beach.  And if you have read Recalculating Truth and were willing to review it, that would be wonderful.

Recalculating Truth - the Novel

After about a year of writing in the wee hours of the morning, and a few months of reviewing, feedback from some wonderful resources, and some editing and corrections, I set about the process of trying to get the book our to the world.  That was almost more difficult than writing it in the first place!

It used to be that you would write a book, struggle through finding an agent, and then letting him or her do all the work of getting it out to a publisher and the market in general.  They might take you to a few cocktail parties where you could meet publishers and convince them how wonderful you were and how wonderful your writing was and absolutely fantastic your book was.  And then you went back in your closet and wrote another book.

You can probably still do that.  There are certainly still literary agents about, but the new Indie publishing opportunity allows anyone to publish a book.  And there are a lot of people and organizations out there who are more than willing to take your money and help you!  There is a line between Vanity Publishing and Self Publishing.  At least I would like to think so.  The Vanity Publishers tell you that you have the best book in the world and you deserve to be on the New York Times bestsellers list and they can get you there.  For a fee!  You pay them to do it all because they appeal to your vanity and make it feel like it is a privilege for them to even consider working with you.

There are also organizations in the middle that seem like publishing houses, that will take your money for editing and promoting or anything else that you want, putting their brand on it if they accept you and you agree to their rules or not if you just choose to use their services.

And then there are the publish and distribution organizations - companies that will convert your document to the right format and distribute it through their connections to the big distribution houses.  They don't give you any input on the content or quality of your work of art.  That's not their job and not what you are paying for.

And then there are all the organizations that provide add-on services from editing to promotion to video trailers to cover design, layout design, and typefaces.  Just about anything you can think of someone has set up an organization that will take your money and assist you with getting your book out into the world.

Wading through all the choices and options is painful and a shot in the dark.  The path I chose from this smorgasbord may or may not work, may or may not be the best route.  But it's out there now and everything and everyone says that you have to spend hours sending out press releases and blog posts and tweets, etc. if anyone is ever going to know that the book exists!  And since everyone says it, it must be right.  Any advice?

Characters

Characters make a story work.  Characters interact with each other and with their environments.  A character has three, core psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Exploring those needs develops the story.  A character needs to feel autonomous - that they are choosing things in their life and are not being controlled.  They need to feel effective and competent, doing things that they initiate and can achieve successfully.  And they need to satisfy their social mandate by having close relationships.

For example a character can feel he is acting autonomously when he is working, making decisions about his skills and his knowledge.  He may not feel that autonomy when he is home responding to family needs, but that may be part of his social mandate to which he is dedicated.  If a member of his family dies or is threatened, it challenges the character's core needs.  How the character responds to that challenge can be a tale worth telling.

It is sometimes easier to develop these concepts for a fictional character than it is to find them in yourself.

Getting Started

Recalculating Truth is the fourth novel that I have finished.  The previous stories reside in boxes and file drawers since they were created on a typewriter and required actual paper and ink.  Despite these valiant efforts, I am still learning.  The publishing world has changed dramatically over the years and Recalculating Truth will be the first to hit the electronic publishing world.  And it has been a serious learning curve to move from writing the book, passing it on to an agent, and waiting for it to be picked up by a publisher and exposed to the wide world to finishing the book and personally ushering it into the wide world of readers - where anyone can read it and anyone can offer feedback and comments.

The mechanics of the process is pretty daunting.  There are dozens of companies out there eager to take your money and crunch your words into electronic fodder and that has resulted in a lot of not so great books.  And there are a myriad of ancillary services from editing to cover design to formatting to distributing who are also eager to take your money.  There are templates and advice givers and newsletters and web site creators.  And there seem to be authors who have created more books than would require a lifetime!  How can they possibly write so fast?

So, anyway, I think Recalculating Truth is as ready as I'm going to make it to meet the wide world of readers.  It will be an adventure.

Preface of Residential Ventilation Handbook

There are dozens of subjects one could study in this life, and it would seem that the old adage is true - "The more you know, the more there is to know."  I remember clearly having absolutely no appreciation for how air moved through fans, ducts, or houses, thinking that it just happened.  About 30 years ago I was asked to use the waste heat from the transmitters of a radio station to heat some offices, and that opened the door to the wonderful world of mechanical ventilation.  I had to figure out how to move that air, what sort of fans to use, and how the air would move through the building.

To solve that problem I met a fan salesman named Jack "The Boze" Kennedy, who taught me about axial fans and venturis and the fact that fans can "suck" and "blow" and a bunch of other salesman stuff that is not the subject of this book.  He also introduced me to a modular home company through which connection I met my wife, Kate.

Clearly a "house is a system."  It is a working shelter for its occupants.  That is its purpose - its reason for existence.  People need to be warm, dry, and comfortable.  And we need air to breathe.  We can't just keep breathing the same air over and over any more than we can keep eating the same food over and over.  This book is about ventilation for homes, both new homes and existing homes, and how to get the air to go where you want it to go and do what you need it to do.  Remember that air doesn't always follow the arrows on the diagrams.

A sample of the first chapter of Recalculating Truth

He suddenly thought that maybe she liked him, but he quickly threw that thought out.  He was under the impression that she didn’t like anyone.  He must be misinterpreting her behavior.  Maybe this was some sort of lesson or test.  Whatever it was, he found it distractingly out-of-character.

Now they were alone in her office and she was looking up at him where he had stepped back toward the glass wall that separated the office from a 30-story drop to the street below.  It was a personal look.  She was probing his personal thoughts, but she asked, “Did you see that?”  Nothing more.

“Yes,” he mumbled.  What else could he say?  He started to explain, “Yes, but I . . . . “

“Here.  Sit down and look at this.  This is their weak spot!”

“I’m sure you’re right, but how . . . ?”

“Sit,” she said.  “You need to learn.”

So he sat.  He tried to concentrate on the screen, but he felt her come up behind him.  He leaned forward.  He felt her lean with him.  He felt her hands on his shoulders.  Her touch almost seared through the shoulders of his shirt.  Then he thought he felt her breasts on his back.  He felt her breath in his ear.  He could smell her perfume.  He could smell her hair that brushed against his cheek as she leaned in toward the flickering text illuminating their faces.  She tapped the heavy glass screen of the monitor with her long, red pointed fingernail.  “Tink, tink, tink!”

Under other circumstances, if Ms Jakes had not been who she was, if this had been a casual, personal encounter, Boyd would have been pretty turned on by the situation. And the fact was that he felt himself getting physically turned on despite what all the professional circuits in his brain were telling him he should be doing.  At the same time, he was scrambling for the next move.

Moments of crisis seem to slow time.  Instincts, training, passions, emotions all get compressed into tiny bits, tiny bits that can alter the course of a life.  There isn’t time to sort through them all, put them into logical order, weigh the pros and cons, choose the best alternative, selecting from a variety of outcomes.  There is in fact only time to react.

Boyd spun in the chair, breaking the physical connection and jumped to his feet.  “Yes,” he said, almost shouting. “Yes, I see what you were talking about.  I’ll get a draft together in the morning.”

Ms Jakes had staggered back a foot from his abrupt ejection from the chair.  She looked at him in the darkening room.  After a pause she said, “Yes.  You’re right.  This can wait until morning.  It’s late.”

Boyd was relieved that there was no explosion, no comments, no acknowledgement of anything beyond the time.

Then she said, “Let’s go have a drink.”

Boyd hadn’t even known that Ms Jakes drank.  Although with all the socializing she was forced to do in her job and her rapid climb to her position, it was hard to believe that she didn’t have to do at least social drinking.  But he was glad to be leaving her office.  A bar is a public place.

He grabbed his jacket.  She pulled her dress into shape with a nonchalant twist of the fabric, ran her hand up for a quick adjustment of her curls, grabbed her bag, clicked off the computer monitor, and strode across the thick carpet of her office, flicking off the light at the door, leaving him trailing behind in almost complete darkness.

As they waited for the elevator he said, “It’s a perfect site for the project.” They both stared at the elevator doors.  “I can’t see why they wouldn’t get the okay from the city to proceed.”

“It’s not a case of logic,” she replied.  “It never is.  The issue comes in compelling all the parties to agree on the financial returns and tip-toeing through the environmental implications.”