Keith Graham

I ordered two packages of bees. These are boxes with 10,000 or so bees in a three pound package plus a queen.

For the last two years, my bees have struggled. I have not been able to harvest any honey. My hives all seem to do well and then they crash. Ward claims that I am not treating them for mites, so maybe this year I’ll treat them in August and see how it works.

I think that the problem is the neighbors spraying their lawns to kill mosquitos. It kills my bees. I am moving the hives to the cemetery side of my property, as far away from the stupid people who live next to me. I think that they would be happy not to have my bees anywhere near them.

This is my last year for bees anyway. I think that by this time next year, I will be moving up to Maine.

Just hit 45,000 words on my Moon novel. I’ve been averaging 2,000 words a day, which amazes me. I write while watching TV with Erica, so the book is influenced by the political thrillers that we like to watch. I am struggling with internal consistency, and I will have to do a rewrite from beginning to end eventually. I want it to be at least 75,000 words eventually, but I am not sure that I can make it. I’ve been listening to Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold the Moon, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, because his vision of the Moon has greatly influenced my own. He spends lots of words with characters arguing or discussing, using his signature approach known as Heinleining to introduce information into the story without actually stopping to explain things.

My book Space, Time, and Other Dimensions is out in Hardcover. It is 175 pages. I priced it at $15. I don’t really expect to sell many, except the paperback wound up being $10. I don’t make any money on either of the books. Amazon takes the lion’s share of sales.

My book To Become A Dragon is stuck. I’ve finished about 20,000 words, but I don’t see how I will go much further than 30,000. I may have to sell it on Amazon as a short novel or a Novella. My experience with the Moon novel might make things easier. I have learned that nothing eats up words faster than characters talking to each other. I may have to go back and give it the Heinlein treatment of moving the plot along without sentences that tell what characters did, and instead have characters propel their own action through their own words and feelings.

I’m up to 35,000 words in my novel. I have been doing between 1,000 and 1,500 words a night.

I am rapidly approaching what may be the end, but I need the novel to be more than 60,000 words, preferably as much as 100,000 words.

Tonight I am going back to the beginning and add a little meat to the first few chapters. Originally, I was writing them like short stories. Short stories are terse, getting to the point quickly. In novels, you have to spend more words to set the scene, flesh out the characters, and include lots of conversation.

I am not sure that I’ll get to 60,000. If not, I’ll self-publish, but I’d like to get this out through a real publishing house.

I think that I may take a little time from Novel writing to work on a program.

Ward had an idea and wanted me to work on it. I am very tempted to try. The program would automatically direct missing images to the correct one. Images are lost when people change web hosts or reinstall WordPress. The link to an image points to the wrong location. This has happened to me a number of times.

A WordPress plugin is not a good solution because the html link is outside of WordPress’s purview. It would have to be standalone. That is not to say that I could not make a plugin to configure the program and run some of the functionality.

Ward and I kicked around some ideas for making it work. I think it is quite possible, and I could make a little money on it. If Ward never did any work, then I will see what I can do.

Currently, I am a copy and paste sort of programmer. My mind is not so clear that I can just put my head down and code. I think that’s OK. I will not be trying to do anything extraordinary. I think, though, that it will be novel enough to be useful.

I found another issue with web hosting. When I reinstalled Apache and PHP, I did not tell them to automatically start up. As a result the websites did not work. I fixed it. Adding this entry is one of the tests that I am making.

I do not have any WordPress sites left. All my websites are just simple web pages linked together to make a website. This is very 1990s, but I feel quite comfortable with it.

This website is the last website that I have that is presented using PHP, and I want to get rid of that and just do my own “Roll Your Own” thing. I have thought about going back to Blogger, or one of the other blog sites, but I don’t know how I would export the data, easily.

When I restored my web server installation, I lost a couple of websites. Ward called me up to tell me.

I had to restore one of the sites from the Wayback Machine, which is a website archiver. The site used Wordpress, but the pages that I got were flat webpages, which is fine with me. I used a scraper that runs under Ruby, which I have never used. I installed it and it worked just fine. There was only one screwy entry, and I think that was from the Wayback Machine and the way it stores the websites.

So I had to spend New Year’s morning messing with stuff that I only half remember.