How a building a house is different than writing a book

I'm attempting to compare two skills which probably nobody in their right mind would compare.

I've had the privilege of being my own general contractor for building this house, and I want to compare that to working on a book, something I'm more familiar with.

Each requires commitment and creativity.

Either job takes about a year from concept to reality but involve a few months of fairly intense effort.

But how are they different?

Let's see...

When you leave a few holes in your plot, there's no worry about a leaking roof sometime later.

Crows don't watch you when you are writing a book.

When it's pouring rain, you can still work on a book (provided your computer is indoors, you doorknob)

There's nothing dangerous about using your word processor carelessly.

Unlike your friendly carpenter, your editor would get pretty ticked if you called them for advice several times a week.

You don't need protective clothing to write a book. In fact you don't need to get dressed at all.

The building inspector doesn't care if he's seen the same design a few times before - he'll accept it anyway.

If your concrete truck is coming that morning, you can't stop and go for a coffee.

You welcome all kinds of help when you're building a house.

Everyone sees the job you did today, and yesterday and the day before that - good or not.

In house building, you can't redo the beginning parts a few more times to get it right. They're probably covered with drywall.

Unlike an editor, when you call a sub-contractor you don't have to wait a few months to hear back from them.

At no point are you obliged to climb a ladder when working on a book.

There's usually not enough trash left over for a decent garbage fire when you're writing a book.

The coffee truck doesn't come around to your house at 10:30 when you're writing.

You get to choose the outside colour and design when you build a house. With a book you're lucky if the cover has something to do with the plot.

Where writing is painful, so is hitting your thumb with a hammer - for the second time that day.

Your best friends are the people who drop by when there's something heavy to lift.

With a book you need to be creative, but with a house, the fact that joists line up properly is more important than creativity.

You can work on your book anytime you don't have to wait for daylight. You can even take your book (in your laptop) to Tim Horton's and work in there. Try doing some construction work in Timmy's sometime.

Post a few more ideas for me.

So here's the house now.

This is the way the house looks on the outside as of a few weeks ago. Shirley is dressed in the work clothes she is looking forward to burning in the near future. The winter has been excellent for building, with hardly any missed days at all. It was also excellent for us accommodation-wise, since we were able to stay in the 'Mallard' (house trailer on site) until late November and then had the use of our friend's Tony and Linda's studio - a separate little chalet with a great view of the lake, for the rest of the time until we moved in.

Call it more research...

Greetings! I'm back blogging after seven months building a new house. I could call it research, but I'm not sure yet how or when I could write about this project, since we're still in the middle of it. Every day there is something new like hanging doors (and making sure they close in the right direction so I don't have to remove the door, chisel out different places for the hinges and rehang it - don't ask) Suffice to say some day I'll work it into a story line.

Our house is built of ICF (Integrated Concrete Forms) which I've been studying for some time as a great and well-insulated way to build a house. I posted some pictures on the blog when I went to Thompson

in 2010.

Our house sold in May of last year and Shirley and I began this next adventure soon after. Our first job together was wading through the exquisitely slimy muck after the excavation and laying out the corner posts for the footings-guys to follow.

The fact that they moved the entire rectangle a metre or so to the southeast has nothing to do with anything. I'm sure

Since that beginning the work has been steady, with hired tradesmen, friends, and family putting in long hours with us in completing this project.

.

Writing?

I barely had 20 minutes a week to answer emails from our dial-up connection in the trailer we lived in on the building site. So the next great teen novel didn't get written, or finished. Or started for that matter.

Here's a couple of photos.

The upper one is this fall, with a view of our 'back forty' and the side of the house.

The next photo is our place back in late August. Airy isn't it?

The foam walls have concrete poured into in them and in this photo the upstairs walls have just been finished.

Maybe next posting I'll show the finished house.

New Book on Chilean Mine Rescue

The book 33 Men by Jonathan Franklin was just released in March and is an interesting read. Last year, as the world watched daily, 33 men were, located, communicated with and eventually rescued in a sophisticated mine-rescue operation at a remote mine site in Chile.

On August 5th of 2010 thirty three miners found themselves on the wrong side of a mine collapse in the lower levels of a large and poorly maintained copper mine. Their route was blocked by a freighter sized collapse of broken rock. Though the miners had heavy machinery, fuel, a supply of explosives and drills it would still have been impossible for them to dig themselves out. They had no alternate escape route since the ventilation shafts never had escape ladders installed as required by Chilean law. The initial collapse severed communication lines and nobody on surface had any way of knowing if any of the thirty three men were dead or alive. Any trapped men would be as deep underground as the tallest skyscraper is tall. Those alive would be in a labyrinth of tunnels averaging 90 degrees heat and 90% humidity. The families of the miners understood death was all but a certainty.

Miraculously, after seventeen days of exploratory drilling to reach the tiny target of one of the tunnels or work stations, one drill found its mark. Word was sent to surface by a note tied to the drill bit - 'Los 33' were all together and safe.

As Franklin describes, the rescue succeeded because the newly elected President of Chile, Sebastien Pinera, decided to have his government intervene and take over the rescue, regardless of the cost*. Despite Chile's pride as a leader in mine technology and Chile having a wealth of mining experience, experts from around the world were called into a highly-scripted, photo-op-filled, spectacle orchestrated by Pinera. He had political hay to make with this dramatic rescue, but clearly without his efforts the men would have died. The mining company responsible was hopelessly in debt and unable to act.

Franklin's book is a good read. He had access to behind the scenes efforts on surface as drillers, medical staff, psychologists and technicians maintained contact and provided food and water, clothing and medicines, letters and magazines through a 3.5 inch drill hole to the men below. Unfortunately the book was rushed to the presses a few weeks before the blue pencil had done its final work. Many phrases and facts are repeated unnecessarily and there is a disorder to the writing. Don't expect well-organized chapters. It's more like tossed-salad.

Franklin also should have spent his weeks on surface talking to miners about the environment of a hard rock mine, or better yet, actually visiting one at work. Many misleading details could have been corrected. Anyone who has spent a day (or less) underground would recognize 'scaling' as a common job which must be performed regularly, not the rare and unusual task Franklin attempts to describe, and any miner could tell that the mesh screening bolted to the roof is, in fact, the proper way to do things. Franklin fails to describe the simplest heavy equipment, such as mine trucks or scoop-trams. A glance at a photo from a mine equipment brochure would have given him a 'Oh, so that's what they were describing...' moment. But I'm sure he was getting around to it.

It won't win a Pulitzer, but this book well describes how tragic events unroll by the minute. We get a glance at the hordes of media in the background as video links provide live footage of sweaty men trapped impossible distances below surface. We learn how the men were fed and clothed, doctored and given water and a hundred other things through a 3.5 inch pipe. We cringe at the overzealous efforts of medical and psychology zealots who overwhelm the fit but bored miners with exercises and intrusions when they simply want to go home.

The happy ending is the returning of Los 33 to their various loved ones; wives, lovers, (and wives & lovers who have just met) children, siblings, parents and fellow miners. Many of the specialty drilling rigs and equipment loans never charged for their work, and firms like UPS shipped tonnes of hardware for free.

It is a great feel-good read because it actually happened this way.

* His decision is a contrast to the tragedy of the Russian submarine Kursk, some years before, when crewmen died slowly and needlessly in a sunken nuclear sub, despite the fact that a foreign submarine rescue ship and submersible escape vehicle was ready willing and able to help, but was not requested by President Putin.

Reviewing Pure Spring by Brian Doyle

Author Brian Doyle has been published since 1978 and has won many awards over the years. Reading Pure Spring, a teen book published in 2007, I can easily see why. This author does it all. He strings along a good story in a fast and readable way. He introduces history and social situations from the 1950's in a 'painless' way for the modern reader. His book reads easily for those who struggle with reading, while maintaining a fascinating plot line for the mature reader. Doyle gives just enough hints of a past accident which takes the life of the main character's parents without giving away too much. Other traumas which shape the boys life and result in his sharing living space with "Granpa Rip" trickle out of the pages steadily. The character Martin is believable, appealing and has admirable moral qualities without this being overdone. One particularly seedy character is well-drawn and his lewd remarks are never written in the easy way which makes a book 'off-limits' for teachers and librarian recommendations. Racism, anti-communist paranoia and antisemitism is also treated in such a way as to respect the reader's ability to discern and judge for him/herself.

Did I say I like his style?

Superb.

BTW Happy Birthday. Follow the link:

http://www.mediafire.com/?8qd8ccll3wlz4t7

Review of 'Victim Rights', by Nora McClintock

In my ongoing quest to catch up on Canadian Y.A. authors I just got Victim Rights by Norah McClintock from the library. I have heard Norah speak about mystery writing at a conference and she was full of good information. *

Anyway, back to Victim's Rights. I liked it. Not having read any of her books before I had to keep looking at the cover to see for sure I hadn't accidentally switched books and picked up some male author named Noah McClintock or something. Unlike a lot of writers she can get into the skull of the other gender and make it seem real. Emotions, decisions, thoughts, and reasoning like the opposite sex is more difficult than you might think. Little things give it away, especially when the reader, like me, is watching like a hawk to see if she can pull it off.

But McClintock does the angry young man thing very well. Dooley, the hero, is authentic. Unable to understand some of the more subtle points of emotions and often ready to explode at those things that piss him off, Dooley is a loaded shotgun. The reader is fascinated. Like a moth to a candle Dooley repeatedly approaches situations which anyone with half a brain would know are stupid and dangerous - obviously you need a character like this to move along a mystery plot, but this behavior is also just like a love-sick seventeen year old. The dialogue in this book is great, especially the unspoken thought lines that accompany most of it. The only problem with it, for me, was the swearing. But the difficulty with swearing is replacing it with something equally extreme that sounds like how people really speak.

I'll let you know if I ever figure that one out.

* There is a snobby attitude towards mystery writing. I had one comment on a manuscript of mine which was "...oh. Is it just a mystery? Nothing more earth-shattering? " - insert a little superior smile here- But Norah readily admits to being inspired by Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys - something the writing elitists would never admit to.

Review of Bonhoeffer, Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, by Eric Metaxas

I just finished reading Bonhoeffer, Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, by Eric Metaxas. I couldn't put this big fat (580 pages) book down. My arm is sore! It is very well written, but quirky*.

Read this book! This is a book for adults, WW II buffs, Christians, non-Christians and social scientists.

I'm not sure if anyone of our generation can fully understand how an entire modern nation of educated people can allow a segment of their own society (Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Communists) to be reduced to the status of cattle, and worse. Even if Germans didn't know about the death camps, they saw their neighbours gradually lose their jobs, status, dwellings and savings and get shipped away somewhere, jammed into boxcars. Sitting in comfortable Canada I can't really understand how this can happen, but this book helps me get a bit closer.

Bonhoeffer was an unlikely hero. He was an aristocratic type, born into high German society and educated at the best schools. A gifted student of theology, he could travel and live and work where he liked as a lecturer or pastor and for a while he did, visiting England and the USA as a guest lecturer in Universities there. But soon he began to fight what was happening to Germany at the rise of Hitler. This book shows how Bonhoeffer and some of his associates were actively working against the change in moral thinking in Germany while Hitler's hold on German society was still very shaky. It is amazing to see how the state-supported Lutheran church began to make moral compromises early on in the 1930s. Slowly and with all sorts of clever logic and reasoning, intelligent and well-educated men began to make compromises about previously established rules regarding treatment of your fellow man. These compromises received state sanction. Lack of moral leadership on these basic issues helped the fascists control a whole country. When evil comes gradually, it seems, we are more likely to accept it.

One of Bonhoeffer's contemporaries, Martin Neimöller, wrote the following poem in 1944

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out –

Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out –

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –

Because I was not a Jew

And then they came for me –

And there was no one left to speak for me.”

Bonhoeffer, born to privilege and connected or related to many in the German government, first led a group of Pastors and theologians to publicly dispute the slipping Christian standards of the state-supported Lutheran Church. Later, as Hitler and the National Socialists became more established and didn't self-destruct as they predicted, Bonhoeffer joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler and some of his top henchmen. For several years they plotted and twice used bombs planted with chemical timers to do the deed. The first bomb failed to ignite on Hitler's plane and the second went off but Hitler was mostly uninjured because a massive table leg protected him from the blast. Bonhoeffer's work in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler was discovered and it landed him in prison, and just weeks before the war ended, execution.

* The quirky part of the book is many sentences in the translated material have that strange German word order where they put the modifier on the wrong side of the verb, or the verb at the very end of the sentence. Many sentences read like this one I pulled at random from the middle of the book : "Perhaps the worst thing of all is the military oath which I should have to swear." Read it as if a speaker has German accent and it will make sense to you.

Metaxas is of German descent and speaks the language well. He has written many books in English, but perhaps he was thinking in German when he wrote some of this. I don't know. Just a guess.