I've started writing a book. It is a DIY book about how to inspect your own home. It is targeted at the homeowner that wants to do a thorough job of maintaining their home in the best possible condition.
It will discuss the 5 major "systems" of a house; Roof, Foundation, Electrical, Plumbing & Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning. It will explain how to inspect these systems and what to look for as far as potential problems. It will also contain two additional chapters; one on Grounds and Drainage and another on how to work with Contractors (and not get screwed)
I have managed to make pretty good progress and the first drafts are done. I went through it and cleaned up the formatting and obvious errors. Now my wife is proofreading the second draft for me. I plan to distribute it to a few friends for a final run through to check readability and to see if it "speaks" to the target audience.
I will post here when it is ready to publish. I'm thinking of putting it up on one of the sites I already write articles for. The also have the facilities to publish full works and sell them on their site. Maybe I can make a little money by selling it. Hope so, that would be nice.
On another note........
I recently acquired a "speech to text" program called Dragon naturally Speaking 10". I have used an older version in the past, version 6 or 7 I think. This new version blows the old ones away! It is amazingly accurate after minimal training. It almost never misses. It even adds punctuation in the right places automatically. How cool is that? I wish I had it when I was writing this book, It would have gone a lot faster. I'm not a poor typist but this is so much faster.
Later,
Dana
Update:
ReplyDeleteAfter publishing an abbreviated "first draft" of this book online for free and getting 86,000 views in 6 months, I decided there was sufficient interest in the subject matter to warrant a much improved version. This version's working title of: "How to Inspect Your Home" will be available on Amazon's CreateSpace print-on-demand bookstore in the very near future. Look for it.