Timothy's Thoughts

No matter how hard a writer tries to make a fictional story seem real, some things just have to be fabricated. I’ve been watching Murder She Wrote on DVD. It seems like a very real place with its population of 3,560, but Cabot Cove, Maine does not exist. If it did, it would sit near Portland, Maine, which the show mentions often. Portland, Maine is a very real place. I have a similar situation in some of my books. If you were to take travel times and the names of places I mention, it wouldn’t take you very long to figure out that the heretofore unnamed city is located in the same spot as the real City of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. A bit of irony is that I once read a novel set in Cape Girardeau that had fewer elements of Cape in it than what my books do and yet I chose to leave the name of the city out of the book. One of the problems we face with using real places is that they don’t always fit the story. The setting for my stories is more like the shopkeepers in downtown Cape Girardea...

Some books you read to learn something. Some books you read for enjoyment. Some books you read because you think you should. For me, Desire and Deceit fell into that last category and after reading it, I think it should for everyone. It is not a fun book to read and I knew it wouldn't be when I bought it, but Albert Mohler does an excellent job of covering a very sobering subject, the subject of how the change in how people view sex is causing problems that will not be easy to solve. In Chapter 14, he brought out something that I had never really considered. I had never considered that lesbians might hold such contempt for men that a lesbian couple would be ostrisized for raising a son or that the mother of the child might fear her female sexual partner would move out because the house was no longer female only . Ironically, it is statistically more likely that a lesbian will have a son. As I said, it is not an easy topic, but Albert Mohler address the topic well. He bri...

I love putting dream sequences in novels. A dream removes all the barriers. Even though a novel is fiction, it can’t completely disregard the rules that control our world. A dream sequence allows us to put a character in an unusual or even surreal situation. We can send him flying through the clouds. We can let him hear what his friends are saying about him behind his back. Then he wakes and nothing in what he considers the real world has changed. A dream sequence lets us show the reader some of the character’s fears in a more interesting way than having him talk to himself. If he fears his wife is about to leave, we can have him dream about her leaving. Maybe he is concerned about money, so we have him dream that someone gave him a suitcase full of money but he can’t find it. A dream sequence gives us a way to show the reader what the character is thinking rather than telling them so much. Fiction allows us to make a dream prophetic, but that isn’t always a good thing. Telling the ch...

If you tried to read my synopsis yesterday, you weren't about to because the link didn't work. I made a typing error, but I have now corrected it. You can also get the synopsis from http://www.timothyfish.net/ShortStories/FLD_Synopsis.pdf .

Note: The synopsis this post refers to is at the bottom. The book it refers to is available at http://www.amazon.com/Love-Devil-Timothy-Fish/dp/1439214255/ . The other day Richard Mabry wrote about some knowledge he gained about writing a synopsis in ACFW Report: Writing the Dreaded Synopsis . For me to say anything about writing a synopsis at all is for me to write from a position of ignorance. To tell you the truth, I don’t even know enough about writing a synopsis to understand why it is “dreaded” by authors. There are obvious reasons why an author or a publisher would choose not to put a synopsis on the Internet. A synopsis summarizes the story from beginning to end. It’s that “to end” part that gets them. It may not be wise to give away the end of the story because the reader won’t have to read the book to find out how it ends. Now me, I am the type of person who sees the “based on the novel by” statement on a movie and orders the book from Amazon. I love a story that I want to e...

Yesterday I talked about the royal family as a plot device. We like the royal family because it represents the wealth and power that we would like to have, but simply making the protagonist a member of the royal family doesn’t make things very interesting. It is quite the opposite. The wealth and power that the royal family represents is what we want our protagonist to have at the end of the story. During the story, we want the protagonist to be fighting to gain, regain or keep that position. For that, we need a villain. A villain can come in many different forms, but he should be equal in power to the hero of our story and he must have an edge. The edge that the villain has is usually that he has no qualms about doing some things that the hero will not do. In a western, the hero and villain may be equally skilled with a gun, but the hero won’t shoot a man in the back while the villain will. In fantasy, a sorcerer may do battle with a king. They are equals because the king has an army...

A favorite character in literature is the king or the royal family. In the United States, we have a democracy and we can explain why it is the best form of government when the leaders make mistakes. Great Britain has a monarchy, but they learned from their mistakes and the queen has very little real power. Even so, what girl is there who has not dreamed of growing up to be a princess or marrying a prince? In the fantasy genre, authors write stories with kings and queens. You don’t see many books where the protagonist is fighting for democracy. A book like that won’t sell. Sure, we get out on Independence Day and celebrate our freedom and I don’t know of anyone who wants one family to rule our country from now owe. We have a hard enough time putting up with a President for eight years, but there is something about the royal family that triggers the imagination. The royal family is the symbol for ultimate power, ultimate wealth and ultimate luxury. Reaching the White House is a more real...

All art forms have similarities and artists in one art form can learn from artists in another. In the visual art forms, there is a phrase that is used, “push the colors.” It can mean different things, but if often implies boosting the saturation of the colors in an image to make it more vibrant. The colors in an image that might have been dull and gray will pop, making the image look clean and fresh. Pushing the colors can help the artist highlight his vision, but if we push up the saturation too much, the image will appear surreal. In writing fiction, there are ways to “push the colors” as well. Because it is fiction, we don’t have to worry as much about overdoing it as we might if we are writing non-fiction. One thing we can do is to deepen the contrast between good and evil. In real life, people are neither totally good or totally bad. We tend to sit in this mush of mediocrity. We might have a story in which a CEO is laying off employees. Rather can making it because sales are down...

I learned yesterday that I’m not a Christian. I know someone who reads this is probably thinking, “I can tell you how to take care of that.” You may be thinking instead, “I wish I knew how to tell him to take care of that.” In that case, I suggest you read my novel How to Become a Bible Character . It will tell you how you can win me to the Lord. Okay, enough silliness aside. Yesterday, I read Chapter 7: Our Standards of Thomas Nelson’s company manual. I pretty much agree with what it says. It mentions the type of people they want writing for them. Communicators who profess a personal faith in Jesus Christ. Communicators who embrace the central truths of historic Christianity. Communicators who seek to live according to the standards of biblical morality. To each of these, I could raise my hand and say, “Yes Sir, that’s me!” Then I took a closer look at number two. “Such ancient documents as the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are simply convenient summaries of these truths and nearly all...

I suppose it is natural, but when I start on a writing project, I am hesitant to tell anyone about it. When you have a great concept, you don’t want someone to copy it and beat you to the punch. That is somewhat silly on my part because good writers are perfectly capable of coming up with their own ideas. Even if one did take the idea, it is unlikely that their vision for it would be anything like mine. Nevertheless, with me nearing the end of my work in progress, it is easier for me to talk about it. Imagine this, an English teacher lives out the life of Hosea. As you should recall, Hosea married Gomer. She may have been a prostitute. At the very least, she appears to have been the child of a prostitute. She had two children by Hosea and one we aren’t real sure whether it was his or not since the child was named “Not My People,” but Hosea claimed the child as his own by naming him. For whatever reason, Gomer leaves Hosea for other men. Even then, Hosea provides for her and tries ...

If you are like me, you commonly switch words like were and where , there and they’re , envelop and envelope . It would be nice if the grammar checker would find all of these mistakes, but it sometimes leaves much to be desired. I won’t tell you about all of my mistakes, since I don’t want you going through my work looking for them, but I will say that I have made quite a few. With some of these mistakes, such as using the word puck instead of puke in my current work in progress, it is nearly impossible to find the mistake unless you just happen to notice it. I don’t know how many times I looked at the word puck and read it as puke . For some reason, I looked at the word this last time through and realized I had used the wrong word. One of the most effective methods I have found for eliminating word usage errors is to use the find and replace feature. I will search for every instance of a word in the document and verify that the correct word is used. If it is not, I will repl...

Yesterday I commented that Thomas Nelson wasn’t listening. The problem, as I saw it, was that though they had plenty of contact information listed on their website, they didn’t have anything that indicated that I could inform them of a problem I found on their site. Let’s not focus on Thomas Nelson. Let’s bring it back to the topic of Church Website Design . When users look at your website, do they receive enough feedback to tell them how to contact the appropriate person? Churches are often compartmentalized by various ministries. The different ministries may not be aware of what other ministries are doing. Even the pastor may be unaware of what some ministries are doing on a daily basis. Website visitors are often aware of this, so if they send a inquiry they want it to go to the right person the first time rather than having it passed from person to person or deleted. A good place to start is to include contact information for each of the individual ministry leaders. We could al...

Inside burning buildings, Captain Caleb Holt lives by the firefighter's adage: Never leave yoru partner. Yet at home, in the cooling embers of his marriage, he lives by his own rules. Growing up, his wife Catherine always dreamed of marrying ... [emphesis added] What’s wrong with the statement above? I copied this statement from Thomas Nelson’s website. Now my thought was that a publisher employees enough editors that they ought to be able to spell the word your correctly on their website, but people make mistakes. That isn’t the problem. I figured that since Thomas Nelson is trying to make a good impression about their products they would want to correct the obvious mistakes in the description. They wouldn’t want people thinking the book has the same mistakes in it. Since I noticed the mistake I thought I would contact the webmaster and tell this person about it. It would then be up to Thomas Nelson to decide if they really care enough to correct the description. I looked ...

Should Christians support prayer in public schools? That may seem like a silly question for a Christian to ask. When talking about the state of our society, many Christians point to the public schools and court rulings concerning prayer. Many go on to imply that any Christian that does not see the removal of prayer from schools as an evil thing must be submitting to the world’s influence, rather than that of the Holy Spirit. Why There Was Prayer in the Past When we consider the history of the public school system in America, it is easy to see why public schools had prayer. Prior to the 1840, the schools were primarily church run entities. As is the case with such organizations today, these church run schools were designed to teach doctrine rather than just reading and writing. When public schools were started, it made sense for the teachers to continue teaching the way they had in the past. If they opened with prayer in the morning, it made sense to continue that. If they used the Bi...

Because I have a website, I am able to block many SPAM messages at the server rather than letting them get in my inbox, but even this is a frustration for me because the spammers keep changing e-mail addresses and lately it seems like more than usual are getting through. Many suggest that I need drugs to give me a "hard rod." First off, I'm single and I don't need such a thing. Second, even if I did, I wouldn't be buying something like that from someone who sends out such vulgar e-mail messages. There is no doubt about it, these people are evil and I feel safe in saying that most of the people who send out spam are going to hell. So, we can't convince them to stop sending these messages out of the goodness of there hearts. What we can do is convince them to reduce what they send throught their pocket books. The problem with e-mail is that it is free. Suppose we created a system in which it cost 42 cents to send an e-mail message. Don't you think spammers w...

Someone at Thomas Nelson Publishers is going to read this blog post and I’m not even going to tell them about it. Granted, that is something of a bold statement when you consider how obscure this blog is, but it is true. The Internet has evolved to the point that we can target specific groups of people with accuracy and we can do it without inundating people’s inboxes with SPAM. Obviously, this could have huge marketing potential if we could use it to get our ideas and our products before potential customers while allowing them to think they chose to view the information. How it Works A few days ago, Michael Hyatt posted the article Defending Your Brand Online . In that article, he mentioned things that are necessary to head off damaging comments that appear on the Web. One of the things he suggests is to monitor the conversation . Conventional wisdom tells us to load our websites with keywords related to our products and hope that people are looking for what we are selling. That d...