Timothy's Thoughts

L et me tell you about my latest book. I’m excited about it. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited about any book that I’ve written. It took me some time to settle on a title, but once I did, I don’t think there could be a better title for this book. And the cover—I’m excited about that too. I love the bold colors; there are no pastels here. Thomas Nelson, Zondervan, Abingdon and everyone else take note; this is how I think you should be doing covers. But more than the colors, what I excites me about this cover is that no matter what you do with it, the title is readable. Scale it down to the size of a postage stamp if you like. Convert it to grayscale or even black and white. Whatever you do to it, it still looks great. Okay, so I don’t think anyone is going to buy the book just to look at it; let’s talk about the important stuff, the story. As our story begins, we find a mother and daughter who are on their way to Fort Worth, but what we quickly discover is that the wo...

I f the number of comments is any indication; the most controversial topic in writing is the use of the F-bomb. On a blog I follow, one of the writers brought up that topic and there were several times the comments they usually get. Though I don’t think we can completely divorce the word from the pornographic connotations, I think the reason many writers feel comfortable using it is because much of its usage in common language is to express frustration upon the realization that something isn’t going the way one might hope. I choose not to use the F-bomb and a number of other offensive words in my writing. Some authors have the idea that we use it because it adds realism to our dialog. Personally, I think that’s utter nonsense. The author who writes truly realistic dialog writes boring dialog. Compare reading trial transcripts with reading a novel about a trial and you’ll see that they are far different. One is completely realistic while the other communicates the information and a way...