Timothy's Thoughts

H undreds of times I’ve heard authors say, “I’ve got a good book, but I can’t get an agent to read it.” Or someone will say, “I know my book is better than a lot of the books in the stores, but no one wants it.” My first thought is that the author doesn’t have as good of a book as he thinks he does. I’ve read a few of these books and I know that’s the case, but let’s suppose that it isn’t. Let’s suppose that it is your book. You’ve seen sub-quality books too, but your book isn’t one of them. Still, agents and publishers aren’t interested. Why? As much as we would like to think that we can improve the quality of our writing to the point that people will be interested in our book, that isn’t the case. Once your writing reaches the point that it is “good enough” there isn’t much that improving your writing skill will do for you. There are thousands of authors just like you and me; their writing is good enough for publication. So what’s missing and why is it that authors with less writin...

I ’ve heard of people downloading free books and then leaving low star reviews because they were angry because they turned out to be Christian books. But I’ve also heard that similar things have happened to books in other genres after readers found out they were not what they were expecting. One idea is that books should be clearly labeled as Christian. I’m not sure that would help, since most Christian books are already labeled as Christian. It seems to me that readers are grabbing up free books as quickly as they can get them and they don’t bother to look at what they are until they already have them on their Kindle. I wonder if maybe the solution isn’t in adding even more labeling but in providing a better means for people to voice their frustration. The only reason we authors find it upsetting when they leave low star reviews is because it makes our book look bad when it is really just a case where someone didn’t like the subject. I’m not sure how many people pay attention to the...

I heard an interesting claim the other day. Dinosaurs are mentioned in the Bible and in other historical texts, but rather than using the term dinosaur , these texts use the word dragon . The claim does not seem to be without basis, since the word dinosaur wasn’t even coined until after the first translations of the Bible into English were complete. And we know that when Satan spoke to Eve, he appeared in the form of a serpent with legs. There is opposition to this idea that dinosaurs and dragons are one and the same. Largely, this could be attributed to what we think we know about them. Dinosaurs are creatures that supposedly died out millions of years ago. Dragons are mythical creatures that breathe fire, work magic, and fly. But let’s suppose we could put a dinosaur and a dragon side by side. Let’s also suppose we get rid of the fire breathing and the magic. Now, they begin to look very similar. Both are reptiles. Both can grow to great sizes, though most dinosaurs were quite sm...

T oday, I want to take one more look at Tate Publishing and Enterprises LLC. In case you missed Tuesday’s post, Tate Publishing is a subsidy press that focuses on unpublished authors. They charge a $3,990 publicist setup fee, but they do appear to have sufficient staff to justify their claim that they have allocated $27,000 for each book. Today, I want to look less at promises and more at results. In the interest of showing rather than telling, take a look at the video below: One of the services that Tate Publishing provides is that they create fifteen second spots like the one above and run them on cable networks. They promise 80,000 impressions. Or to state it another way, they promise that 80,000 people will see that commercial. Someone from Tate Publishing is welcome to correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe they charge an additional fee for these commercials. The way I would expect this to play out is that each commercial will air one time with about 80,000 people watching. T...

Y ou don’t really think about the power of words unto you consider how the meaning of one word can influence our understanding of big important concepts. Let’s look at the word church . This word is interesting because we throw it around so loosely and most people don’t give much thought to what it means or where it comes from. We go to church . We meet in a church . We are members of a church . Three different sentences and the word has three different meanings, but there are more than three. When we consider that the Bible used the word church many times, we might start to realize that our whole concept of what a church is may be very different based on which definition we use. If you say, “I went to church on Sunday,” you probably mean that you went to a worship service of some sort. There’s nothing particularly wrong with using church in that way, since it gets the point across. The problem is that if we use that definition when we reader where Jesus says, “Upon this rock I wil...

O n more than one occasion, I’ve been asked to give an opinion of Tate Publishing (legally, Tate Publishing and Enterprises, LLC). When I was originally asked, I had very little basis to form an opinion, other than from what I could find online and that left a bad taste in my mouth. According to their website, Tate Publishing claims to be a traditional publisher. This is interesting because authors who have used them mention a $4,000 fee. By definition, that fee makes them a subsidy press rather than a traditional publisher. I don’t like it when companies hide stuff. I began to understand them a little better when I had the opportunity to look at the contract they ask their authors to sign. The $4,000 fee is actually a $3,990 fee that they classify as a publicist setup fee. Essentially, they require their authors to have a professional publicist. If they don’t, Tate Publishing will charge them $3,990 to use one of theirs. They claim that the publicist is valued at $20,000 per year, b...

I ’ve read that 53% of the world lives on less than $2 a day. In the USA, poverty is defined as a family of four with an annual income of less than $22,350 or $10,890 for an individual. That works out to be $30 a day for an individual. That is about 15 times what most people in the world are living on. Only 15% of Americans fall below that line. It is no wonder that so much of the world sees us a rich. It also explains why so many people come to America in order to work and send money back home to their families. Imagine if there were a place where you could go and even the lowest paying jobs would earn you $150,000 a year. If you were struggling here, would it not be attractive to leave your family for a while to earn some money to pay off your debts? That is how much of the world looks at us. But what does it really mean? The thing is, though we are rich, $2 in the USA doesn’t go as far as it does in some parts of the world. In areas where they are living on $2 a day, you can hire ...

I ’m concerned. I look around and I see a decline in good male role models. I don’t just mean in the world. I don’t expect the world to provide much in the way of role models. The world is so confused that they don’t know which way is up; you can’t expect them to know how men ought to act. No, my concern is male role models among the saints. We still have a few good male role models, but I’m concerned about some of the things I’m seeing. One thing I’m concerned about is men going to church because their wives want them to go to church. There’s nothing wrong with these men going to church, but their role is messed up. In everything the Bible has to say about the relationship between men and women, it makes it very clear that the men are to lead. Ideally, it should be the case that a family gets up on Sunday morning and they know they are going to go to church because that’s what they always do on Sunday. But let’s suppose that isn’t the case. It should be the man who turns to his wife...

I thought I'd given up on book videos, but then I came up with this one. The main reason I put this video together is because some of the examples in Extending Art of Illusion can't be fully appreciated without seeing them in action. I had a lot of fun developing the Tracker plugin. I spent more time than I care to admit just setting up trackers and moving a sphere around the scene with my mouse so that I could watch the pointers follow it through the scene. You can see some of that in this video.

B y now, you’ve probably heard of SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). On January 18, 2012, several of the popular websites including Wikipedia and Google protested the act, bringing it into the public awareness. But you may have also noticed that the news organizations who were reported about the event, such as CBS and CNN, included statements in their reports saying that their parent companies were in support of SOPA. So what’s going on here? We know that the news organizations are liberal, so is this just a liberal versus conservative thing? No, I don’t think so. This is about money. What else would it be about? The divide between those who support SOPA and those who oppose it is generally the same line that exists between those who make money by creating content and those who make money by using content. The goal of SOPA is to shut down websites that are using pirated information. In concept, if a copyright owner finds a website that is using his intellectual property without permissio...

W hat is love? Let’s not confuse the issue too much. Let’s focus on agape . The others are fairly clear. The KJV translates it as charity . It gets interesting when we look at 1 Corinthians 13:3. “Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor…and have not charity, it profited me nothing.” It is interesting because we are commanded to have charity. In reference to the love a man has for a woman, it is intentional love. But here, it appears that we can give our goods to the poor and still not have it. Fortunately, Paul defines it for us. “Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” It is still intentional. You have the choice of being long-suffering or not. You have the choice to be kind or not. ...

S ome people make the claim that if God has ever willed the death of an innocent child then he is not worthy of a Christian’s worship. What? Where do they get that? You may not like to hear this, but God kills people. And yes, he has killed babies who, as far as we can tell, never did anything wrong. David’s son with Bathsheba, is just one example. That’s the facts, plain and simple. He willingly let Satan kill Job’s whole family and Job was a just man who offered sacrifice for his children. Innocent in all points of the law. That’s the facts. God kills people and makes no apology for it. If, as they claim, a god like that isn’t worthy of our worship then God is not worthy of our worship. But that’s not what God says. God says that he is worthy of our worship. Are Christians worshiping the wrong God? Or are the people who have made that claim idiots? The thing is, we don’t get to pick and choose. There is one living God, he is what he is, and he demands our worship. We may not li...

Y esterday, I mentioned the omnipotence of God and how it is not open for debate. But though all things are possible with God, that doesn’t mean that he will do all things or that he does not allow us to have freewill. Since all things are possible, one of the “all things” that he can allow is for us to make our own choices about many things, including whether to accept or reject his Son. We know that it isn’t his will that any perish. We know that he could force us to accept his Son. But he doesn’t. Why doesn’t he? I don’t know, but he doesn’t. One of the questions people ask is whether God could create a rock that he could not push. Yes, I’m sure he could, but I don’t think he is going to. What we see instead is an even bigger problem. God created man. God wanted a relationship with us, but he gave us the ability to sin. God cannot have a relationship with sinful beings. That makes it seem like there truly is a rock that God can’t push. So God got creative. Instead of writing us of...

W hat is debatable? Some people seem to think that pretty much anything is debatable. Recently, a literary agent invited me and all of her other acquaintances to get involved in a debate on a client’s blog about whether God is omnipotent. How is that debatable? Jesus declared in Matthew 19:26, “with God all things are possible.” That sounds pretty omnipotent to me. So people who would debate this subject have rejected the Bible and the words of Jesus as the foundation of truth. That is a problem because it is the Bible that tells us what God is like. If all we have to go on is what we see around us, then we would conclude that he is very powerful, but we would have no way of knowing if he is all powerful because we can’t see far enough to know. Our telescopes can’t even see the end of what he has created, so how could we possibly know whether there is something out there that he doesn’t have power over. Simply put, it is not debatable. Paul seemed to think that even less was debatabl...

A critic once wrote, “the hero must triumph over his enemies, as surely as Jack must kill the giant in the nursery tale. If the giant kills Jack, we have missed the whole point of the story.” ( The Times , 13 September 1968) Why is this? Why must the hero triumph? Stories are about encouraging people to understand and to do what is right. When we look at a story like Jack and the Beanstalk, we see a good for nothing character who turns his life around by accomplishing something amazing. That is what we want to encourage men and boys to do. We want them to strive to be the hero. We want them to strive to overcome their imperfections. If the giant had killed Jack, then we wouldn’t be encouraging boys to try but we would be causing them to fear to make the effort. I believe the exception to that is in a call to arms story. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin , the bad guys won. In other words, the giant killed Jack, but what makes it different is that it was clear that the mostly white readership o...

T hough I will never promise to end all of my stories without tragedy, I’m a big fan of happy endings. People like to reach the end of the story and feel glad that things turned out the way they did. We need sad endings too. Books like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold have their place. Part of the reason I know sad endings have their place is because some of the stories in the Bible have sad endings. What could be more sad than a man achieving a great victory in war and then coming home and sacrificing his daughter? We need those to remind us that not everything works out the way we would like. But happy endings give us hope. I am so much a fan of happy endings that I’m convinced that unless an author has something that can only be said through a sad ending, he should plan on a happy ending. Take Uncle Tom’s Cabin for example. It is about a black slave who is trying to make the best of a bad situation. But in the end he dies a terrible death. The ending is somewhat happy because h...

D eborah is an interesting character in the Bible. We don’t actually know much about her, other than she had a lot of spunk. But I’ve got a couple of theories. Actually, they are more like suppositions than theories. One is that the reason she was a judge was because the men weren’t doing their jobs. That’s not to say that she was wrong to do what she did, but Judges is written about a time when the Jews had turned away from God. They weren’t doing what they were supposed to do. They weren’t worshiping God like they should have been. They weren’t following the leaders they were supposed to follow. I suspect there was a man who God had called to be a judge but was not doing his job. That leads me into the next supposition. Deborah was a prophetess because her husband was a prophet, not because she was called to be a prophet. Consider the wife of Isaiah. She was called a prophetess because she was his wife, not because she was getting messages from God. So it could be that Deborah’s hu...

A new year, a new story. Last year, I wrote two books, and published three, but none were novels. This year, I intend to write at least one novel. I found a story in the Bible that I would like to retell in a modern setting. It’s a great story, but I’ve been having trouble figuring out where to begin. The basic outline is there, but I’ve been having trouble figuring out where the main character is coming from. I know what has to happen, but why? The Bible account is a little vague on that point. It states the facts of the situation, but it doesn’t tell us anything about what is going through people’s heads at the time. Besides that, the Bible account takes up only two chapters, with the second chapter saying much of the same thing the first chapter did. Essentially, I have to take three pages of information and expand them into 300 pages. But after struggling with how to begin, I decided not to begin. Instead, I wrote the final chapter first. I began with the final event and detaile...

I n life, it doesn’t matter how you start as much as it does how you finish. You may begin in poverty or in wealth, but the real question is what you do with your life. Endings are so much more important than beginnings. Think about what you see in the Bible. As great as the beginning is, God always had his eye on the end. In the end, he wanted a relationship with us. In the beginning, he gave us the freedom to choose, but without seeing the relationship he wanted to have with us, none of that mattered.

H ave you noticed that nearly every movie that Hollywood produces has a love story? Stratch that. Have you noticed that nearly every movie Hollywood produces has a romance? There are exceptions, but even a real guy's movie, like Die Hard , has a romance. There's a reason for that. I'm sure I'll take some heat from the romance authors out there, but the fact is that romances are easy to write and easy to sell. At least, they're easier to sell than stories without a romantic element. I believe the reason is that we all have this natural desire to hook up with someone and live happily ever after. But desire and reality are often very different. First there is the struggle to find someone. Then there is problem that marriage turns out to be a lot more work than most people imagined. So we like stories that let us imagine that we can storm a tower, kill a bunch of bad guys, rescue the girl, and walk off into the sunset with her. But just because they're easier to s...

I 've been struggling with a story lately. I have a rough outline done but some of the finer points are difficult. The story involves a woman killing someone, but the story isn't about her, it is about another man. The strange thing about this story is that the man she kills needs to be killed, but I need it to be the case that the reader feels that the man the story is about should have been the one to kill this man. I'm also struggling because the story takes place in a modern setting, so it is hard to see this as justice if it doesn't first go through a court of law.

R omance novels make up the bulk of the Christian fiction market. Harlequin’s Love Inspired is pumping out six a month. Then there are suspense novels, many of which are also romances. Harlequin’s Love Inspired Suspense is pumping out four of those a month. And that’s just a portion of what one publisher is putting out. It seems that the theory of Christian publishers is that there is not story that cannot be rewritten as a romance. I’ve been giving this subject some thought ever since Tamela Hancock Murray brought it up on Steve Laube’s blog ( [1] , [2] ). Tamela is a literary agent and a romance novelist, so that should give you some idea of her view on the subject. But the thing I’m really struggling with is the concept of love that we find in Christian romance novels. I’m not going to tell you that they aren’t clean. I’m not going to tell you that they are poorly written. I could give examples, but most are clean enough that pastors’ wives read them and the readers aren’t complai...

T he other day, I was involved in a discussion about providing links to more than just Amazon.com. The claim was that Barnes & Noble checks to see if authors are linking to them or not and they will stop selling the author’s books if they don’t find links to their site. I don’t know if that is true or if it is just an urban legend. It seems to me that Barnes & Noble has better things to do than to pay someone to see how many links there are from the author’s website. Besides which, Barnes & Noble makes money from selling books, not from links. But it’s one of those things that sounds almost believable because Barnes & Noble has a history of refusing to sell some books. But this post isn’t about that. In the discussion, one of the things mentioned was that with so many booksellers out there, having more than one link results in a big long list. I suggested that rather than having a list of links, people could just have their website or blog randomly choose which link t...

H appy New Year. This is the year the world ends, or so say the people who are putting faith in the Mayan calendar. But you may recall, the world was supposed to end last year—twice. But some people think that the world is going to end December 21, 2012, all because of a Mayan calendar. Most people are acting like they believe it will end then, but I do think there are people who are afraid that “it just might be true.” The sad thing is that people are more willing to put their faith in Mayans who are dead than they are in people who are living. They are more willing to put their faith in a piece of ceramic with no evidence to support it than they are in the Bible, which has a preponderance of evidence to show that it is true. Why would you believe a calendar that has no proven claims over a book that has hundreds of proven claims and no disproven claims? That doesn’t make sense to me. One thing I know is that the world is not going to come to an end on December 21, 2012. I cannot ...