Timothy's Thoughts

Brandilyn Collins has been writing a series of posts about the rules of writing. In a recent post she discusses the rule Avoid Using “to be” Forms in Narrative . As I worded my comment (for which I probably owe her an apology for being so lengthy) I began to think about the power of “to be” verbs. The Problem With the Forms of Be You probably learned the Be Verbs in English. They are, am , is , are , was , were , been , being and be . We often say that they are weak verbs, but that is inaccurate, as I will show later. What we actually mean is that they appear repetitive, they hinder clarity and they lack action. In sort, when they are used carelessly, they produce writing that is boring, passive and static. Repetition The sun was bright. The air was warm. The day was beautiful. Here we see three sentences and they all have the same verb. There is nothing wrong with any of these sentences, but they lack variety and while the scene is light and airy the repetition drags it down and mak...

Recently, I have been working on a small publishing project. The book is the History of the Cane Creek District Association by D. F. Magruder. As I perused the manuscript, I noticed in the minutes of one of the meetings that they collected about $20 for associational expenses. As I read further I noticed that the messengers voted to spend $1.50 to buy a record book in which they could keep the minutes of their meetings. I assume that it was one of those hardback record books with lines on the pages. In relative terms, a $1.50 notebook would have been a fairly significant purchase for that time period. It was about 8% of the total budget. Even so, the total cost of a notebook appears to have been about the same as it is today. The person the association authorized to purchase the book also served as the clerk. He was also authorized to print the minutes. By all indications, they expected him to be able to do it with less than $20. Today, that same association spends hundreds of dollars...

At first, I didn't do a complete outline of my current work in progress (WIP), but I read Blake Snyder's Save the Cat! on Friday and I was anxious to see how well my WIP would fit within his structure. By the time I was done, I had the whole thing outlined and I even came up with forty scenes. I suspect that I will be making some changes along the way, but it is a good starting point. I like the outline, but some of what I wrote may not fit. My WIP is a Dude With a Problem story. The problem is that the man's wife left him and the kids for someone else. One of the things I noticed after reading Save the Cat! was that I have a stranger feeding my protagonist information rather than having him go out and find it. I had noticed that before, but I justified it by saying that it was the only way the protagonist could get the information. That may be true, but if I can find a way around that then I will. Snyder suggests giving the theme of the story early on. I can’t h...

Word Music and Lillenas Music use a different scale to define the different difficulty levels of their music for solo piano. Word uses the terms Easy, Intermediate, Medium Advanced and Advanced. Lillenas uses the terms Easy, Moderately Easy, Moderate, Moderately Advanced and Advanced. My best guess is that Lillenas’ Moderate would be split between Word’s Intermediate and Medium Advanced, but most of it would fall within the Intermediate category. I was looking at their websites the other day and I was attempting to determine the difference between Word’s Medium Advanced and Lillenas’ Moderately Advanced. I clicked on one book that Lillenas has and below the product information was one of these statements that say something like “If you like this then you might like this.” I followed the link to another book by the same arranger. For this product , there were audio files to listen to. I clicked on one and thought “that’s pretty, but it’s a little more difficult than I was expecti...

I read several blogs. By reading blogs you can find some very interesting information. At times, you can find too much information. Blogs are a very public forum and yet many blog owners include information that would be better suited for discussions with their close friends and family. There are times, after reading a blog post, that I think I really didn't want to know that much about you . Unfortunately, by the time we realize that we don't want to read it, it is too late. My personal opinion is that blog owners need to be more considerate of the people who might stumble across their website.

Here’s something that caught my eye. Sharon Hinck has a special kit for book clubs . For the price of eight books ($119), you can get eight books, a literary guide, a discussion guide, a party planner, leader checklist, a DVD from Sharon Hinck, and graphics for invitations, posters, and evites. I would have to see the DVD before I would pass judgment on it, but it appears to be something that book clubs might find useful. If they are planning on buying eight copies of the book anyway, then they really don’t have anything to lose.

A few years ago, there was a science fiction series on television called Firefly. It was highly entertaining, but the network quickly canceled it. It wasn’t perfect, but I won’t go into all of that. I do want to mention one episode, Jaynestown. The B plot of this episode has the characters River and Shepherd Book back on the ship. Shepherd is a preacher. River is a super smart woman who has been driven to near insanity by the government. She gets a hold of Shepherd’s Bible and decides that she is going to fix it. She starts tearing out pages as she goes because she finds things that she believes are incorrect, things like creation and the ark protecting the animals from the great flood. Shepherd tells her that the Bible doesn’t have to make sense because it is really just about believing in something. Later, she tells him that she is sorry that she tore the pages out of his symbol and she wants to put them back. Obviously, Shepherd is not a good preacher. Rather than showing ...