Timothy's Thoughts

I was in Atlanta on Thursday, waiting for a flight back to Fort Worth. I was standing, watching out the window at gate D-4 as a plane prepared for departure. Apparently, the windows were dirty or something because, while I watched, one of the pilots opened the left cockpit window and climbed partially out of the Boeing 737. In his hand he held a one liter bottle of Dasani water, which he poured on the windshield. They used the wipers to wipe it off before he poured more of it on. He eventually emptied the whole bottle. I assume they were able to get the window clean. The next time you get on a plane, you can feel safe because the pilots have cleaned there windshield with bottled water.

I just got back from the annual meeting of the Baptist Missionary Association of America (BMA). I went as a messenger from my church and I am also the Secretary/Treasurer for the Baptist Music Fellowship. Overall, the meeting was very harmonious. There was disagreement, but no one was disagreeable. When the BMA meets each year, it brings together many churches that agree on doctrine, but have different opinions on many other things, such as worship styles and preferences of Bible translations. It is good to see that these people can work together to accomplish a greater good.

Valerie Anne Faulkner has posted a review of Searching for Mom . The lead-in is interesting, though I had the sound of Ron Howard singing The Wells Fargo Wagon running through my head after reading her comments about the UPS truck. The review is a the bottom of the post.

In the current system, just before a book's release date, an author or a publisher will send out review copies of a book, hoping to generate buzz. They want the book to sell well, from day one. Bloggers across the Internet post a review on their site and their readers, the author hopes, will go out and buy the book. The problem that I see with this is that people who read don't time their purchases around when a publisher releases a book. A few authors may have fans anxiously waiting for the next release, but most authors don't. People who read a lot may go ahead and purchase the book, knowing they will get to it eventually, but many won't buy a book until they are ready to read it. That may be weeks, months or years after the release date. I see so many reviews that I mostly ignore them. I happened to scroll through the reviews at novelreviews.blogspot.com. Most of what I saw didn't interest me, but I noticed a review of My Heart Remembers, from fifteen day...

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...