Timothy's Thoughts

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...