Timothy's Thoughts

I was looking at future releases and I came across Watch Over Me by Christa Parrish and I thought, that sounds formiliar , but I knew I hadn’t seen it before. So I went back and I found Cry in the Night by Colleen Coble. I have read neither book, but when you read the descriptions you see similarities between both books. The premise is identical. A rescue worker takes in an abandoned baby when the parents can’t be found. It is only upon closer inspection that we find that the problems are different. What that tells me is that it is the premise that makes a story unique, not the problems the characters face. If we nobodies hope to get any notice, it isn’t going to be through presenting manuscripts with similar premises, but different problems. The development of the premise is the place where we can achieve the greatest gains in developing a good story.

W e call it the advance and it can range from $1 all the way into millions of dollars. Many are in the thousands of dollars range. With all the other changes that are taking place in the publishing industry, publishers are messing around with the advance as well. Not that long ago, Chip MacGregor was complaining about Random House wanting to pay the advance a year after the book releases Previously, I have said I don’t like the concept of the advance because it puts the author in a position of owing the publisher. If the book doesn’t earn out, the author will be unable to repay the debt. That is if you view the advance as something the publisher pays the author in order for the author to live while completing the work. We could also look at the advance more like an earnest payment. By paying an advance , the publisher is promising to publish the book, but if they don’t the author walks away with the earnest money, much like when an offer is made on a house people ...

Three sentences: The old tractor climbed the hill and disappeared down the other side. I saw ol’ Bob on that old tractor of his, just as he was going over the hill at the Abernathy place. Didn’t you see it too, when that tractor went over the hill? We talk a lot about Point of View (POV). From a technical standpoint, all three sentences have a different POV. The first sentence is Third Person POV. The second sentence is First Person POV. The third sentence is Second Person POV. But let’s ignore the technical meaning of Point of View and consider the scene and the camera angle . In each case, it wouldn’t be hard for us to imagine that the speaker stood on a hill over looking a valley, looked out and saw Bob driving his tractor over a hill on the other side. Neither the scene nor the camera angle have changed and yet the three sentences sound completely different. Lest we think Point of View is the only thing at work here, let’s add two more first person sentences: When I saw Bob ...

A few weeks ago, Jim Thomason of Thomas Nelson blogged about On-Line Streamlining , saying he would shut down his Facebook (FB) and Twitter accounts. Don’t ask me why I took so long to write about this, but the essence of his post was that he is stopping these activities because they are time consuming, take away from personal interests, most of the people on FB are an accident of geography and besides, they can follow him on his blog. His last reason is “Most days, my life’s just not that interesting to me, much less to other people.” Yeah, mine neither. For me, many of the people on FB are family members and church members. There are also those accidents of geography that I haven’t seen in several years. The rest are people somehow related to my writing and a few that just happened to show up. Jim is right; every one of these people could follow me on my blog. Some of them do. But here’s the thing. It isn’t about them keeping up with me. It’s about me keeping up with them. Many of m...

I got back home from the BMAA meeting yesterday at about 9:30 PM. To say the meeting was great doesn't give it justice. If you would like to read my thoughts about the meeting, I have posted them at http://www.fortworthbaptistchurch.org/Articles/Article.asp?ID=318 .

I don’t know if anyone has done a study of how long a blog post should be, but for me, 250 words is a good number to remember and no more than 500. At some point I signed up for the RSS feed for Randy Alcorn’s blog. He often has these 700 word monstrocities. I don’t even bother to scan his text as I scoll through it. I aught to dump the RSS feed, but I keep thinking he’ll say something that interests me. When people talk about this subject, they often say things like, people don’t have the attention span they once had . I don’t believe the evidence bears out that assumption. There are gamers who will spend days, nearly uninterupted, trying to complete all levels of a computer game. Huge attention span! I mean huge! More than once, I have read through more than 100 pages of an online PDF document because I believed it would help me with my job. The problem isn’t that people have shorter attention spans. The problem content and format . Creating...

I 'm still out of pocket and I'm continuing this week's series on blogging. One of the things Michael Hyatt said in his presentation is that openness and transparency builds trust. I want to take that in a different direction than he did. A few weeks ago, I read a blog, made a few comments about some things I didn’t think the blogger had considered when she crafted her blog and moved on. I meant no harm by the words, but the blogger didn’t see it that way and became upset. I hoped to smooth the ruffled feathers, but I didn’t want to add insult to injury by posting another comment to the blog post. I checked her profile. I checked her web site. I couldn’t find a way to contact her anywhere. Many people on the web are afraid of letting people know enough about them to even send an e-mail message saying, “sorry about the misunderstanding.” In the comments of many blogs we see Anonymous comments and profile photos of dogs, inanimate objects and children. ...