Timothy's Thoughts

T he world is coming to an end, people are trying to kill me and my friend’s seventeen year old daughter just ran off with an older man. I have another friend whose drug addict son is in rehab, but she thinks he may have killed someone. Maybe he’s the one who killed my neighbor’s daughter. I heard about this kid who woke up strapped to a chair. Someone was going to kill him and he didn’t know how he got there. It all makes the problems another friend of mine has seem small. She has this job she likes at a women’s shelter, but her husband doesn’t want her working there. He’s threatening to leave her if she doesn’t quit. Sounds bleak, doesn’t it? Fortunately, much of this hasn’t happened yet, but it will. This is the world as seen through the eyes of Christian publishing during the next year. It has made me think about the differences between a dark story and one that isn’t. Dark fiction is short on hope and provides no escape. Mary E. DeMuth’s novel A Slow Burn (Oct. 2009) will be abou...

I magine that a novel is a roadmap that the characters must follow. Before we know anything about the journey, we must know where we’re starting (point A) and where we’re going (point B). If we were taking a trip, we would already know where A is and we would choose B, but a novelist gets to choose both. Now, on a road trip, your starting point tells you nothing about your destination and vise versa. When writing a novel, your selection of one point significantly narrows the possible selection points for the other. A and B are opposites of each other. Consider a typical romance plot. At Point A, we see an un-content, single, self-sufficient, businesswoman who sleeps with a cat on her bed. At point B, we see a woman on the verge of happily ever after with a man who has helped her with her business and the cat sleeps outside. Whatever the status quo was at the beginning of the book gets turned on its head by the end. What about Beauty and the Beast ? We begin with Beauty a member of a l...

L ast week I announced a contest in which the contestants were to modify the title of a novel to create a new title and then write a brief description of a story that goes with the title. The prize for the winner of this contest is a $25 gift certificate from Amazon.com, which the winner can use to purchase anything from books to toys to groceries. I also gave a second chance opportunity to encourage people to tell their friends, but I don't need to repeat the contest rules. So, without further ado, the winner of the contest, for her entry, The Shock , is Cindy. I will have Amazon.com send her prize to the e-mail address she has listed on her profile page.

W e all hate spam and we keep looking for ways to reduce how much reaches our inbox. I filter a lot of it out at the server, but some makes it through anyway, such as those e-mail message that appear to have been sent from my own e-mail address. For those, I have a rule set up that just deletes them, as everyone should. If everyone would delete them without looking at them, spammers would stop wasting their time sending them. One method of controlling spam that has gotten popular among people in the writing community is to list their e-mail address as something like somename [at] adomain [dot] com . The idea is that the web crawlers won’t realize that it is an e-mail address and thus protect the owner from receiving unwanted e-mails. Some people go ahead and create the mailto link, as I have done above, while others leave it out. In either case, all this method only discourages the people you want to e-mail you from doing so. Mangling the e-mail address like this will not keep the addr...

M entor - somebody, usually older and more experienced, who advises and guides a younger, less experienced person ( Encarta Dictionary ). Recently, I’ve been noticing an increase in what I would call a misuse of the work mentor . I first noticed this when I our church was going into John C. Maxwell’s Injoy program (which I now consider to be a huge waste of money). I think he may have backed away from this wording some now, but I saw wording that stated that John C. Maxwell had mentored thousands or millions or whatever it was. My first thought was, Wow! How does he have time? and then came to realize that they were talking about how many people had bought his tapes. In my book, that isn’t mentoring at all. More recently, I’ve noticed people in the publishing industry using the verb mentor as a pseudonym for edit . I was on Rachelle Gardner’s website the other day and saw a list of freelance editors. I was curious to see what they were charging for editing a manuscript. I clicked ...

C an you imagine trying to write a novel with one of these? Then again, with the predictive sentence technology, type the first letter and all you have to do is find the novel already written. And here's the kind of treatment you can expect if you ever sell so many books that people like Michael Hyatt think you're important.

F ollowing the Presidential election of 2000 there were what seemed like endless recounts in the State of Florida as the United States tried to figure out who really had won the election. With both eventual President George W. Bush and then Vice-president Al Gore claiming victory, the news media had nothing better to do than sit around discussing how the nation would accept the man who took office. I remember someone saying that once that man put on the mantle of the presidency people would accept him because appeared presidential. There is a similar principle in writing that we might call the writer’s mantle . Every reader begins with expectations. Suppose a reader believes a writer is humorous, he laughs when the dog dies at the first of the book. He rolls in the floor when the mother dies. He is sixty pages into the book when he realizes it is a serious book. One reader opens a book, expecting it to be good and it is. Another reader opens the same book, expecting it to be bad, and ...