Timothy's Thoughts

D isappointment comes from anticipating things that don’t happen. Events begin to take place and we anticipate what will happen next. A friend calls up, for example, saying that he’s going to be in town for a few days and would like to get together for a few hours. We look forward to that time, thinking about what we’ll do and the fun we’ll have. Then the day comes and we’re ready to go meet him, but we receive a phone call, “Sorry, I can’t make it, but something came up.” It hurts us when things like this happen. Things are rarely the way we imagine they will be. Sometimes they are worse, sometimes they are better, but if we aren’t careful disappointment will cloud our judgment of which is which. Because we are so disappointed that we didn’t get what we wanted, we fail to see that what we got is actually better. For the Christian who trusts in the Lord, we can have confidence that though disappointment may come all things will work out for our good. There are things that we want so mu...

W hat is a story? There are several different ways to look at a story. How we perceive a story helps us to set our goals when writing a story. One way to look at a story is as the actions of the villain as told by the lead . We often think of the story as being the lead’s story, but when we consider how much of the lead’s life we ignore we might question that. However, when we look at it as the villain’s story it begins to make sense. Look at the story of Cinderella for example. Her father is gone. It isn’t clear why. The storyteller may throw some reason in there, but it doesn’t really matter why he is gone and yet that would have been a very important event in Cinderella’s life. The reason we don’t put much emphasis on that event is because it has very little to do with the story we’re telling. Stories are about disturbances in the lead’s life, so that’s why it becomes the villain’s story as told by the lead. If we take all the stuff that villains do to a particular person and bind ...

J anet Reid writes concerning a query that had been sent her, “What would make me think I was wrong is if you mention you're a touring musician. The value of a writer's bio in a query letter is for just these moments. As I'm reading along, and I think, "oh this isn't how that stuff works" and then I see you're actually in that industry, I'd give you the benefit of the doubt.” ( Query 161 ) It’s usually pretty obvious when a writer has been in the industry he is writing about. One the good side, such a writer gets things right. You don’t have unbelievable things happening. On the other side, such a writer puts to much emphasis on things that aren’t important to the story. It is usually hard to read a medical story written by a medical doctor, for instance. The average reader probably doesn’t care about the details of a patient’s treatment and doesn’t care what kind of drug was used. All the reader cares to know is that the doctor either knows what he is...

W hat are the dangers of putting too much information about yourself online? I don’t mean unprotected credit card information and stuff like that; I mean stuff like what you might put on a networking site. I saw a novel the other day that dealt with this topic. Apparently, the victim had been involved with a networking site and the killer found her through that site. Now the victim’s sister is trying to bait the killer through the same site so that she can catch him. I think the risk here is in implying that by not participating in such a site people can protect themselves from would be killers and rapists. The fact is that the online community is just an extension of the public community in which we live. Unless we hide ourselves away like monks, we are putting ourselves at risk no matter what we do. There was a woman in our area who had taken her kids to the park and as she watched them playing a man came up behind her and stabbed her, paralyzing her. While he must have had a motive,...

C onsider this as a followup to my post on booksignings from the other day. I didn't do the video, but it seems realistic.

A song writer did a video to explain a song he had written. It was a product of him losing a friend to death. In the video he was talking as he looked through a notebook he used to write lyrics and he said that after seven years it was still hard to look at what he had written there. He teared up as he spoke and it was easy to see that these tears weren’t fake. It got me to thinking about art in general. He is a singer/songwriter, but there is carry over in all forms of art. The thing I thought about was that as artists, whether we be songwriters, or novelists or painters, our art should be a product of our strongest emotions. There are times when we’re just writing to be writing, maybe to pay the bills or to communicate, but our best writing comes from strong emotion. We should feel so strongly about the subject that we take it personal when someone disagrees with us. When someone asks us about it, we should be able to talk for several minutes, if not hours about the subject.

I keep saying that I’m not going to review any more books unless I really like them. I’m compromising today by reviewing Rooms by James L. Rubart because I mentioned it in a previous post, saying that I intended to read it to see if there was any truth to the reviews showing up on Amazon.com as a result of people who read the free version. In a word, this book is weird . It is about the owner of a software company who inherits a house on the beach. The house is modeled after the man’s heart. We later discover that the house is demon possessed, so perhaps that means the man is also demon possessed, but that isn’t made clear in the book. In any case, the more attached the man gets to his life at the house on the beach the more he loses of his previous life. People who were once a big part of his life become as if they had never met him. He has memories of these things, but they don’t. I might as well tell you that it’s a case of deus ex machina all over the place. I found the book par...