Timothy's Thoughts

H omeschooling is growing. Texas saw a twenty percent increase in homeschooling last year. Supposedly, it is because of the economy. Parents who were sending their children to private schools are pulling them out and homeschooling instead. Now, I realize that there are some cases where home, private and alternative schooling is necessary, but as a general rule, I think that parents with Christian children are doing the wrong thing by homeschooling their kids. The primary reason parent homeschool is because they want to “integrate their faith” into their children’s education. I get that. Really, I do, but what about integrating our faith into the education of the lost world? Isn’t that what God has called us to do? I hear a lot about prayer being taken out of schools and the Ten Commandments being taken off the walls. I can tell you right now that the courts have done far less to take prayer out of school than what Christians have done by pulling their kids out of the public schools an...

S cience fiction folks like to talk about these other dimensions. Sadly, many of them get the idea wrong. They talk about another dimension like it is another Universe. As you know, we keep track of four dimensions, X, Y, Z and Time. If you were to add a fifth dimension, whatever that would be, it would be possible for something to be at one location and at the same time be at another location. Quite literally, as far as our four dimensional Universe is concerned, that object could be everywhere at once. The comparison is usually made between a two-dimensional space and a three-dimensional space. If a living being could only perceive two dimensions, then a three-dimensional object would appear as the intersection. A cone would appear as a circle or some other conic shape. If it moved along the third dimension through time, it would appear to expand or contract. It could come into existence within an instance and disappear for no apparent reason. The problem with that is that there is ...

T here are several stories that I’d like to be writing right now. And there’s a non-fiction book I’d like to write. Actually, there’s more than one. Funny how I want to work on them while I need to be working on the book I’ve already started. The one I’ve started completes a five book series. I really want to be finished with that series. It isn’t that I don’t want to spend more time with those characters; I love my characters, but I’m ready for a new cover design. That’s one of the great things about self-publishing; you get to design your own cover. Of course you can let someone else do it, but what’s the fun in that. So one more novel and I get to play around with covers again.

I ’ve hard that the best stories come about when you write yourself into a corner that you don’t think you can get out of, but you do. Writing shouldn’t be easy. When you find that a character is doing something without a good motivation, you might decide to quit. You might decide to go on to another story, but if you keep going and work through the problem you might discover that what you have is one of your best stories ever. It might take you a while, but work it out and see what happens.

A lot of importance is placed on an author making a name for himself. How different that is from how television and movies work. You don’t often know much about the person writing a script. You might know something about the actors, but only the stars. You don’t pay much attention to most of the people involved and you may only recognize the actors by the character they play. It may just be wishful thinking, but wouldn’t it be nice if books were that way? Perhaps it’ll get that way. People won’t pay much attention to who wrote the book, just whether it is a good book or not.

C onfess your faults, one to another, James 5:16 tells us. I’m not sure when the Catholics first built their confessional boxes and made confession a requirement for salvation, but in modern times the confessional box often aids sagging plots in television shows by providing a place where the evildoer can talk about his crime without fear of the police learning of his crime. Of course, his confession is often overheard by someone standing nearby or by some recording device placed in the box. It’s all in good fun to make things more interesting. But before you go sticking confessional boxes in your stories, let’s look at the idea of confession a little closer. The Catholics have popularized the idea that confession is going and telling one’s sins to a priest. Protestants have turned around and said that it is God we should confess to and not to a priest. When we look at James 5:16, the phrase “one another” seems to indicate that confession is not limited to the sinner and the priest, b...

B ooks aren’t like television shows. The thing about television shows is that some people will watch them just because there isn’t anything else on. You’re tired and you want to watch some mindless entertainment. You want to watch it now, so you turn to the most interesting thing you can find that is on now. With books, people pick and choose. Occasionally, they’ll pick something up just because it is there, but someone had to make the decision that the wanted it in the first place. It’s interesting because television shows can get by with some of the worst plots. They’ll throw an episode in there that is nothing but clips from previous episodes. Usually, the main character is away somewhere and the supporting cast is remembering what a great person he is. Can you imagine if we tried doing that with books? Instead of writing a new book, we would just pull chapters from other books to tie together with some weak plot. No one would buy the book, but television producers don’t seem to t...