Timothy's Thoughts

C an you believe it? It is Christmas Eve. I suppose that means I’m building a fire so Santa will have a good hot seat, or something like that. I’m writing this post early so I don’t have to worry about the blog while I’m doing whatever I’m doing. But that also means that while I’ve been pushing hard to get a book published this month, I don’t know if I’m to that point or not. I’m really hoping I can pull it off, but with all the holiday stuff going on (don’t send me e-mails for calling Christmas a holiday) it is hard to fit everything in. It is quite possible that the book will come out next month instead. That’s okay too. Well, it won’t hurt to talk about it anyway. I think I’m calling this book Mother Not Wanted . In this story, a woman, Amber, from St. Louis shows up on Fox Jacobs’ doorstep claiming that the girl, Lizi, she has with her is his granddaughter. The family has no knowledge of such a girl, but Amber drops some information and names that cause them to question whether sh...

Writers walk a fine line and those who do it well succeed. The rest of us languish in obscurity. The one thing that highly successful books have in common is that they are different from their peers. The first novel that does something interesting or different gets the glory. The rest get…nothing. Or next to nothing. We want our work to stand out, but we also have to be careful. Maybe we don’t want to stand out too much. Put God in a dress flipping flapjacks and you have a novel that stands out. But does it stand out for the right reasons? Okay, actually that has already been tried and what I expect is that we will start to see more novels (mostly self-published) that will attempt to rethink God. Perhaps instead of putting him in a dress someone will give him the body of a cow. Isn’t that what the children of Israel did? Read the Bible, God was not amused. But enough about that. As we write, we have to make choices. The most important choice is the story idea. Nothing makes a book stan...

Here are the first three chapters of For the Love of a Devil . I am posting these hoping that they will entice you to purchase the book. If not, then maybe they will serve their purposes by helping you decide if the book is right for you. The book is about a beleaguered English teacher, Geoff Mywell, longs for the love he once thought his wife had for him, but when she leaves him for another man on their fifth anniversary, he is forced into the life of a single parent. He isn't sure whether to give in to the relief of having her out of the house or be sorry that the marriage seems broken beyond repair. He goes after her as she moves from one man to the next and eventually falls into prostitution. Geoff must enter the darkness and pull her back or lose the woman he loves forever.

There is a very unheated debate over whether to outline a novel before writing it or not. For me, it is easier if I know where I am going, so I create an outline. Also, as I noted in a previous post, if you ever need to write a synopsis, an outline can cut your workload significantly. There are different ways to do an outline. I find that I describe the current state more than I describe the action. The action will come as the manuscript begins to take shape. Below, I have included my outline for For the Love of a Devil . Some of you may recognize the high level outline as coming from Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat . If you haven’t read that book, you really should. The numbers beside each heading are word count totals. Blake Snyder defines when things should happen by page count, but novelists tend to think more in terms of word count. My goal was an 80,000 word novel. I went a little above, so the work count is a little off, but the intent was that it would tell me when I f...

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...

One of the things I have been thinking about recently is how can a novelist use a website to sell books? It is very important that we draw a distinction between novels and non-fiction books. It may not be easy, but with non-fiction the formula is straight forward. The Non-fiction Method People choose which websites they visit based on a felt need. Often, the felt need is translated into a search engine query. Unless you are a regular reader of this blog, you may have found this post by typing how can a novelist use a website to sell books or something similar, into Google or some other search engine. You may have clicked on the link because it may answer your question. Following that thought. If a non-fiction author has written a book about Habakkuk, it is reasonable to assume that the people who will buy the book are looking for information about Habakkuk or other books about prophets. The author can provide this information on his website and then simply say, “if you would like to ...