Timothy's Thoughts

C all it writing research if you will, but I was looking at the question of putting a father’s name on a baby’s birth certificate (not mine, I assure you) and became bombarded with websites in which unmarried women are asking about whether they should or should not put the father’s name on the birth certificate. Being naïve like I am, the thought had never crossed my mind that a mother who knew the name of the father would leave it off because she thought it would prevent him from laying claim to the baby or something like that. As I perused those websites, it shocked me how self-centered people can be. These women had not thought for what would be best for the father of their child. They had no thought for what would be best for what would be best for the child. All they cared about was what would make their own lives easier. You would think that the baby was nothing more than a possession and the baby’s father was nothing more than a means of obtaining that possession. People find ou...

A mazon.com is a fascinating place to visit. To be quite honest, I spend too much money there—enough that my Prime membership has paid for itself. But its a great place, even if you don’t spend a dime. For the author, it contains a lot of useful information. The first thing we notice is that it gives us a relative index of how popular particular books are. If you are looking for the most accurate and most up to date bestseller list, Amazon.com has it and you can filter it down to pretty much any category you would want. Another thing Amazon.com is useful for is as a means to look at product descriptions. You can walk through Barnes and Noble, pull some books off the shelf and read the backs, but it is much easier to do it on Amazon.com. Besides, Amazon.com has several times the selection of Barnes and Noble. If you are writing non-fiction, Amazon.com makes it fairly easy to find similar books to the one you are writing. With that information, you can then tell any agent you quer...