Timothy's Thoughts

E ditor’s Note: For your readying pleasure, a scene from—well I’m not sure what it’s from, but I hope you enjoy it. It was dark in the cemetery as he began his work, but he had enough light to see without the aid of a flashlight. The full moon shined down on him from high in the sky. He planned it that way. He needed the light of the moon so a flashlight wouldn’t draw attention to him. The pole light over by the little church helped too. Mostly, it lit up the area around the big silver propane tank, but it helped. He heard the singing tires of a car on the highway. He crouched down and waited. The car slowed to round the curve. For an instance, the headlights swept the cemetery, making the shadows from the tombstones look like ghosts moving in the night. The car sped up and went on down the road. Ryan didn’t have time to worry about ghosts. The flowers had to go first, but that was easy. He pulled them off the small mound of dirt and set them off to one side. They had begun to wilt, b...

H ere’s what I’m supposed to want. I’m supposed to want an agent. I’m supposed to want a publishing contract. That’s the only way for an author to prove that he’s worth anything. It’s about validation. I’m convinced that I’m brilliant, but only a publishing contract will tell me whether I’m right or I’m delusional. That’s the story the publishing industry is pushing anyway. Everyone from publishers to agents to authors are pushing it. But what if I don’t want to buy into that? I don’t really want to make my living as a writer. I like my day job—not all the time, but I’m not anxious to give it up. The average “successful” author makes $31,000 a year. I make more than that. Then there’s those agents and publishers you have to mess with and there’s so much stuff you have to do just to get the $31,000. I’m not sure I want that. Writing as a hobby? That’s great. Writing for a little extra spending money? Excellent. Writing as a career? I’m not so sure. Then there’s Imposter Syndrome to co...

W hat if you could be a literary agent for a day? I don’t know about you, but here’s what I would do: First, the slush pile has got to go. If it’s paper, burn it! Or if you happen to be eco-conscious, shred it and turn it into compost. These days, with the Internet from shore to shore and around the globe, there’s no reason for anyone to be sending a 300+ page manuscript as a physical document. Any author who hasn’t figured that out, I’m sorry you wasted your money on postage, but take heart in knowing that your story is doing a great job helping my daisies grow better. Now that we’ve established that I won’t be accepting paper manuscripts, lets move on to the electronic slush pile. Anyone who sent a paper manuscript is welcome to resubmit to the electronic slush pile, but don’t be too hasty. I won’t be accepting e-mail submission either. I don’t need an inbox full of manuscripts either. Instead, I need everyone to resubmit their manuscripts through my new web based Manuscript Handling...

S tories are about doing the stuff you can't do. Think about it. Children love stories about fantastic creatures that don't exist--elves, dragons, wizards--actually, I like those too. But consider some of the adult stories. Secret agents, spys, police detectives, all tracking down villians who are far worse than the average criminal. Not all books are that way. Some touch on romance. These too fit the trend. The men in this books are not like the men their readers have married, but like they wish their men were. These men do great things and talk of love, while real men only do stuff like go to work to earn a living and come home so tired they can barely find their way to the couch before they pass out. So women escape into these books and imagine that their men did the wonderful things the men in the books can do. They imagine what it would be like to have the fairytale romance of the book instead of the romance of the guy snoozing on the couch or watching the game.   Ther...

M y trade is that of a software engineer. If you don’t know what that is, you might know it by another name, computer programmer. That may not tell you much either. We occasionally show up in fiction. Tron had a computer programmer who entered a computer and was able to speak to his programs. As much as I would love to do that, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. You may recall in Jurassic Park that the villain was a computer programmer. He was a little more true to life, but trust me, a real computer programmer wouldn’t have been able to write a million lines of code by himself. In real life, hundreds or even thousands of software engineers may work on a single product. You may think of software as programs that run on you computer and that is true, but these days there is computer code in almost every electrical device you can think of. Your microwave oven, for example, may have code that controls what it does when you press the buttons. Rather than wire the microwave a specific wa...

T he question today from the 20 questions for leaders that Michael Smith of ClearView Baptist Church in Franklin, Tennessee asked Mike Hyatt is What advice would you give someone going into a leadership position for the first time? Remember your place. In particular with ministers in a church, I would remind them that the Lord's people are like his sheep and leaders are only the undershepherds watching out for them. When someone hires you to watch his sheep, he is more concerned about the sheep than he is about you. We might also remember that the church is the Lord's Bride. I don't remember Dad getting upset about much of anything when I was growing up. O, I got my fair share of spankings, put I don't remember him being angry. But I do remember one time when I was a teenager that I said something I shouldn't have to Mom. I may have called her a name, but I don't think that was it. Dad and I were going to go somewhere. I remember having a conversation on th...

E ditor’s Note: No editor’s note this week. Thus far, I’ve stayed away from true genre fiction. I have an unpublished manuscript that could be classified a mystery, but that’s at a stretch. However, if I were to write genre fiction, which I believe I might in the near future, I would write in the mystery genre. As a child, I read the typical teen detective stories and eventually moved into Agatha Christie’s books. There was also Sherlock Holmes. On television, there has been Murder She Wrote , Diagnosis Murder , Columbo , Monk and who knows how many others that have influenced me. I’ve loved them all. There just can’t be too many good detective stories. The best detectives are always eccentric. Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, Jessica Fletcher, Mr. Monk, they are all eccentric. Not in the same way, but they were all eccentric and they had to be. They don’t face ordinary criminals that the guys down at CSI can catch. These criminals are often your super villain who is sma...