Timothy's Thoughts

O kay, so I was over at Mike Dellosso’s blog the other day and he had this short post about possibly writing about using Fiction to Evangelize. It got me to thinking about how that can be done. If you’ve read, How to Become a Bible Character , you know that it tells the way of salvation several different times. I can’t say that I was trying to do that, but it’s just that kind of a story. And Thy House is also that kind of a story. It is a about a guy who becomes a Christian and then has to deal with daughters who don’t think he should have. But is that the way to evangelize through fiction? One thought I’ve had is that instead of focusing our attention on getting people saved, we writers should focus our attention on getting people lost. I don’t mean that we should write the most confusing prose imaginable. Some authors seem to think that is their goal in life, but if the message of salvation is going to have any meaning, people must see their need of salvation. A drowning man will l...

T erry Burns recently wrote about the calling to write . Some people talk about the calling to write. When you think about it, that sort of leaves the rest of us out in the cold. Who are we to say we even have the right to call ourselves writers if others are called by God to write, but we are not? What I like about what Terry said is that he called what the rest of us do an offering. There’s an awful lot of stuff I do that I wouldn’t consider a calling. I work with kids in our church’s Awana program. While I enjoy doing that, I don’t see that as a calling. But that isn’t to say that isn’t to say that I’m doing it for myself; it is an offering. The stuff I do with our church’s website: that is more of a calling. I won’t go into how I know the difference. The point is that there are some things we are called to do and some things that we simply offer up to God as we worship him. If you are called to write, great, but there is no sin in writing if you just have a desire to write and want...

I wasn’t going to write about this, but it keeps coming up. Actually, I wrote about it once, changed my mind and deleted what I wrote, but if you haven’t heard, Harlequin continues to get blacklisted by writers’ associations. The board of the Romance Writers Association (RWA) blacklisted them several days ago and in response Harlequin change the name of their vanity press to DellArte. I’m not sure if that appeased Michelle Monkou and company over at RWA, but it didn’t appease Lee Child and company on the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) board of directors. They voted to bar Harlequin from consideration for their Edgar award. I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around this thing. The publishers are supposed to be the publishing experts and yet, last year more books were published by POD companies than by traditional publishers. It’s no wonder that publishers are beginning to try to move into that market. But what is it that these association boards hope to gain by blacklisting publishe...

P eople in the publishing industry are a bunch of liars. I was reading a literary agent’s blog the other day and she made a comment about a perfectly good book that she didn’t feel she could represent because perfectly good books don’t sell, only great books sell. Anyone who has ever picked up a book, read some number of pages and finally decided to put it down because it was just too boring, knows that isn’t the case and would be glad to have some perfectly good books out there on the market to replace some of those not so great books. The problem is one of terminology. Imagine you are a literary agent and you have a book you are trying to sell. You can’t go to a publisher and say, “This is an okay book that I think you should consider. It probably won’t make you much money, but I don’t figure you’ll lose money on it either.” Instead, you have to go to the publisher and say, “This is a great book! This book is going to help you make up the money you lost on those other books you’...

E ditor’s Note: With it being time for another Fiction Friday and since my latest book will be coming out soon, I am posting the first chapter for your reading pleasure. To give you and idea of where this is headed, this is a story about a man who divorced his wife and raised his children out of church, but comes to discover that he was wrong after the girls have reached an age when he has begun to lose influence with them. Chapter One A t the top of the steps, going up to the church building, the greeter pushed the glass door open. Martin shoved the door open even farther. The greeter stumbled and regained his footing as Martin brushed past him. Another man held out a church bulletin. “Welcome to…” Martin brushed aside the bulletin and made a beeline for the doors of the auditorium. Other greeters milled about the otherwise deserted foyer. A man and a woman stood at the double doors of the auditorium watching the pe...

N o backstory, is the mantra. It kills the story. But it keeps showing up, time and time again. Is it because we’re just all a bunch of bad writers? Maybe we just don’t see backstory as being the problem that people keep telling us it is. Maybe we just don’t understand. Whatever the case, backstory creeps in and when we consider how closely backstory is related to flashbacks, there’s an obvious reason. The big difference between the two is that backstory comes from a different story while flashback comes from our current story. It isn’t always easy to keep them apart. Instead of arguing against backstory, I’d like to talk about the underlying problem. I see the problem as one of rationalizing. Suppose a character is a rich garbage man. Because we don’t typically think garbage men will be rich, our natural tendency is to try to explain how he became rich and why he continues to collect garbage, but that’s part of a different story, making it backstory. It would be better to just say tha...

A nyone who has read this blog very long knows that page numbering is a pet peeve of mine. Admittedly, I almost numbered a book wrong the other day, so I understand that mistakes can be made. My real issue is with people who number a book incorrectly with no intention of trying to do it correctly. There are several publishers out there who make no distinction between the front matter and the text other than that they may leave off the numbers for the front matter or use lowercase roman numerals, but the result is that the text of the book could end up beginning on page 7 or 11 or some strange number that seems out of place. I found one publisher, NESFA Press, that even says in their style guide that they do not start renumbering with the first page of the text. Their actual statement says, “We do not re-start numbering with the first story page. (If it really bothers the editor not to use Roman numerals on the front matter, OK, but the pages are still numbered consecutively in one s...