Timothy's Thoughts

Y ou might not believe this if you pay much attention to writer’s blogs, but Windows is the hands down favorite operating system of writers. How do I know? 85% percent of the people who visit my blog are using a Windows OS. Only 9% are using a Macintosh. Yeah, I know Macs are cool and all of that, but Windows is about getting the job done. The funny thing is, I hear far more complaints about Macs from the 9% who use them than I hear from Windows users. But I’m not sure that Word 2010 is even available on the Mac yet. If I owned a Mac, I think I would buy a Windows PC just so I could run Word 2010. You won’t look at cool, but I think writers are better off with Windows.

I n the process of revising a manuscript I went through a list of commonly confused words, searching for each one in my manuscript to verify that I had used the word correctly. I skipped a few, such as to and too , simply because there are too many of them. And some of the words didn’t appear in my manuscript at all. Overall, it was a helpful activity because even though it didn’t find that many mistakes, it did find some that I could’ve easily overlooked while reading through the manuscript. And since Word 2010 lists each word it finds along with some of the context, it doesn’t take that long to move through the list. There were about a hundred words or so and I managed to get through the list is a few hours. My most frequently confused words are where and were . It isn’t that I don’t know the difference, but I think it is a case of a lazy finger. I found a number of occurrences where I had used the word were when I should’ve used where or vice versa. Consider the statement, “He ...

O ne of the great promises of the vanity press industry is that it gives good books that were rejected by traditional publishing a chance. If I remember correctly, that is the argument Thomas Nelson used when they began the WestBow Press vanity press. I think it’s a valid argument, but finding those books is like looking for a needle in a haystack. As I looked through the books published by one vanity press, I noticed book after book that were inferior. One book was about why we should all be obeying the traffic laws. By not doing so, we’re endangering people’s lives. I can’t disagree with that, but it’s hardly a book I would expect to sell. Several of the books were novels with titles that did nothing to encourage me to read the books. In one book, the author attempted to defend Samson against the attacks of theologians of our day. Essentially, she wanted to say that all the stuff that Samson did wrong was by God’s will. She’s so far off on what she had to say that I don’t think it’s...

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...

W hen I was a kid, I knew what artists were like. I suppose Tom Runnels was the archetypical artist for me. He was a local artist who was somewhat well known because he had a column in the local paper which included a pencil drawing along with the text. He also did sculpture. You can see an example here . Our art teacher at school was his niece. She is quite talented in her own right. I’m sure she must have sighed a great sigh of relief when she finally taught me that the sky touches the horizon and there isn’t a big white gap between the two. But as you can see from the picture taken at Tom Runnels’ Cat Ranch, he was just a down to earth guy who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. The thing about art in any form is that most people don’t get rich at it. For that matter, most people are doing good if they make money at all. Art is a passion, it isn’t a profession. On top of that, there are always the critics. You pour your life into your work and there are always people there who wi...

E ven though the wise men didn’t show up for a couple of years later, I find them a fascinating part of the Christmas story. Here these guys were watching the night sky in the east and something unusual happened, a star appeared. Somehow, they knew that meant something important had happened and they set off after it. That seems to indicate that this wasn’t the kind of star we see in the sky, but it was a bright light close to the earth. They follow it to Israel, like one might seek the end of a rainbow, but then they catch it. Only it doesn’t show them anything, so they ask the ruler. After some research, they discover that the child was to be born in Bethlehem, but not just any Bethlehem. There were actually two Bethlehems. Their research revealed which one. It wasn’t like today. They couldn’t Google, “odd star in the sky” and find out what it meant. They had to pull out the books to find that information. So, when they started looking in the book, they were looking for prophecies a...

I saw a video online that I’m sure was put together by an atheist. A cartoon atheist was hit by a city bus (ironic considering what the atheists paid for in Fort Worth this month) and he stood before God. I won’t go into all the discussion between the two, but the atheist as the question, “if all that’s required to get into heaven is that a person believe in you, why can’t I just start believing in you now?” It’s a question that many people, even Christians, have asked and I think it is worth our consideration today. The basic question seems to be, if God is good, why does he allow people to go to hell? Before we answer this question, I think it’s important that we avoid the temptation to assume certain characteristics of God and then question why such a person would do what the Bible says he will do. For example, we might assume that since God wants to give us all that’s good, he would never send us to hell. We should instead approach it from the other way. Given what the Bible tell...