Timothy's Thoughts

A co-worker and I got into a discussion the other day about the value of unions. He was very much against them because of experiences with union workers taking much longer than is reasonable to do their job and not being able to do it himself because the task fell under the union contract. My position was that while I don’t desire to be in a union, I support the concept and I think there are a few unions that still serve a good purpose. I gave the Actors’ Guild as an example, because they use their collective power to help persuade movie producers to provide actors with better working conditions. Many of these actors work so infrequently that they would take any part, without consideration of some of the things the Actors’ Guild has taken into account. What surprised me was my co-worker’s response. Rather than mentioning the role of the government (which may or may not apply depending on the country a movie is being filmed in), his response was that he didn’t see the Actors’ Guild a...

S ome people really don’t like the idea of writing the same plot over and over. They say things like, “Publishers just want to force us all into the same genre. They won’t even look at something new.” But look at how many times Cinderella has been told. There must be thousands of variations on that story. And look at the Romance genre. Forget the strict rules about what makes a book romance novel, most books in the genre follow the same plot. Two characters with problems meet. They are soon at odds with each other. But as they discover that they need each other and that they are better together than apart. But that plot isn’t limited to the Romance genre or characters who fall in love. In spite of the evidence we have a tendency to think that if we could just come up with a plot that no one has ever done before then it would shake up the literary world. People who try that end up with is a poorly done variation of an existing plot. What do we make of all of this? First, people lik...

“ W hy do you want to know?” Most people try to read between the lines and most people are bad at it. That’s what happens when you try reading something that isn’t there. But that doesn’t keep us from trying. I got involved in a conversation online recently in which several people read a lot more into my comments than what I had actually said. At one point in the conversation I said, “I wasn’t saying anything against romance. (Why is it that everyone seems to think I am?)” To this Steve Laube replied, “Agreed. You did not mention romance specifically. But there have been comments on other posts where the genre was mentioned by you.” I suppose I should be grateful that people remember what I’ve said (apparently better than I do), but you would think I have a vendetta against romance or something. That is not the case. For some reason, people are most interest in our motive for saying something or asking something than they are in the words we use. “How is your mother?” we might ask...

H ow much money should you make? The question came up on Steve Laube’s blog Goodbye to Traditional Publishing? . Apparently, Ann Voss Peterson (no, I don’t know who she is either), is upset because she only made $20,000 on 170,000 copies of a book. That is roughly 12¢ per copy. The cover price is $4.50. So allowing for the store to get 40%, the publisher gets $2.70, so Ann Voss Peterson receive only 4.3% of what the publisher received, or 2.4% of the cover price (by her figures). Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Okay, backup. I think you missed something. Ann Voss Peterson made $20,000 from a book she wrote. Given that an author writing full-time can crank out four books a year, that is the equivalent of $80,000 per year. You won’t get rich on that, but I know a lot of people who think that is a good salary. We usually measure what we consider to be a good salary by what other people are making. If someone is making $50,000 a year but he sees a co-worker making $60,000 a year, he ...

A proximately 1.7% of Americans describe themselves as homosexual. Now that means that roughly 2 out of every 100 people you encounter are gay. That’s not that many, but it is enough that you are likely to find some among your friends or at the very least you know people with them in their family. Being the nice person that you are, you might not see anything wrong with gay “marriage”. After all, it isn’t like it will change anything for you. If they want to get married, what’s wrong with it? As long as they keep what they do behind closed door—and isn’t that true for heterosexual relationships also? So what’s wrong with gay “marriage”? For the sake of argument, let’s forget what the Bible says about homosexual relationships. The thing is, every sin that exists manifests itself in the form or something harmful, so if there is any merit to what the Bible says, then there ought to be a harmful manifestation. If that isn’t the case, then maybe the Bible isn’t right. As an example, con...

The book of I John was written for the express purpose of helping us determine whether we are saved or not. Here are some of the tests: Do we walk in darkness? (I John 1:6) That is not to say that we do not sin because John tells us in I John 1:8 that if the say we don’t sin then the truth isn’t in us. Rather, we should ask ourselves whether we desire to do good or not. Do we keep his commandments? (I John 2:3) People who are saved are no longer under the law, but they have a desire to do what God has commanded anyway. Do we lust for the present world? (I John 2:15) What is important to you? Do you want to make lots of money so you can buy a nice home, have the latest technology, go to all the parties, or would you rather be serving the Lord? Do we believe that Jesus is the Christ? (I John 2:22) Are we trusting Jesus and Jesus alone for our salvation or are we relying on things like the money we give to church, the number of times we read our Bible, the things we do for the poor, eve...

N o one deserves to die,” or so is the claim made by a television show I watched recently. The series is based around a man who was once a hit man. His then boss and father figure in his life taught him that it was okay to kill the people they were hired to kill because they deserved to die. But then he was given the assignment of killing a woman whose only fault was that she had witnessed a crime and those who had done it didn’t want her to testify against them. That was the turning point that caused the main character to begin a crusade to protect the innocent. But is it true that “no one deserves to die?” It sounds good. With that battle cry we would have reason to protect both friends and strangers. Instead of saying, “no one deserves to die,” how different it sounds when we say, “everyone deserves to live.” They are both saying exactly the same thing and yet, with the second, we aren’t as quick to agree. Life is a privilege, is it not? It is a thing of great value. It is so val...