The Voices on my Page

I have a confession to make: I wrote a book a couple years back. Finished it in 2005. It was horrible. Truly, truly bad. It was 165,000 words long. L-o-o-o-n-g. I tried to revise it; tried for five years, off and on. Couldn't do it. My mind was shot. Part of the problem, that I recognized even in '06 during my first attempts to rewrite it, was that I didn't have a voice for the narrator. Took me six years to find that voice. Here's how.

Opening Your Precedent

I know, it's Monday, not Wednesday or Friday, but I needed to get this out. I don't want to talk about it on Wednesday, because it's not about writing; nor do I want to discuss it on Friday, because it doesn't deal strictly with faith. Although, after reading it, it may seem like evolutionists have more faith than they profess.

Calm in the Storm

"A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, 'Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?' He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, 'Quiet! Be still!' Then the wind died down and it was completely calm. He said to his disciples, 'Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?' They were terrified and asked each other, 'Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!'" (Mark 4:37 - 41).

It's popular in feel-good theology -- and maybe even glossed over in not-feel-good theology -- to marvel with the disciples at Jesus' power to calm the storm, and think to ourselves "Well, Jesus can calm the storm in my life, too!"

But check out another verse:

A Good Life

There is a troubling, deeply troubling idea out there; every time I encounter it, my stomach churns a certain amount; and if it is too blatant or too subtle, it churns the worst. The idea is that the best stories are born out of the worst circumstances. Specifically, the writer's circumstances; someone said, and I don't know who and I don't want to wrongly attribute a paraphrase, that a person must have a bad life in order to be a good writer. Maybe I only hope that's not true, because I've not had a particularly bad life. But mostly I think it simply isn't true.

Love's Ascendency

Just one more post about this, so hang with me. Because when I get on a certain topic like homosexuality and gay rights, and it's important for me to have my opinion on firm footing, it tends not to leave for a while. At least not until I get through the major arguments.

So, when all you have is the material world, love turns out to be one of the strongest motivators -- hate is up there, too, but we don't promote that one for obvious reasons; and, really, hate is the same passion, just turned the opposite way. So without God, love becomes the complete and utmost expression of humanity, in a way. There's no greater drive, and there's no reason it should not be fulfilled within certain cultural limits.

The problem is that, as Christians, we've bought into this.

Radical Changes

First, late me take an opportunity real quick to say I've published a short anthology of shorts (whoa) on Amazon Kindle under the name Daniel Dydek. If They Keep Silent is a collection of voices as varied as any crowd with one thing in common: the need to tell their story. You can get the book here. If you don't have a Kindle, you can search "Kindle for PC [or Mac]" and get a free download that will allow you to read Kindle books on -- you guessed it -- your PC or Mac. My version even came with some free books. Check the anthology out, you can preview before you buy it, and if you're an Amazon Prime member, you can check it out in the Kindle Library. Thanks!

So last night, while we were sitting and eating at a very, very good local Italian place, my fiancee and I began talking about the next book I'm working on. Well, "working on" might be a little misleading: I'm primarily working on finding an agent for the novel I've finished. But I'm tumbling around ideas in my head, I have a sample chapter done just to explore the world and meet some of the characters -- but nothing terribly concrete. It's malleable. Which, after last night, is a good thing.

Mind Blown

Some of you may have to forgive me if this is patently obvious, because I have never heard this described so that I understood it this way. I'm talking about the key to God's omniscience and omnipresence. Because every way I've heard it described indicated to me that His omniscience was simply a trait -- just something He had that we had trouble explaining. If God knows everything, we ask, do we actually have free will? If I'm getting this right, the answer is unequivocally "yes." Here's why.

"Search" for an agent

Emphasis on "search." Fortunately, I live in an age that includes -- along with Spotify, Nobuo Uematsu, and the Post 9-11 GI Bill -- a wonderful website called agentquery.com. Have you written a book with a loosely definable genre-classification that you desire to publish? Go to agentquery.com, select your genre from the drop-down menu, and hit "search." Poof: all the agents looking for that genre are right before you. Except, not quite.

Extreme Itinerance

Now I'm jumping in so swiftly, I don't have a title. This is going to be extremely itinerant -- bam! Title. But this is going to be some very itinerant musings about the Bible and Christianity. Because I work with people who don't believe in it, and I watch TV shows containing characters who don't believe in it. So these are a number of observations that have been collecting in my mind, but lack the germination to become full-fledged posts. Here we go.

Perhaps one of the bigger mistakes has been dividing the Bible into Old and New Testament. I thought about this after an exchange by two characters on a popular TV drama wherein one character expressed his preference for the New Testament. So, here's the point: they're both about the same God.

It's Weird Coincidence Wednesday!

Maybe that was a bit dramatic; but I've been gone for a long time, so leave me alone.

Something strange arose recently, as I'm moving back into find-an-agent-and-query-them phase: I began to realize an intertwining between the theme of my novel, and my quest to craft a perfect synopsis. I basically needed to take the advice of my book. But I couldn't realize that until I had already taken the advice of my book that I didn't realize.....Let me explain a different way.