Fun Dream

The highlight of the week was a dream I had. I was invited to be in a new, experimental spaceship this guy was testing. Experimental made me nervous because no one would be able to rescue us if something went wrong, but I took a chance. One other person was onboard. He was kind of standoffish and didn't talk. We flew past a bunch of planets and moons kind of like a tour of the solar system. The planets/moons would be blurry from a distance then pop into focus with clear details. Unfortunately, we went by them so fast I was only able to get one good picture with lots of detail. I was by a big window. The pilot was flying the ship. The standoffish guy was kind of down a passage with no windows but still had sort of view out the windows where I was. We never crashed or lost pressure.

Before going to bed I had watched part of a Star Trek episode and listened to some Christian videos. Two of them talked about stepping out and taking chances when God throws something your way. Clearly, the dream had a lot of day residue in it. I was in space. I took a chance when opportunity arose while not knowing the outcome.

One way of looking at dreams is to see all the characters as an aspect of yourself. It's your dream. It's in your head. The characters come from your own mind. The pilot would be sort of a creative part of myself that pushes ahead with advancement when other fans of space are still stuck on the cost per pound to orbit "problem", a problem that is easily solved by the way. The standoffish guy would be the part of me that holds back too much. He had an amazing chance to experience the solar system but was back in the corridor/alcove and was merely looking on from a distance.

The me part of the dream was enjoying seeing all the moons and things, but there was a problem. The camera I had was big and bulky. It was about 12 inches by 12 inches(30.48cm x 30.48cm) with toggles and buttons. If you've ever seen one of those camera boxes that hunters and wildlife researchers strap to trees to take pictures of wildlife, it was similar to those. It was the reason I couldn't get any good pictures. We were going so fast, and the views were so amazing that by the time I hit the right buttons the planetary details were gone.

One way of looking at the camera is to see it as details or complications. I spent a small amount of time fiddling with the camera to get pictures I could look at later that no one had ever taken. I was doing that instead of focusing purely on the main experience. Maybe that's a dream imagery way of saying I need to stop sweating the small things and concentrate on the big picture. It could also be a way of saying that more preparation is needed for unfamiliar things. I didn't know the camera. The one good picture I got was after I had learned the camera. If I'd been properly prepared, the pictures would have been seamless and easy. Part of my thinking while working the camera was proving that I had seen all those amazing worlds. Maybe the camera was showing me I don't always need to care what other people think. I knew I was seeing all that stuff whether anyone else believed I had been there or not. Was the camera just a hindrance I could have let go of?

So, dreams are fun. On the book front I've been going through AoE sentence by sentence checking commas. I'm almost done.

Have a great weekend and pleasant dreams.

New Grammar(Comma) Rules

This was a proofreading week on the book front. For a while I've been aware of changes in grammar rules from when I was in school, specifically comma rules. Some would recommend a comma after the word while in the previous sentence. In my books I only put a comma after a leading prepositional phrase if it has five or more words or if it would be ambiguous not to use one, and I'm not changing it. Commas after a prepositional phrase is just one of the new rules.

Not too long ago I did some proofreading and light editing for someone and had to look up a comma rule to make sure I was using the modern rule. I patted myself on the back and went on. This week I ended up looking up comma rules more in depth. It's so discouraging. I had to email the person I did the proofreading for and tell her about the modern rules and how I didn't know all the changes.

So and nor are considered to be coordinating conjunctions now. So I could see. I've been using it as one for a long time despite knowing the rule against it. I don't see how nor could be one. I've never in my life used nor as a conjunction between independent clauses nor ever seen it done. It doen't make sense to me in standard or informal English. Anyway, I spent way too much time this week searching for and reading about modern comma rules. It doesn't help when I find conflicting information. It also doesn't help when a grammar book I own tells me some of it is a matter of personal taste. As long as it's easy for the reader, I can make it up as I go along.

My next book coming out, AoE, is for a young adult audience that sees modern grammar in school every day. I think it's important to use rules that won't distract them from the text. I also like the idea of not having to look up comma rules again. I'm going to have to learn all the new rules and go back and apply them to all my books. The struggle continues.

French Stuff

For a while I've been using a page count for my French reading, instead of using whatever extra time I have. I've been seeing better progress that way. Some of the books I'm reading are modern, and some are translations of things I read when I was younger. I'm almost finished with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unfortunately, the French version I got was based on the movie and not the book, which was very different. I've been flying through it. It's so much easier to read than the Asimov and Heinlein books I've been reading. I was feeling good about myself until it occurred to me that the book has to be dumbed down for a mass audience the way newspapers are written at a lower grade level. It's still nice to be going through it more quickly.

A while back I got the French version of Heidi for free on my Kindle. Between having to look up words and not enough excitement in the story, I set it aside for the moment. I read a little more of it recently. It's a lot easier to read now, and I can read it faster than before. Unlike 2001, I know the improvement is real. I can imagine finishing it in the near term. It doesn't have car crashes or plane crashes. No one has been murdered. The goatherd boy isn't going to turn out to be a Soviet spy. Heidi isn't going to rebel and try to overthrow the natural order of things. Her grandfather won't turn out to be a retired MI5 agent who needs Heidi's help to stop an international assassin. Nevertheless, it's a classic. I'll at least have read one of the classics.

I've been thinking more about doing a language exchange. There are multiple sites where people can sign up to talk to a native speaker. So, if I want to learn French, a site would connect me with a native French speaker who wants to learn English. Part of the time we talked would be in French and the other part in English. It's all free. I could spend as much or as little time as I wanted. I could talk to a different person every night, if I wanted to. I'm not quite where I want to be with my vocabulary yet, but I'm getting close.

Have a great weekend.

Another Nail in the Coffin

A while back I saw an article about the minimum number of people it would take to establish a colony on another planet. It was a very high number. I was thinking about that again this week and looked it up. The minimum number of humans needed for a viable colony is 10,000, though that doesn't insure 100% preservation of the human genome. The number for that is 40,000 people. One of the articles about the study is here. Different articles conflict a bit on the numbers. That one says 14,000 minimum. It also has this interesting tidbit:

"Almost no natural populations of vertebrates dip below around five to 7,000 individuals," he said during the FISO talk. " There are genetic reasons for this. And when they do go below this, sometimes they survive, but many times they go into what's called a demographic or extinction vortex."

Thus, a colony population of a few thousand people would not survive. It would take a ton of people. (More information on extinction vortex.)

One of the most disturbing scientific findings in recent times was the discovery that humans are losing about 200 base pairs of DNA per generation. Hold onto that thought.

When thinking about the minimum number of humans necessary to preserve our genome, it occurred to me that this directly applies to evolution. According to evolution, humans evolved from simple organisms and continue to evolve into more and more complexity. Also, according to science, humans evolved from one woman who is referred to as Eve or ancestral Eve.

Wait a minute. If vertebrate species need well over 5,000 individuals to survive, how could humans possibly have evolved from one woman? If we need 40,000 people to prevent losing part of our genome, where did that diversity come from? We now know that we're losing 200 base pairs of DNA per generation, a complete contradiction to the evolutionary model. Instead of becoming more complex, our genome is shrinking from complexity to simplicity. In other words DNA follows the law of entropy.

That's the end of Darwinian evolution. A primitive monkey-woman would not have had the genetic diversity to birth our species, not to mention there would not have been the 40,000-person minimum population needed to preserve our genome.

Darwinian evolution is dead. It violates the law of entropy. It violates the law of abiogenesis. It violates the laws of genetics. Over and over again, science keeps disproving Darwinian evolution. Evolutionists keep believing in it anyway. Where is the rational thought?

According to the Bible, Adam and Eve transmitted a very complex genome that is decaying over time. That's what science keeps confirming. We're not evolving. We're devolving.

Have a great weekend.

A Writing Week

This week was a writing week. I went through The Rise of Aethan Lightbringer. I found a few mistakes. Can you believe it? I know. Me either. It was things like titled instead of tilted, a stray apostrophe, etc. Spellcheck won't catch those. I made notes for corrections, but I'll need to go through it one last time. It was in preparation for going through book 2 in the series, which I published a while back but withdrew. It just didn't feel right. I needed a break from the series and went on to working on AoE. After book 1 this week, I went through book 2 and spent more time on editing it. Now that I've been away from it for a while, it was easier to see the problems. Sections of it are just fine. Other sections will need to be fixed or possibly re-written.

Book 1 has a certain feel to it. It flows along pretty nicely and carries me along. Book 2 is set a few years later. The gap of time and the events in it have to be explained. That takes some space. The things going on at the time sometimes need additional context. It all works to slow it down. Another problem that goes along with that is that things can be happening, but there's a lack of urgency to them. Not everywhere, just in some places. It's hard to explain. The story is unfolding, but it doesn't pull me along the way book 1 does.

How do I fix book 2? The most radical solution is to scrap the entire thing and start over with it set immediately after book 1. The current book 2 could become book 3 or simply abandoned altogether. I don't entirely like that solution. The gap of time is already written into book 1. Changing it would require changing book 1, a distasteful solution but certainly doable and with not a lot of effort. Then there's the problem of: What happens after book 1? Practically nothing, although I could make something up with Ashley, a minor character from book 1. Hmm, maybe it could be a 99-cent novella, something I could do later.

Another way to fix it is to go in and change the wording of the prose to alter the tone. I could also change the tone of the characters and remove some of the sense of humor and replace it with seriousness. Maybe I could condense some of the chapters together and still convey the same information. I could change settings. Maybe, instead of meeting in public, a couple of characters could meet secretly. A simple change would be having the characters talk about the pressure they're under or the time deadline. Another change would be to put more pressure on the characters or change their reactions to the pressure that's already there.

I'm thinking book 2 doesn't have to have the same exact feel as book 1, but it needs to have the same pacing. Book 1 pulls the reader along. Book 2 only does that in certain sections.

I just finished going through book 2 last night before bed. I haven't had time to look through any of it again. I'm thinking that maybe I'll pick a small section that's not working and try to fix that to see if it can be done easily. If so, then the changes won't take long. Even if I have to re-write some of it, it still shouldn't take too long to get it out the door. I hope.

Have a great weekend.

Water Leak

I woke up to a water leak today and spent a while cleaning that up before breakfast. It was hard to get to the leak, because I need to take two boards out of the wall. I'd already bought the sealer but not the replacement boards. I sealed it as best I could for now. The whole time I worked on it, my cat waited for breakfast. It was hard to be a person today. It was tough to be a cat, too.

Before the Notre Dame cathedral burned down, this year there has been a string of attacks against Catholic churches in France, including an arson attack last week. Speculation about the true cause of the fire at the cathedral is forbidden by the liberal media who have been speculating about Trump since 2016. The media thinks it's okay when they do it, using nothing more than hatred as their foundation. They think it's a crime when we do it, using published facts as ours. It's like things are to the point where a journalist is just as big a liar as a politician.

The week was otherwise unremarkable. I've been practicing with the graphics tablet working my way up to making real covers. It's not going as quickly as I'd hoped. I'm going to have to increase the amount of time I put into it. I was able to make some rocks that didn't look bad and a cliff face. I need to go through more brushes figuring out what they all do. I've been using a handful and practicing with those, but my goal is to develop a small set of brushes and only use those. I can see improvement. It's just slow. I've been toying with the idea of doing at least parts of a cover with real paint, photographing it and finishing the covers with the graphics tablet.

I've put some work into the book after AoE. I haven't done any writing on it. I'm still developing the plot and the details. Some key things have fallen into place. It's a detective/mystery story set in the science fiction universe of the first book. The mystery aspect is forcing me to take a different approach. The Messengers series is pretty straightforward. In this book the mystery will have to be solved by following the clues in a logical way. I need to figure out all the clues and the sequence as well as the story surrounding the detective. It's good practice for other books. I've had this science fiction story in mind for a while that's set on a space station at Jupiter or Saturn. In that story a murder occurs, but the video evidence has been removed from the main computer, a near impossibility. I think about that book sometimes but not enough to come up with the sequence of events. The book after AoE will help with that.

However, I need to finish the B'vellah War series before doing too much more. I've been thinking about that, too. I may do that instead of the book after AoE.

Have a great weekend.

Buying Overseas

I buy things from overseas from different countries. It's not frequent at all and never anything expensive, but every once in a while, I need or want something I either can't get in the U.S. or can get more cheaply elsewhere. Now that I'm reading French books, I need to buy books from Europe. Sometimes the price is better in the U.S. Sometimes not. The difference makes it worth it to buy certain titles from Europe.

It turns out my debit card won't work for that, because my bank has a restriction on it. I've ordered books only to have my card declined. I talked to the bank, and they told me they could lift the restriction for a 24-hour period, if I called them before I wanted to buy something. I usually don't know I'm going to buy something until I see if there's anything to buy. Nevertheless, a couple of weeks ago I called them. They said I was set.

I found four books on Abebooks.com and ordered them. Even after getting the bank to lift the restriction on my card, it was automatically, instantly declined. I called the bank the next day. They claimed it wasn't their fault. There was nothing they could do. Hmm. A while back I changed banks. I never had this problem at the old bank.

I've spent hours and hours trying to find a way to buy things from Europe. The books I want are usually sold in France, Germany and the U.K. The savings makes the hassle of looking at pre-paid card after card and all the fine print worth it. It's absolutely necessary to look at the fine print, because that's where the hidden fees and charges are. Also, some cards can only be bought in certain countries. I found a great card in the U.K., but I can't drive to their office for it. However, this week I was able to order a couple of books from France, and it worked. This is how I did it.

There's a pre-paid card vendor called MOVO. There's no monthly fee as long as you buy things or transfer money in or out. No problem. At worst that's a 99-cent book on Amazon, or I can transfer funds from my bank and use MOVO instead for some things. I signed up for a card. That was half the battle. The challenge was getting money on it. Doing it at a store costs money that I'm trying to save. After a ton of searching online, I was finally able to use Google Pay to transfer $50. . .to myself. It was free. The trick was I had to have two different Google accounts and two different email addresses. The other trick was that it took two days to authorize the accounts for the transfer as well as authorizing an account on MOVO plus waiting for the money to be credited.

So. I log into Google Pay and choose the send money option. I picked the payment source and the amount. I put in an email address and hit send. I check that email account, accept the money and choose the account for the deposit.

The entire process of getting everything authorized and then waiting for the money to transfer was a complete hassle. But now that it's done, everything is set up for me to transfer money to myself that I can spend almost anywhere in the world without some ridiculous restriction.

The sad news was that by the time I got it all set up two of the four books were no longer available. I was able to order them, but the transaction was never completed. I had to cancel. One of them was a dollar less at another French book store. I ordered that. It was all good. I got three out of the four.

I should mention the currency conversion fee. MOVO charges 3 percent to exchange dollars to Euros or whichever currency. The books I'm buying are between $4 and $6. We're talking about 12 to 18 cents per book. I'm saving well more than that buying them from Europe. So, it's not a problem for my purposes, especially without a monthly fee for the card.

Have a great weekend.

Jury Duty

Around the beginning of March, I got that dreaded letter in the mail: jury duty. The reporting date was April 1st. I was summoned as a trial juror and not as a grand juror. I dreaded it the whole month. Along the way I came up with a brilliant idea: tattoo sleeves. That's for a 20-pack. The 6-pack is cheaper.

When you're picked for a jury, the prosecution and the defense can ask you questions about yourself and your life. I've had to do that. You go up into the jury box for that in front of the judge and the entire court. That would be the perfect time to casually take my jacket off and expose the tattoo sleeves to the shock and condemnation of all. Surely, no one would pick a guy with tattoos up and down both arms, right? Right. The thing that held me back was the possibility of being held in contempt of court. If they thought I was trying to get out of jury duty with a trick, I figured it might be possible to be in contempt. April 1st was a chilly day. Tattoo sleeves are partly for protection from the sun. I decided not to get them. I wouldn't have a good reason to be wearing them like I might in summer. I might get some later as a gag. I have relatives I don't see very often. . .

Part of jury duty is calling the night before. I called. The grand jury was to report at 9 a.m. The trial jurors were not to report that day but were to call after 6 p.m. I was riding past the courthouse around 5 p.m. There were a lot of cars there, though the parking lot wasn't full. Obviously, it was the grand jury. I called later when I got home. The trial jury for this week was dismissed. Yay! I didn't need the tattoo sleeves after all. The best part is I got credit and won't be called again any time soon. It's been years since the last time. Only the people who sent back the form the county mails got credit. People who didn't send it back will have to do jury duty a different week. I bet they wish they'd sent the paper back.

Book Stuff

Progress hasn't been as fast as I'd like on the books and cover fronts, but progress is being made. It seems like things keep getting in the way that weren't there before like the forces of darkness have risen against me. I just have to force a way through, I guess. One of the books I've been putting time into is the concept for the book after AoE. I believe I can make books 2 and 3 have overlapping content. For instance, a character(Keelia) who only appears briefly in book 2 for a few scenes would be doing things that are the story for book 3. In book 3 the main character in book 2(her dad) would appear a few times just like she did in book 2. That way they can't team up and very quickly solve their problems together. Even though the books are a series and not a trilogy, by book 3 it would all fit together. I've been putting a lot of extra work into book 2. I have a lot of ideas written down, but it hasn't quite come together yet. It's close.

As for the covers, my main weakness is the human figure. I can't not have people on the covers. Corel Painter, and other programs, have something called mirror mode. The way it works is that there's an invisible line down the center of a painting/drawing. Anything drawn on one side is mirrored on the other automatically. For characters facing the camera, I can use mirror mode to get the faces symmetrical instead of having to paint/draw each side. It would work for certain buildings, too. I'd still have to do the full work on characters facing to the side or away, but mirror mode is a good trick. The characters would have to be on their own layers for it to work, of course.

Have a great weekend.