EM Drive and Sedition

A short while ago I mentioned the Cannae and EM drives and that it appeared the Cannae Drive was going to space. The EM Drive is making headlines this time. NASA has had a paper peer reviewed and published. They detected thrust. A lot of skeptical skeptics are still skeptical, because the EM Drive gives the appearance of breaking the laws of physics as we understand them. However, a scientist named Mike McCulloch has a theory that explains how it could work with know physics via Unruh Radiation. The next step is to test it in space. Rumors say China and the U.S. military have already done some tests in space. Who knows. If it works, it would be a breakthrough and make space travel much easier.

In more dangerous news, the Democrat party has revealed its true colors as the party of hate and intolerance. They and their allies are inciting people to protest and riot against democracy and inciting others to engage in sedition by intimidating and attempting to coerce the electoral college not to vote the will of the American people. They're also funding or attempting to fund recounts. The main criticism of electronic voting machines has been that they can't be recounted, since there's no paper trail. Why do they want a recount, when there are no ballots to recount?

These efforts are engineered to overthrow the election results and overthrow the will of the American people. Democrats lost fair and square but refuse to accept it. If they're successful, they will have overthrown democracy by changing the results of a legal election in a democracy. It would be the end of democracy in the U.S. There would be no going back, if the line is crossed. Both major parties already hate elections and cheat in them. The Hillary campaign was caught this year on video trying to rig the presidential election(Caution: a bit of adult language). The liberal media refused to cover it, because they're actively engaged in deceiving the public and have been for years.

If you're a praying person, this is the time to pray hard. The Democrat party is attempting to overthrow democracy in the U.S.

In book news, I'm still going through the rough draft and making final polishes.

Have a good weekend.

A Real Leader?

I finished going through Book 2 and have barely begun going through it one more time. The hard part is over. It shouldn't take too long, if I can make the time to sit down and get it done. Now on to the situation in the U.S.

I could make an argument that Ronald Reagan was the last truly American president. I think it's more obvious that he was the last leader elected to the oval office. Everyone since him looks back and tries to invoke him. If they were leaders, they wouldn't have to do that. They would simply lead. So, we haven't had a leader in the White House since Reagan. Trump could be the first leader since Reagan. He gives the appearance of being a leader. We'll have to wait and see how events unfold to know for sure.

Will he drain the swamp? To do that he has to work with swamp creatures in Washington who don't want to lose their habitat. If he has to work with them in order to get rid of them, they're not going to let it happen. How else could he drain it? It might happen something like this. One day we could wake up to find a breaking news story about a prominent leader of congress who has been exposed as a corrupt criminal. It would be someone no one suspects, possibly a member of an important committee or even a committee head. No one would know where the leak came from. I would guess the congressman would be a Republican. They would immediately suspect Democrats. They would also suspect other factions within the Republican party. I would be Rep vs Dem or Neocons vs Tea Party(Are they still around?) or Reps vs whoever. If there's retaliation and a second member of congress goes down, it would be like dominoes.

Or it could happen more quietly. We could wake up one day and see a prominent member of congress announcing he's not running in the next election, because he wants to spend more time with his family. Other congressmen would find out that he was being forced to resign and the scandal was being kept quiet. More resignations would follow.

Or Trump could be at a routine press conference or state of the union address and start listing names and crimes and say he has the proof in his office.

No matter what the first domino is, to drain the swamp Trump would have to stand up and lead to get the rest of them. It would have to begin in the Republican party.

That's just my opinion. It could work out some other way like Wikileaks. This is food for thought. The main point is that for the first time since Reagan we might see a real leader in the oval office. I hope so.

Still Free

This week a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. Living under the Obama administration has been a burden. He broke his first campaign promise less than a day after taking office, and it was to his own people. Since then, it's been scandal after scandal with a corrupt congress failing to act, because of political reasons. Democrats don't honor the U.S. Constitution, and Republicans thought they could use the scandals to get votes. Obama has defended Islamic terrorism his entire term in office while declaring Christians to be terrorists(#72). Agencies like the IRS have been buying military ammunition. A lot of the ammo purchase stories are exaggerated or false. However, the IRS is an accounting agency with no enforcement powers. Why do accountants need guns? Hmm. Obama has boycotted the national day of prayer. The largest genocide of Christians in history is going on right now, and he never mentions it and has never been seen doing anything to stop it. I could go on and on.

The atmosphere of intolerance in the U.S. toward Christianity has grown the last eight years. From my observations we haven't had a Christian president since Ronald Reagan. But the presidents between Reagan and Obama were not actively anti-Christian the way Obama has been. There's a difference.

It looked like Hillary was going to be another Obama. It looked like she was going to be even more radical. She said during her campaign that Christians were going to have to change their beliefs. Video here. Another way of saying it is that she thinks her word is greater than God's word. The United States was founded by people fleeing religious persecution by tyrants who were trying to force them to change their religious beliefs. Hillary is the exact kind of person this country was founded to get away from!

The polls were saying she was going to be elected. The closer election day drew the more of a burden I felt. Between the ammo purchases and the declaration that Christians are terrorists and Hillary stating that Christians would be forced to change their beliefs, it was only a matter of time until the persecution became more physical.

The polls were wrong. Were they false propaganda the whole time? Were the pre-Brexit polls propaganda? Trump was elected. The Kenyan has 69 days left in office. Yes, he was born in Kenya. The corrupt Democrats and Republicans through spiritual ignorance failed to block him from running for office, when he was clearly not Constitutionally eligible. The Constitution is our covenant with God. Putting someone in office who was outside of covenant nullified a lot of blessings. If we don't follow our covenant, we don't get the blessings just like ancient Israel. According to the Bible, being ruled by a foreigner is a curse, and being ruled by a woman is curse. It looked like we were going from one curse to another.

But a lot of people have been praying. Our prayers were answered. If everything goes as it should, America will once again have a president who is under the covenant. Blessings that have been blocked will be able to flow. Pandering to terrorists will end. Persecution of Christians within the U.S. should greatly reduce, although the Democrats are extremely intolerant of other views.

Knowing that I'll have a president who doesn't hate me for my religious beliefs is such a relief. Is Trump a Christian? I have no idea. We'll have to wait and see the fruit. He's said some good things and some bad things. What I do know is he's not a muslim who hates Christians.

Up until now I've been assuming Christians would be persecuted in the U.S. before the Tribulation starts. Is it possible the persecution won't begin until the Anti-Christ is in power? Matthew 24:14 And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come. America is the largest exporter and funder of missionaries in the world. Is it possible that God will keep us free in order to fulfill that verse? I don't know. It's something to think about. If the dollar crashed, our freedom could vanish overnight. Will that too be delayed until the end? These are some strange thoughts.

World Champions

 The Chicago Cubs won the 2016 World Series. Rejoice! As I mentioned a long time ago, at the end of 2014 I was so disgusted that Braves' manager Fredi Gonzalez wasn't fired that I decided in 2015 I was going to switch to my second favorite team the Cubs no matter how many times they lost or how many times the Braves won and follow them full time rather than the Braves. It was very hard to do that when the Braves had a good team, and the Cubs were lovable losers. Then a miracle occurred. During the off season between 2014 and 2015, the Braves sold off most of the team. The Cubs acquired a new manager and new players. They made it to the playoffs in 2015. It would turn out that 2014 was the best year to make my number two team into my number one. I never had to worry about how many games the Cubs lost that year or how many games the Braves won. It turned out the exact opposite of how I thought it would.

Instead of following the Cubs on the side like I normally would, I was there for 2015 and 2016. The World Series win is amazing. When I was growing up, television channels TBS and WGN were broadcast nationally on cable and were called "superstations". A lot of people became Braves and Cubs fans. I didn't really watch them until the 90s. Back then, I mostly watched the Braves, but the Cubs were always there as my number two. I don't consider myself a hardcore, lifelong Cubs fan. However, I've been kindly disposed to them for a long time.

Destiny. This was the Cubs' years. Not even Joe Maddon's mismanagement in game 7 could derail a historic victory. After a solid year of managing, he choked when the pressure was the greatest. I have a video planned about that. For years, I've been wanting the Braves to win one more World Series before the Tribulation. Their owners aren't interested enough in that. Destiny. Their inability to do the right thing forced me to make the full-time switch to the Cubs before they started winning. Even if it wasn't the Braves, I still got to experience a World Series victory. And this year doesn't look like it's going to be the last time. It's amazing.

Eventually, Fredi Gonzalez was fired. I've watched some Braves games this year but not like I used to. The people who own the Braves don't care the way fans do. They care about profitability instead.

Despite watching the World Series, I was able to work on Book 2. It's going pretty well.

Have a great weekend.

Pitch to Publicity 2016

I got a little side-tracked by Pitch to Publication 2016, #p2p16. I recognized three of the editors with a couple more being kind of familiar maybe. I found out about it the day before the deadline but didn't have time to put something together. Due to lack of submissions, they extended the deadline by a day. Even with that, I was still rushed and didn't have a proper pitch letter. Remember the YA book I mention sometimes but haven't done the final edit on? It's in good enough shape that I sent the first 5 pages to see what would happen. Since the book wasn't quite done, I thought maybe I should work on enough of it to cover a larger sample in case an editor asked for one.

I added the editors I submitted the sample to on Twitter. They each said something like "all the submissions are great". All of them? Alarm bells. Then I started seeing things like "great pitch, great pages, too much work" and "great pitch, great pages, too much work for a month". Alarm bells. The Archive, Blog Posts and Success Stories pages on the site are all blank, and this is not a new event. Evidently, no one who has done this has gotten a book deal. Alarm bells.

Finally one of the editors tweeted to the effect that the manuscripts need to be grammatically and stylistically perfect. My comma usage is never grammatically perfect. That's what editors are for. :) There was no explanation of exactly how the whole process is supposed to work. Specifically, there's no FAQ. For example, they asked for 5 pages but have no margin or word count specification. Alarm bells. Etc.

After absorbing this for a few days and reading tweets, which you can check out for yourself by following their Twitter links on the Editor page, I realized something. They're not looking for the best books. They're looking for books that need the least amount of work. Basically, they want books that are already agent ready or need an absolutely minimum amount of editing.

It's pitched as a helping hand, but the writers who need this the most are automatically disqualified by the 4-week editing time frame. The people who benefit from it are the ones who don't need this kind of help. They're already agent ready whether they realize it or not. As I write this, I'm still waiting to hear from two editors that haven't said they're done going through submissions to see if they want a larger sample. This late in the week, I don't really expect to hear anything.

So, if this doesn't benefit writers, who does it benefit? Follow the money. It's a publicity gimmick to drum up business for the editors, especially during a slow time of the year like the holidays, when writers are spending money on everything but editing services. It's essentially free advertising. However. It's not a pure scam. It may not even be a deliberate scam. It may just be poorly designed. One month is too short a time frame. To get the best books instead of the easiest books, it needs two or three.

At least one editor said she was going to send feedback to the authors. Submissions are limited to 100 per editor. Only two editors were listed on the site as having that many, although one mentioned receiving over 90. I don't know how many the one doing feedback had, but sending feedback is an incredible amount of work. I don't think a scammer would work that hard. Even if the whole thing is just a publicity stunt, some of the editors are putting real work into it.

Anyway. I know I should be more cynical about "free" opportunities and not be so disappointed, but I found this whole process to be extremely discouraging. Messengers isn't widely commercial, but the YA book is. I was hoping that somebody would see something of value in my work, even if it was a little rough, and be willing to take a harder look. To find out that I'm automatically eliminated and never had a chance to begin with really sucks. If I'd found out even a week earlier, I could have polished my terrible pitch letter and thought through some of the risky things in the first 5 pages such as the real jargon I used. Authentic and immersive world building to be sure but very, very risky for such a conservative industry. To an editor who hasn't seen my other books, it was probably an alarm bell.

The point is I got a little done on Book 2 but not what I should have. I tried to get the break I needed, and it didn't work.

Have a great weekend.

Behind the Scenes a Little

The weather turned last night. It was unseasonably warm with temperatures over 80(26.67C). Today it's about 65(18.33C). Why is that important? Because the cool front came with wind that knocked the power out and interfered with the blog. I don't have everything in life scheduled, but the blog is one thing I have a set time for.

I transferred the corrections from the printout of Book2 to the computer. Some of it was simple like fixing commas and typos. I had things like "barely had barely" and "be been" where I'd rewritten sentences and missed a deletion. They don't show up in spell correct. Not that that always helps. Part of working on books 2 and 3 required checking things in The Rise of Aethan Lightbringer. Right away I found a spelling mistake that spell correct showed the whole time, but somehow I didn't see it.

Other parts of transferring fixes to computer involved changing paragraphs or how a page flows. I had this one really weird sentence to start a paragraph.

“Eleven at last count,” Mussarev said. “As long as we were being bombed, we lost no one. ..."

What? That doesn't make sense, considering how many people died at that time. What was this guy thinking when he said that? I spent several minutes reading the context and pondering. He stepped off stage for a few minutes while the dialogue continued without him. When he came back, he kept going with his own thought, and I'm not sure what that was. I think he meant they lost no one in the air. I ended up deleting part of it and saving the original to a Remnants file to go over later. My Remnants file is a file where I save things, if I have to delete paragraphs or pages or sections. When I was getting back into writing, I hated deleting something in case I needed it later. It made it mentally easier to delete things into which lots of work had gone. I don't use one any more. If it needs deleting, I just delete it.

Something more disturbing was a discrepancy between the printout and the computer file. I use OpenOffice. There have been instances over time where I thought something had been changed by the program during the save process but couldn't prove it. This time the printout did not match the source file, and I don't remember fixing anything after printing. The printout said "is". The book's file said "his". His was the correct word. I've been thinking about getting MS Word for a while, because OpenOffice won't save the settings for widows and orphans. Maybe I should think harder about that. It's annoyed me the whole time I've used it and interferes with how a book looks in print.

So, the corrections are all done. The next step is to go through and work on things that are too big for the correction stage. I did a bit of it with the page flow changes I mentioned. Sometimes an entire page doesn't quite work. Usually, it's too choppy or feels rushed and needs a few extra sentences to smooth out the flow of it.

I'm still trying to get YouTube videos made. I need more wardrobe for the Messengers channel, and I've spent a lot of money lately that I hope will pay off in a few months. I checked a second-hand store this week but wasn't able to find what I needed, although I did pick up a shirt I can use later for a gag. One of the problems is I don't want to rush to get it all started only not to have enough time to get a video out every week. It takes a lot of time to make and edit and upload videos. I've been doing tons of research in the evenings. I can't do it all.

That's mostly where things are at the moment. Have a great weekend.

More of an Update

I finished up the first going through of Book 2 last week. This week has mostly been hours and hours of research I had to do for something else. It's more or less finished now. I should be able to apply it to the YouTube channels in future videos. I'll have more about that later, if it works out the way I'm hoping.

Book 2 needs to be gone through again. I'm starting to think about the YA book. It's getting closer.

Congrats to the Cubs! They beat the Giants to advance to the next round of the MLB playoffs. I was hoping they would play the Giants. They looked like an easy team to beat. The next round should be harder. They're playing the Dodgers.

It's been a bit of a long week. The tired had set in by last night. This was more of an update than a full blog. Last week's was a bit long. Maybe this one balances it out. :)

Have a great weekend.