Dear Brother Faith Seed

Dear Brother Faith Seed,

I saw you on Christian TV asking for a $1,000 "faith seed" to help further your ministry. You said if I sent you $1,000, I would receive a blessing of $10,000, $100,000, $1,000,000 or, who knows, maybe even $10,000,000. There was just no telling. It sounded farfetched, but your testimony and the testimonials of other people that you presented about how God did it it for you were very impressive. By the end of the show, you had me convinced to send you a $1,000 faith seed. Unfortunately, I'm unable to do that at this time. However, I've figured out a way that would allow me to send you much more than a mere $1,000.

Since the testimony from your own mouth before so many witnesses clearly demonstrates you have the faith to make this work, I know you'll be able to take advantage of this opportunity. Instead of me sending you $1,000 and receiving at least $10,000 from God, you will send me the $10,000 blessing up front. I call this a "faith bush." Like a burning bush, your faith to send me $10,000 will shine like a light in a desert world as an example of faith to everyone.

Once I receive the $10,000, I will immediately tithe $1,000 to your ministry for which I would receive a blessing. I will also send you the $1,000 faith seed you requested in the first place! After receiving $10,000 from you, my faith would be extremely strong, and I would be ready to receive a blessing of $10,000, $100,000, $1,000,000 or, who knows, maybe $10,000,000. There's just no telling, is there? Once I receive the minimum $10,000 return on my faith seed, I will send you $9,000. Thus you would have the $10,000 back from me plus my $1,000 tithe plus whatever blessing you received for sending the faith bush in the first place. Because I'm much less fortunate than you financially, the $10,000 faith bush you send me will enable you to receive additional blessings on that merit alone. You could receive $100,000, $1,000,000, $10,000,000 or, who knows, maybe even $100,000,000. There's just no telling.

If I received even more money, I would tithe the extra blessing into your ministry and give even more faith seeds, which would cause me to receive even more blessings. This would start a blessing cycle that would allow me give untold amounts of money to your ministry. Think of what an exciting new outreach program this would be!

Knowing how strong your faith is in sowing financial seeds, I anticipate hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,

Matthew Jenkins

99 Luftballons

99 Luftballons by Nena was one of the songs I liked in the 80s, and it's aged well. (English version: 99 Red Balloons.) It made the "news" last weekend on Yahoo after someone did a cover of it using red balloons as instruments. I didn't particularly care for it but a tip of the cap for the work that went into it. The German version was always cooler by the way. Never let them tell you otherwise, because they're wrong!

Some things can only be written in certain time periods. That song was a Cold War song the same way WarGames was a Cold War movie. They captured the threat of nuclear holocaust that loomed over us all the time. How do you explain the zeitgeist of it to someone who didn't live through it? There's nothing like it in today's culture. Terrorism? Too local and limited. Climate change: too vague and debunkable. Global thermonuclear war was big and civilization ending. It could have happened overnight with no warning. We'll never wake up one morning and gasp in horror to find the glaciers melted and the beaches flooded. And if we did, would it end civilization? No.

One thing today and Cold War times have in common is conspiracies. Back then they were communist conspiracies. Today they're government conspiracies. Why can't Sept 11 simply be an attack by religious fanatics? Government incompetence explains it. Why all the alternative theories?
Isaiah 8:12 Do not speak of a cabal, for everything this people speaks of is a cabal; do not fear what they fear and do not be overwhelmed by it.
Later it would turn out the Cold War was largely propaganda. The Soviet Union was decades behind the U.S. technologically. Having the government lie to me about that creates instant skepticism about terrorism and climate change. Mmhmm. Been there, done that. And don't forget. Al Gore bought a building in San Francisco at sea level.

Anyway. One of the hard things about Messengers is capturing the zeitgeist of an era. King Afton's time has a different spirit than King Terfel's. Even the time after the return of the gifts should be different than the period immediately before it. That's one of the things I'm focusing on for the sequel. If it's another world with another culture, it should feel that way. There should be a touch of kulturkampf for the reader. I got to use zeitgeist and kulturkampf at the same time. What a beautiful day.

I'm also focusing on little things. Does Ceinwen have a hobby? She was a herb healer and later a seamstress, but what does she do on the weekends? When Joe builds the house, it's mentioned in passing that he needs north light for painting, but he never has time to do that. In the space novel, we'll see some of his paintings. Maybe we should see one now in the sequel.

What I'm Not Working On
Something I'm not working on is a parody about a man named Hairy Plodder. Hairy's a balding, middle-aged wizard who used to have adventures but now spends most of his time drinking. He's put on weight since his younger days, and his drinking has gotten him banned from setting foot on the campus of Swinecorns, his old wizarding school. With all the gold he inherited from his parents, he bought the house where he grew up. He gets drunk and passes out under the stairs where he used to sleep. Times were tough then, but it reminds him of when he was young and had so much potential. While not drinking, he runs around trying to rescue people who don't need rescuing, because he's convinced an evil wizard named Moldemart had a son who's out to destroy the people around him.
I bet it would be a best seller.

Trudging Forward

This is a pair of shorts I picked up earlier in the summer. The stitching for a buttonhole is there, but there's no hole for the button. Cutting one was easy. Then I found out the zipper was broken. This is kind of symbolic of how the whole year's been. I'm really looking forward to some kind of breakthrough.

Somewhere around June I changed prices on books 2, 3 and 4 to 99 cents for a while. I forgot to mention it the other day, but they're now back to normal price, $2.99. Amazon wanted me to go $3.99 for maximum profit. Interesting, but no. I'm starting to see a lot of books for $3.99. Still, no.

The mystery/romance is in a state of hibernation while I decide what to do with it based on a piece of negative feedback concerning an aspect of the story. At one point there's a bit of supernatural intervention to make sure the heroine chooses the right romantic interest. In so many words, a test reader didn't think marriage is important enough for God to do that, or people wouldn't be marrying the wrong person all the time. Personally, I think God intervenes all the time. It's just not as blatant as I portrayed it. I've been leaning toward making it less supernatural and more like what we see in real life.
I would've gotten more done if I hadn't broken a tooth and had to wait until I could get an appointment. Talk about tired. I felt worn out almost all the time. I'm feeling better but not 100%.
I follow this guy on twitter who has tons of money. One Sunday he tweeted that he broke a tooth. About five hours later he tweeted again that the dentist had fixed it. Dentists around here don't work on Fridays much less Sundays. Wouldn't it be nice to have that kind of money? :)

I've been working on the sequel, although the tooth interfered a lot. I'm trying to raise the quality of my work. Something I'm paying a lot of attention to is structure. Novels, plays and movies typically follow a standard 3-act structure, which can be broken down into minute details that I wasn't aware of until recently. Book 1 has two distinct storylines. I wasn't sure if the whole book should be in three acts or if each storyline should. I asked story structure guru, K.M. Weiland, who wrote a book on structure and was generous enough to answer my questions. There's more than one way to do it. I'm treating each storyline almost like it's its own book. Is hearing this like watching sausage being made? My approach was to make two extra copies of the rough draft and cut them up until each held one storyline. I've gone through one. I'm still going through the other.
It's been hard not to make corrections, so I've kept the master file open in the background. In one place a character is talking candidly about the past. There's a sentence that said, "I've evil done things" instead of "I've done evil things." How does that happen? That's probably the worst thing I've found. If it doesn't sound great, it's a rough draft sentence. It may not make it to the final draft. Literally every sentence has to be gone over.

Until next time.

Always

I don't listen to secular music, but I hear it at stores and restaurants sometimes. The other day I heard a song that sounded like it was about a man in love with a lawnmower. It was too noisy to hear most of the words, but the chorus was loud enough. It went something like this:
I'm loving you, mower, mower, mower.
I'm loving you, mower, mower, mower.
As someone who cuts a lot of grass, I'm curious as to which model he was singing about. Maybe Weird Al knows.

[I had a fun parody of Kristian Stanfill's Always here, which is where the blog title originated. It was about Bilbo's love of food and his scoring free food off Gandalf. However, someone was offended. If one person is offended, there's bound to be more. I'd like to get to the point where I make enough writing that I can do it full time. I won't get there by alienating potential readers.
Romans 14:21 What is good is not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that causes your brother to stumble.
If parodies of Christian songs cause some people to stumble, it's better to remove it.]

Book Stuff
An intrepid test reader for the mystery/romance pointed out a sentence that was "borderline run-on". That happens when I try to cram multiple sentences that either don't flow together very well or would turn into a boring, lengthy paragraph into something that's shorter and hopefully sounds better.

The intrepid test reader(You know who you are!) pointed out the sentence at the end of a pile of corrections. I proofread. How could there still be errors? Shouldn't the book be Error Free(TM) by now?  By the time I got to the borderline run-on sentence, it was comical the number and types of fixes I had to do. The test reader's wording made me laugh. For fixes that are more than simple things like a missing comma, I email back what I've done to correct them. For that sentence I sent back what might be my new catchphrase: Borderline run-on. That's how I roll.

Too geeky? It made me laugh, although I never heard back on it.

I've been working on the Messengers sequel. I ran into a problem. Something was prophesied in Call to Selah that I tried to put in too early. I had two choices: alter CtS or alter the sequel. After talking to a couple of readers and praying, the solution was to alter the sequel. I just realized I forgot to tell you that the rough draft is finished. I finished it the other day. As I've been going through the finished rough draft, I've been fixing that prophesy problem. It's going to add an exra scene that still needs to be written. There's another unrelated scene that I probably need to add in. We'll see. I've also been removing some background characters that were redundant. Another character was already doing their job. I actually caught that during the writing. I think I'm past the point where I stopped referring to them. So, it's moving along. I'll let you know how it's going when there's more to tell.

It was like the 70s

Last night was like the 70s as I ran from store to store trying to find that one specific object before all the stores closed. Along the way I saw this:

Yesterday was Aug 7. Halloween is almost three months away. There was a whole section of Halloween candy. In August! Why?

I got an email from Walmart back in June for summer clearance items. It was barely summer, even in the south. And they were doing clearance? It was crazy. If I'd had money to burn, the canoe/kayaks did look pretty good, but that's not the point. Like the Halloween candy, it was far too soon.

Book Stuff
I have the mystery/romance in the hands of tester readers. I'm still not sure the book works, but we'll see what they say.
I just about had the rough draft of the first sequel book done when I ran into a problem that made me want to throw cotton balls at a window. I have this long storyline involving Etan that contradicts a prophecy about him from the original series. Aw, man. The choices are ugly. I could alter the original series. Argh! I could alter the storyline. Difficult. I could leave it and do an Author's Note explaining the change. Disgusting. I don't like any of the choices, but something must be done. I was talking to a reader(also a test reader for the mystery/romance) about it and got some helpful feedback to ponder. I was leaning toward altering the original series, but I need to think about different angles over the weekend.

Words of Wisdom
Getting upset about something you can't change is like throwing cotton balls at a window.

80s Music

I was in Fred's a while back. If you have don't have Fred's where you live, they're kind of like a miniature department store. I haven't heard the term department store in a long time, but Google assures me they still exist in the current century. So, I was in Fred's, and their ambient music was 80s music. A Men at Work song came on that I recognized. I didn't have a lot of albums during the 80s, but that song was from one that I actually had. If you lived in the 80s, you know it was like every 5th song was a Michael Jackson song. A lot of songs never made it to radio. The Men at Work song was one of those. It was never played on air during the 80s. That made me wonder something. People today don't know what was on the radio back then. Since that song didn't make it to radio, is it really an authentic 80s song?

It was made during the 80s. It came out during the 80s. But is it authentic 80s? Nobody but people who bought the album ever heard it. Does it really count? The kids today listening to 80s music don't know the difference. It's all 80s music to them. I got to thinking about that.

Back in 2013 or maybe 2012 I was at Burger King. They were playing 80s music. A Duran Duran song that I hadn't heard since it was on the radio in the 80s came on. That was the first time that had happened to me. It's hard to describe the feeling I got. Burger King was a place I went during the 80s, so I was in an 80s-type setting. Music can trigger a lot of things in a person. Hearing that song again took me back to the point in time when I used to hear it. It was like I was seeing myself then and in the present. It was like the song put me in two time periods at once. It was extremely strange. I've had that happen a few times since but never as jarringly as that first time.

I've decided that the Men at Work song I heard at Fred's, even though it was never on the radio back in the day, is indeed an authentic 80s song. The kids today can listen to the old music and enjoy it. They're just doing it out of context. They don't have the 80s experience that goes with that music. The setting in which they're listening to it is out of context.
It makes me wonder if older people thought about things like that when I was listening to classic rock.

Book Stuff
I've gone through the proof copy of the mystery/romance and fixed things and ordered the updated version. It'll probably get here Monday. The plan is to mail it out right away to test readers and see what they think. I still have doubts about it. Ideally, I'd like to find an agent for it, if I can, though that might be very difficult.
I've been working on the Messengers sequel. I'm very close to the end. It's going to be a lot of work to get into shape, once the rough draft is done.

Seeing Some Progress

I read a book not long ago by William Woodall that was set in Texas. Somebody in the book made brisket, which I had to look up, because I'm from the south. I don't know what all people out west eat. I forget exactly what the definition was, but it's basically some kind of beef. So, I was at the store recently and noticed some pulled beef brisket in barbeque sauce. I had to get it to see what brisket is. Well, hmm, it isn't different than normal barbequed beef. I've been making barbeque sandwiches with it.
Here's the point. I had a barbeque sandwich with barbeque potato chips on the side. It made me wonder something. Is eating a barbeque sandwich with barbeque potato chips too southern?

Anyway, the forces of darkness have been fighting me tooth and nail on the writing front lately. I could use prayer for that and prayer in general. It seems like it's been one roadblock after another. I need a breakthrough in some area.

There's been some good news. A cold front from Canada has moved in bringing lower temperatures and lower humidity. It's July in Georgia, and it's been in the 70s and 80s without the oppressive humidity we normally have. (That's 21-26+ degrees in Celsius.) The high today is 73o(22.78C), and tomorrow is about the same. The nights have been blessedly cool. The weather feels miraculous.

I've been wrestling a bit with the ending for the first book in the Messengers sequel and decided to change it because the original idea didn't seem dramatic enough. I think I have it now. I just need to force some time to finish it.

And, I've finally gotten back to the mystery/romance and read it through making corrections along the way. I finished that last night but still need to transfer the changes to computer. I printed it out to read so I could work on it anywhere. Plus, there's something about going over a hard copy that's more real than doing it on the computer.
I still don't have a title for it, but I think it works. I wasn't sure it would. It seems to flow along once I get past the first few pages, which makes me worry about the first few pages. They set the stage for later. I'm just not sure that's enough to grab a reader's attention. The first bit of suspense doesn't happen until page 4. I need to make sure people get that far. I'll have to think about it more. Right now, the plan is to get the changes done then let someone else read it while I work on the sequel to Messengers.