Teaser Tuesdays: The Prodigal God
For a study series with some of the gang from my church, I’ve been reading Timothy Keller’s The Prodigal God. In this short but profound book, Keller reexamines the so-called Parable of the Prodigal Son. He points out that the story is really about two sons, the younger brother, who squanders his share of his father’s fortune, and the elder brother, who in the end cannot fathom why his father has readopted the younger. The title of the book alludes to the fact that the father in the story expends lavishly in order to bring the younger brother back into the family.
Before I get to my teaser, however, a heads-up from author Destiny Booze: this is the last week of the 15%-off sale on her romantic suspense novels Altered Beginnings and Predetermined Endings.
Today’s teaser, from page 36 (randomly selected by Random.org) of The Prodigal God:
The hearts of the two brothers were the same… They each wanted to get into a position in which they could tell the father what to do… but one did so by being very bad and the other by being extremely good.
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just follow the directions at the “Teaser Tuesdays” post.
-TimK
Friday Fun: Better Junk Food through Science
As you may know, I do the soccer-dad thing really badly. I do okay as a stay-at-home Dad—except that I always seem to be behind on the housework. But I am so glad I don’t own a minivan! I don’t know how I would cope if I had to cart the neighborhood kids around everywhere. Just dealing with my two plus one or two more (the most that can fit into our old Saturn sedan), just that overwhelms me sometimes. I tell my Beloved to take the car to work, in part because the alternative would be for me to spend 3 hours total driving her back and forth to work. But the real reason is because if I don’t have a car, I can’t be expected to taxi anyone anywhere!
I carry the really-bad-soccer-dad image into the kitchen, where the first thing you’ll notice is that I’m always behind on doing the dishes. The second thing you’ll notice is better-than-average junk food. I love to cook sometimes-elaborate meals, but I rarely have the time or energy. I do, however, throw together simple snacks (usually using prepackaged ingredients) with minimal preparation.
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My Life Playing Musical Chairs: An Interview with Jen Knox
I’m sitting with Jen Knox, author of the indie memoir Musical Chairs, here in my virtual living room today. Hi, Jen.
Hi, Tim.
As you know, I loved Musical Chairs. What does the title allude to?
“Musical Chairs” came from the name of a game, where music plays and kids run around a circle of chairs that is one short of the number of players. When the music stops, someone is left standing, so the goal of the game is to sit in a chair immediately, to be alert and react quickly, to find a place to sit wherever you are. Then the music calls you to your feet again.
In the book, I wanted to retrace my time as a runaway and attempt to recapture my mindset during that time. In a sense, these years reminded me of that game; I felt as though I was always finding a new chair, a new environment or home, and something would inevitably pull me up to run again.
Writing my memoir, digging up the old memories was very emotional for me, but at the same time, I began to understand the people of my past in ways that I hadn’t understood them at the time. Did you have any similar experiences you’d be willing to share?
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25 Things You Should Know about the Original Americans
Photo © 2007 Wally Gobetz CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
And by “original,” I don’t mean the Pilgrims. I don’t mean the Jamestown settlers, who arrived some 13 years earlier. I don’t mean the first permanent Spanish settlement in 1565. I don’t even mean the African slaves who escaped their Spanish captors, who had landed in 1526 in modern South Carolina. Those Spanish shortly left for Haiti, but their ex-slaves stayed and became American immigrants. These ex-slaves were probably the very first non-native settlers of America, the very first true African-Americans.
But what I mean by “original” Americans— I mean those who traveled across the Bering Strait, into modern Alaska, spreading throughout the Americas, settling and developing that land sometime between 12,000 and 40,000 years ago— We don’t really know exactly when. But we do know a bit about these Americans, when they were no longer just settlers, but rather established residents, from the 15′th century on. And we know a bit about how their culture—then a vibrant and living culture—affected what would become our modern American culture, in ways that you may not realize.
Of course, maybe you are already aware of these bits of knowledge, which I’ve gleaned from my current non-fiction read, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, by James W. Loewen, (which I should have read many years ago, but which unfortunately is still not completely out of date, even though I’m reading an earlier edition than the latest). Even if you know these, most of us are basically ignorant of them, never having gotten past the myths, popular legends, and one-dimensional factoids.
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Teaser Tuesdays: Lies My Teacher Told Me
After surveying eighteen leading high school American history texts, James W. Loewen has concluded that not one does a decent job of making history interesting or memorable. Marred by an embarrassing combination of blind patriotism, mindless optimism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies, these books omit almost all the ambiguity, passion, conflict, and drama from our past.
I finally picked up Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (an earlier edition than the one pictured above), which has been sitting on my shelf for years. As a writer, I haven’t been reading enough non-fiction. So I started a non-fiction read that I can really get into.
Loewen’s thesis is that the way history is taught is too loaded down with factoids, not built up enough with drama— I know that my high-school history was taught that way. I hated it. It wasn’t until years after I graduated high school that I began to discover history, because history is full of drama. Never are our historical figures as one-dimensional as we try to make them appear. They are never pure “heroes” or “villains,” but rather deep, realistic characters, full of conflict. And Loewen delves deep into those conflicts.
I’m hooked.
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Teaser Tuesdays: Truffles by the Sea
Determined to turn her life around, Gaby Flores moves to a beachfront loft, takes on a new motto–Be gullible no more–and begins to rebuild her flower store while searching for Mr. So Right. But when a lawsuit, an eviction notice, a near-empty bank account, and quirky neighbors invade her beachy world, not even chocolate can solve her worries as her fledgling faith is put to the test. (From the back cover.)
I managed to mooch a copy of Julie Carobini’s second book off BookMooch. Her first, Chocolate Beach, I had trouble getting into, but I ended up rating it 4/5 stars. Truffles by the Sea, however, is drawing me in from the first page— I don’t know whether that’s because I already feel I know the characters, or whether because it simply has a beginning that grips me more, this time from Gaby’s perspective instead of from Bri’s. Whichever, I’m already enjoying it. Hopefully it will fulfill and exceed my expectations, and leave me singing its praises.
Today’s teaser, from page 8 (randomly selected by Random.org):
A girl’s–no, this girl’s–got her pride. Without that, thanks to the fire that leveled my apartment building, I got nothin’.
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just follow the directions at the “Teaser Tuesdays” post.
-TimK
The Great Water Panic of 2010
Photo © 2009 Éole Wind CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
“Always bet on stupidity.”
I heard that quote last week on a classic episode of Babylon 5, “Ceremonies of Light and Dark.” Fascinating that it should be so apropos.
I first heard about the water emergency Saturday afternoon when my daughter’s school phoned us with a pre-recorded message. They said there had been a break in a water main in Weston, and we should boil water from our faucet before using it. (Actually, I’m softening the wording here. The actual message was more in the form of an order, with unspeakable consequences should I disobey, like storm troopers coming to arrest me if I should disregard the “boil water order.”)
I immediately hit the Internet and New England Cable News for more information. Indeed a water main in Weston had sprung a catastrophic leak, affecting every city and town from there to Boston. Fortunately, they were able to switch over to backup reservoirs in order to maintain water pressure. Unfortunately, this reservoir water is untreated and has not been tested for safety, so federal regulations require that they promptly use words like “contaminated” and warn you to boil your water (like in a third-world country).
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Now’s Your Chance to Get Back at Me
Just a quick announcement, since I was feeling ill this week and didn’t get to write a proper Friday post.
If you want to get back at me for the picky comments I’ve been making on everyone’s books over at Goodreads, or if you thought one of my reviews was petty and opinionated (which it probably was), or if you’d just like to see me get taken down a notch, now’s your chance.
You can revel as Paula B picks over (i.e., “critiques”) part of From the Ashes of Courage on her “Slush Pile Workshop #3″ podcast. It’s the romance snippet under the title “Gail Bishop.” I’m sure she was gentle, but I probably won’t be listening to it any time soon, because I’m such a big wimp. (Yeah, I can dish it out, but I can’t take it.)
So let me know how it went, eh? 
-TimK
EDIT: Apparently, it wasn’t clear that I wrote the above tongue-in-cheek.
The real reasons I submitted the snippet to Paula’s show were (1) to support her podcast and (2) to perhaps get a little PR for me and my work. (I hope that doesn’t sound too mercenary.)
Truthfully, I’ve been wrestling with depression, and I need to keep my spirits up in order to make progress on my current writing projects. So if I delay listening to Paula’s comments, it’s just so that I don’t have to think about them right now.
I do hope to listen to them eventually, though. And even though I consider Paula my friend, because we’ve known each other online for years now, that doesn’t mean we’ll see eye-to-eye. She’ll probably be speaking from the viewpoint of a potential publisher or agent, going through the slush pile, and I don’t ever expect any of my current work to end up in a slush pile. (The reason why is a whole other conversation.) I also don’t really care right now about impressing publishers or agents, because I care about impressing certain, specific readers. (Yeah, I know; publishers and agents are supposed to know how to impress the readers, because they’re the experts. And if you truly believe that, I have a bridge to sell ya, goin’ cheap. Yet another whole other conversation.)
So when I listen to her comments, I’ll do so in the spirit of receiving a critique. I’ll compare her values to the characteristics that I admire in my favorite authors’ work, and if I think her suggestions would make for a better rendition of those characteristics, I’ll consider implementing them.
One more thought that came to me recently: I adore Holly Lisle’s novels. I adore even her early novels, which I can tell by reading them are less sophisticated than her more recent work. I adore her work, because she stresses in her writing many of the same characteristics that I want to see in what I read. And I subscribe to the advice, write what you would enjoy reading. Now, Holly does not read unpublished work by other writers, so I have no expectations that she’ll critique my work. But if she were to critique something I wrote, I would hang on every word, and I wouldn’t even feel bad about any criticism she would give me, because I look up to her in admiration. Now, I also look up to Paula in admiration, but not for her novels. So really any advice she—or an agent or editor—gives on my writing, I filter it through my own value system. They may or may not have a point.
(Last edited: May 2)
Teaser Tuesdays: Musical Chairs
Some weeks (or months) ago Jen Knox and I swapped memoirs. She sent me a copy of her book Musical Chairs, which explores her family’s history of mental health diagnoses, her years of strip-dancing, alcoholism, and estrangement, and her struggle for reconciliation. (That’s from the cover.)
I also sent her a copy of Love through the Eyes of an Idiot, the story of how I flitted from romantic obsession to romantic obsession, until I made a fundamental change in my life; then I met my Beloved.
This past weekend, just as I had started reading her book, Jen sent me an email about mine:
I finally posted my review of your delightful book. Oh how it made me remember how lucky I am to have found Chris after all the relationships (if you can call them that) that came before him. He thanks you. I thank you, for writing a great read.
Thanks, Jen! That really lifted my spirits. Really. Do a good deed today: email your favorite author and tell her how much you enjoyed a book she wrote.
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Why Do You Write?
Photo © 2008 Ed Yourdon CC BY-SA 2.0
A number of people who follow this blog not only enjoy reading, but also write. In general, I’m finding that a good number of the people who participate in online reading groups are also writers. Some are published writers; some, freelance writers; some, indie writers; some, aspiring writers. Most of us are some combination of those.
This led me to ask a fundamental question. I’ve always assumed I knew the answer. But after considering it, now I’m thinking I’ve probably assumed too much.
The question is: Why do you write? Not just what do you hope to achieve in your writing career? But what does writing do for you? And why is that important to you?
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