The e-Book Chronicles, Part V

Well, creating my Epub file using the converter at Lulu.com proved to be a bit of an adventure ... of the trial-and-error type. Fortunately, they provide a fairly thorough guide (click on the "download the guide" button) that does a decent job of walking you through the process.

The first thing you have to know about is using Microsoft Word styles, because that's how Lulu's conversion software knows where your book title, chapter titles, and any subheadings are. It uses them to build the .ncx file, which is the digital table of contents for your Epub file. Your book won't be accepted by any of the online retailers if it doesn't have a properly working .ncx file, so this is important information to have. Here again, the Lulu guide explains this pretty well, and even includes screen shots from your desktop--well, if you're using  a Windows machine, that is--to ease you through the process.

So far, so good. The next thing you've got to do is to take out all the extra hard returns that you probably put into your document in order to get the various title elements to show up on the page looking cute. Unfortunately, these elements are going to display differently to readers, depending on which device they're using to read your book. So, in the name of functionality, you may very well lose some of the "pretty" you worked so hard to put into your document. In the case of my novel, it wasn't too big an issue, since it's all text with very few overt design elements. I had to tinker with this a bit, taking Lulu's suggestion of using

line breaks (shift + enter) instead of hard returns to situate title elements on the page. Once I got the hang of that, I was able to mostly get things to show up where I intended.

Then, the cover art ... Fortunately, I was able to take advantage of the previous publisher's cool cover art and adapt it for my new e-book. I downloaded a nifty free graphic design program called Gimp and, after ascending partway on the learning curve, was able to pull elements from the original cover, add some new touches, and come up with something that is both functional and attractive, I think. It worked well enough that I was inspired to make a small donation to Gimp.

I do have to say that I found certain aspects of Lulu's conversion and publishing wizard to be non-intuitive. The hardest thing for me, for example, was convincing the wizard that I really and truly didn't want to use any of Lulu's prefab cover art, and that I really and truly did want to upload the cover image that I'd created myself, thankyouverymuch. But after some tinkering and a few imprecations muttered under my breath,
I was able to get the image uploaded successfully. Important note: If you generate your own cover art for an ebook, it needs to be at a 72 ppi (pixels per inch) resolution in order to display optimally on digital devices.

So ... there you have it! I've taken you through the process, pretty much start to finish. Except ...

... Oh yeah ... selling the thing. In other words, we're just now getting to the whole reason I did this in the first place. One of the things I like about Lulu is that they submit properly formatted titles to major online retailers. At this moment, they're in the process of submitting Jeremiah: He Who Wept to the iBookstore (Apple) and Nook (Barnes & Noble). Also, since I assigned my own ISBN to the book (see "The e-Book Chronicles, Part IV"), I'm planning to download my fully functional Epub file and submit it to the Kindle Store and Google Play Books.

But that is slightly in the future. For now, I'm pleased to have gotten this far and to actually have a working product for sale. Now, all I've got to do is persuade a few people to drop $2.99 for the download... Say ... could I interest you in a really cool new e-book?

Thomsblog (a weblog) by Thom Lemmons is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

The e-Book Chronicles, Part IV

Today I made the financial commitment to a decision I've been weighing for awhile ... I bought my own ISBNs. Perhaps some of you might like a bit of explanation ...

The ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is a book's principal identifier in the marketplace; it has been characterized as a book's "social security number." This unique identifier allows any person or retailer, anywhere, to positively ID the book to which it is attached. Every book publisher in the United States has its own unique set of ISBNs, all of which start with the same prefix. This prefix is like the publisher's DNA, becoming a part of each book it publishes. So, if you're going to be a publisher and you plan to sell your book in the public marketplace--both on shelves and in the virtual retail space of the Internet--you need your own ISBNs for your books.

Now, I am well aware that online retailers like Lulu, Amazon.com, and others will provide self-published authors with a unique identifier for books sold on their platforms. However, these aren't the same thing as a unique ISBN. In fact, they aren't really ISBNs at all, since they don't identify the book outside the platform to which they are assigned. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing for everyone. If, for example, you want to self-publish your book and you're content with marketing it through a single channel like Amazon.com or Google Play Books (the latest name for Google's virtual bookstore), then allowing them to assign an internal identifier to your book might be a fine way to go. People will be able to find your book, purchase it, and download it to their devices. Everybody's happy.

However, if you want total control over how and where your book is sold, and if you want to be in control of your book's metadata (the critical information about price, title, author, publisher, format, and other details of your book that retailers and purchasers depend on to be able to find your book in the marketplace), then you really have to have your own ISBN. Since my day gig is working as a managing editor for an academic publishing house, I know the importance of maintaining control over your metadata. One of the catchphrases in the digital publishing world is, "Metadata is king." Although, I guess the grammatically correct form would be "Metadata are king." But I digress.

Thus, for me, the final tipping point was reached when I decided I wanted to do business as an actual publisher, rather than just having my name in the front of the book as author. In order to do that, your ISBN must match your publisher data, and the only way that can happen is if you own the ISBN with which the book is registered.

Of course, as you may have suspected, ISBNs--unlike the internally assigned identifiers provided by Amazon and Lulu--aren't free. There's only one place you can get them: from Bowker, Inc., the company that maintains the ISBN registry for the United States. A single ISBN is $100. However, since I plan to issue several of my older titles as e-books, I decided to buy a block of 10 ISBNs from Bowker for $250 (do you get the feeling that they discourage one-off purchases?). I'll say this for them, though: for a monopoly, they maintain a pretty user-friendly website. I got in, registered, paid, and had my block of ten ISBNs in less than ten minutes, start to finish. You can check them out for yourself at https://www.myidentifiers.com/Get-your-isbn-now.

So, bottom line ... the $250 I just parted ways with could be seen as a setback for my original low/no-cost objective for this self-publishing project. On the other hand, it could be viewed as a strategic concession to the greater objectives of maintaining more control over my book's metadata and having increased flexibility to market it on multiple platforms, thus increasing its visibility--the current buzzword is "discoverability"--in the marketplace.

But to make the type of professional impression with my book that I hope to make, I've got to tackle cover design and layout ... about which more in future posts ...



Thomsblog (a weblog) by Thom Lemmons is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

The e-Book Chronicles, Part III

Success! I found a copy of He Who Wept with the newer cover!




Of course, I realize that just having this image is a long way from having a professional-looking cover for the e-book, but at least I now have this as a design option. Editing and OCR-correcting the main text proceeds, amid the many distractions of life and work (see "The e-Book Chronicles, Part II").



One thing I've learned: If I intend to do many more e-book conversions from scanned hard copy, I'm going to need a much better and faster scanner, and possibly some OCR software. But for now, it amuses me (in a slightly sick way) to do the hand-work of reading, correcting, and formatting. Sort of an artisan thing, I guess. Is there such a thing as an artisan e-book?











I've also been collecting information about pricing and design strategies. While the jury is still out on where e-book pricing is going to finally settle, things seem to be moving in the direction of generally lower pricing for e-books than their print editions--see, for example, http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2013/ebook-price-roller-coaster-ride-over/. So, for now at least, I think my intention to price He Who Wept at something like 2.99 or less is a good one.







Well, that's about all the news for now. Guess I'll edit, format, and correct another chapter of He Who Wept, and then maybe do some recreational reading ... imagine that!

The e-Book Chronicles, Part II

In which I announce my decision about which portion of my opus will be the first to debut as a self-published e-book…



After careful reflection, I have chosen my first novel, He Who Wept: An Epic Novel of Jeremiah for this honor. If you can call it that.

Several factors went into my decision. Mainly, though, the book had some decent legs when it was in [hard-copy] print. It even made a couple of best-seller lists in the religious trade publications. So, it seems likely that there’s some readership out there that might take advantage of the opportunity to acquire (or re-acquire) the book as an e-edition… if the price is right. About which more in a future post.



The big obstacle at this point is accomplishing the physical task of scanning, correcting, and formatting the book as a Word document.

I’ve managed to get the scanning done, and at this point I’m about two-thirds of the way through cleaning and correcting all the various boo-boos that inevitably get created in the scanning process. Allocating enough time for this is a bit of a drag, in between freelance jobs and life in general (have I ever mentioned that I do freelance editing and ghostwriting? I do. End of commercial announcement.)



One thing I’m wondering about is what to do for a cover design. The original design for the book (the first edition) looks a bit dated, which makes sense, since the book came out originally in 1990.



Dang. I’m really that old…

I wish I could find a good copy of the second edition, because I really like the cover design, and I would use it if I could get a really high-quality scan. Unfortunately, no copies of it can be located online, despite my best efforts. So, it may be that I’ll actually spring for an original cover design, which will somewhat work against my intention for this as a low- or no-budget operation. Hmmm… More on that as developments warrant.


Thomsblog (a weblog) by Thom Lemmons is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

The e-Book Chronicles, Part I

Sometime in the early 1990s, I swore I would be the last person on Earth to get a cellular phone. Bear in mind, this was when "handy" meant a bag phone roughly the size of the trade paperback edition of War and Peace, and you had to keep it plugged into the cigarette lighter of your car (most of the time).

Of course, we all know the end of the story; it's the same ending experienced by all the other technologically hesitant: I eventually got a cell phone and quickly realized I couldn't live without it. Ditto my laptop, my broadband Internet, etc., etc.

These days, I'm considering joining a support group for the iPhone-dependent. Clearly, I am not an Early Adopter, but I eventually cave. Most of us do.

But then came the rumblings preceding the digital book revolution. And here, friends, I dug in my heels. "A book is paper and glue and binding, with pages you can turn," I sniffed. "I want to smell the ink; I want to run my fingers along the spine. I don't want to boot up my book."


Last Christmas, my daughter and my wife ganged up and got me a NOOK Color. You can probably guess the rest.

Concurrent with my gradual immigration to the Digital Promised Land, content megasources like Amazon and others have been making it cheaper and cheaper to produce and publish e-books (and they've had a few nasty spats with Big Publishing along the way). If we know one thing about technology, it's that over time, it makes certain things cheaper. Thanks to Gutenberg and his intellectual heirs, you no longer have to be a feudal lord to be able to acquire a wide variety of reading material.


The process that required five centuries or so in printed books is happening with e-books in a couple of weeks, it seems. Now, you can download free programs that will convert your properly formatted word processing files into e-book files that can be sold online ... or forced on unsuspecting friends and family members, as the case may be (assuming they have e-readers, that is).

As an author with a few books that have come to the end of their life cycle in print, lately I've been thinking about ways to try and squeeze a little more income out of my currently fallow intellectual property. My notion is that I should be able to scan some of my out-of-print books (for which publishing rights have, by contract, reverted to me), do a little reformatting, and, by means of some free software, convert them to e-books that can be uploaded to Amazon's Kindle store, Lulu.com, and maybe, with a little luck and persistence, to other online stores like BarnesandNoble.com. Whether anyone will buy them ... well, that's another story.


So, this is the beginning of my foray into e-book self-publishing. If you want, you can come along for the ride. I'll document the process, including my frustrations, my successes, and how it all turns out. I'm pretty sure I'll learn something, if only how it shouldn't be done. But who knows? I may locate a vein of milk and honey. We'll see ...



Thomsblog (a weblog) by Thom Lemmons is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Butch, Sundance, and Jesus at the Top of the Cliff

I noticed a news story the other day that suggested perhaps Butch Cassidy didn’t really die in a shootout in Bolivia: that he actually lived to a ripe old age as a business owner and solid citizen in Washington state. It was an interesting coincidence, running across that story, since I had been thinking about a line from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for a couple of days previous.



You remember the scene: Butch and Sundance are pinned down on a mountainside, their implacable pursuers closing in (“Who are those guys?”). They decide that their only chance for escape is a leap off a cliff into a rushing mountain stream. Butch notices that Sundance is reticent about making the jump.


“What’s the matter with you?” he asks.

“I can’t swim,” Sundance says.

“Are you crazy?” Butch hollers, “the fall will probably kill you!”

Then they both rush to the edge and fly out into thin air, shouting a word that many of us might use under similar circumstances.

For some reason, Butch’s opinion of Sundance’s priorities about the dangers facing him reminds me of something Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 6:34, he says, “Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” I’ve heard this verse paraphrased as, “Why worry about tomorrow? Today will probably kill you.” And with these words, we arrive back at the top of cliff, standing beside Butch and Sundance and staring down into the gorge.



In times like these—or I don’t know, maybe in all times—it seems like Butch and Jesus have a pretty good point. Not that it’s a good idea to live carelessly; quite the opposite. In uncertain times, we should live with our eyes wide open, with every sense engaged, savoring each moment as it goes by, because after all… there aren’t any guarantees about tomorrow, are there? Why would you want to miss anything, as long as the ride is still moving? Besides, the fact is that borrowing worry from the future is a debt with no amortization schedule.

Now, the people who know me very well—especially the ones who live with me—are probably rolling their eyes as they read this. I am pretty lousy at not worrying. But I want to get better at it; I really do. In fact, greater trust and less anxiety are consistently on my Top Ten request list for God. And, they do say that knowing you have a problem is the first step toward a cure…



My guess is that, especially in the current unsettled environment (and again, aren’t all environments unsettled, to a greater or lesser degree?), lots of folks would like to learn to “travel light,” as my friend Max Lucado might say. To allow each day to worry about itself, rather than packing so much future worry into the present. To seek to notice more, and seek to control less. To live right now, listen to what’s around you, see all the colors, and smell all the smells.


So go ahead… take the leap.


I’m right behind you.



Thomsblog (a weblog) by Thom Lemmons is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

Shechem’s Briss and the Israeli Boat Raid

It’s not one of the stories you learn in Sunday School…



Jacob and his clan were grazing their flocks in the territory of the Hivites, where Hamor was king and his son Shechem was looking for love. And whom should Shechem’s amorous gaze fall upon but Dinah, Jacob’s daughter, who was paying a visit to some of her Canaanite girlfriends? Scripture doesn’t exactly reveal the nature of the blandishments Shechem lavished upon Dinah before having sex with her, but the Old Testament does relate that he loved her—to the point of going to his father and making a plea for parental intervention and the arrangement of a marriage contract for Jacob’s baby girl. It seems possible that Shechem’s love was not unrequited by Dinah, who may very well have been more than ready to leave behind a tent full of domineering older brothers and take up life as a Hivite princess.



Enter the brothers. Jealous for their sister’s chastity and enraged by Shechem’s intrusion upon her reputation, they hatch a devious plan to impose circumcision upon Shechem and all the males of his city as a condition of the marriage, insisting that this is the only way their sister can retain her honor. Shechem, blinded by love and testosterone, agrees. And then, while Shechem and his followers are convalescing after the painful ritual, Simeon and Levi lead a raiding party, massacring the entire city and looting it before dragging Dinah back to the camp. So much for Hamor’s gracious offer to Jacob to live in the land, engage in trade, join the Rotary Club, and otherwise assimilate.




When Jacob finds out what his vengeful boys have done, he says, “You have brought trouble on me by making me a stench to the Canaanites and Perizzites, the people living in this land. We are few in number, and if they join forces against me and attack me, I and my household will be destroyed” (Genesis 34:30). Not much more is said about the aftermath, other than protestations from Simeon and Levi that they were just defending their sister’s honor. We do find out, however, that Jacob, under divine guidance, prudently relocates his base of operations to Bethel—putting a few miles and several hilltops between himself and the vicinity of his sons’ recent crimes against humanity.

Reading last week’s headlines about the deadly Israeli commando raid on the flotilla of blockade-busters bound for Gaza with humanitarian supplies, I was immediately reminded of this violent old tale from Israel’s ancient past. Israel, under the leadership of the hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu, seems well along the road to becoming a stench in the nostrils, not only of its longtime enemies in the Palestinian territories and the surrounding Arab nations, but also in the international court of public opinion.



Bent on starving Hamas into submission in Gaza—a strategy whose historical success seems wide-open to debate, by the way—Israel is coming to have an uncomfortable resemblance to the neighborhood bully: a far cry from the vulnerable, yet plucky image the nation capitalized on in its early days and up until at least the Six-Day War of 1967. Add to that the current Israeli regime’s truculent expansion policies, which appear to be imposing even greater stress upon the already fragile environmental, agricultural, and social infrastructure in what used to be the Palestinian territories, and one might be excused for coming to the reluctant conclusion that Israel intends the ultimate—if gradual—expulsion of the Palestinian people from the places that have been their homelands for thousands of years.




I wonder if anyone in the Israeli government has considered the words of Jacob to his angry sons. How long before Israel, by pursuing the politics of intimidation, expansion, and isolation in the name of national security, actually succeeds in isolating herself from the support of those who have heretofore been her allies? How much longer can the United States—with its own less-than-stellar record regarding the subtleties of international relations—continue to turn a blind eye to Israel’s economic, political, and military repression and disenfranchisement of the Palestinians?

Israel, more than almost any nation on earth, ought to know the value of tradition, history, and heeding ancient wisdom. It seems to me that the time is long overdue for Jacob to have another conversation with his modern-day children.



Solving this crisis, though, is going to be more complicated than moving a few miles down the road.


Thomsblog (a weblog) by Thom Lemmons is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

Perfect Pitch, Anne Lamott, and the Meaning of Life

Here's a piece that ran a few years ago in New Wineskins. If you've never seen this e-zine, you should check it out: www.wineskins.org (also see the link at right, below). Before anybody carries on about the mention of a "cassette player," remember: this was a few years ago.

############

Today I'm thinking about perfect pitch and Anne LaMott.

Maybe I should explain.


Recently, a friend of mine discovered her seven-year-old son has perfect pitch. Somebody told him to turn his face to the wall, then played a note on the piano. The kid turned around, went to the keyboard, and played the same note. They repeated the process with a different note, and before the boy got to the piano, he asked, "Was that a black note?" Nobody answered, but it was. The kid nailed it. Perfect pitch: spontaneous recognition of a musical tone.



I heard another guy talking about this. He's a music critic for a major newspaper and is blessed—or cursed—with perfect pitch. His wife bought him this great new car stereo system, but the cassette player ran just a little too fast. That meant the music he heard was reproduced anywhere from a quarter to a half step too high. In other words, instead of hearing a Mozart piano concerto in g minor, he was hearing it in something between g and g-sharp minor.

So, what's the problem? you ask. The instruments in the recording are all affected the same way, so it should sound fine, right? Right—for people like you and me. But for this guy, whose nervous system was pre-set to hear g minor as g minor, not as something else, everything sounded weird, off-track—as if your best friend's voice suddenly started to resemble Alvin the Chipmunk's. His perfect pitch rendered his imperfect car stereo almost useless.



And that got me thinking about Anne LaMott. In Traveling Mercies, she describes the religious environment of her childhood: "...my father despised Christianity. ...no one in our family believed in God... I went to church with my grandparents sometimes... But I pretended to think it was foolish, because that pleased my father…. None of the adults in our circle believed." She talks about her own nagging sense of God's existence, and her repression of that sense for fear of her parents' disapproval. For various reasons, her life became a pretty big mess. Eventually, she got desperate enough to let God into her world. Today, Anne LaMott describes herself as "a bad born-again Christian." That fits me, most days.



Maybe we all have something inside that works like perfect pitch. Don't we all get the sense, some days, that some stuff just ought to be different than it is? Don't we sometimes feel, like singer David Crosby, that "…there's something goin' on around here / that surely won't stand the light of day"? Aren't we all sometimes desperate for something—some fix, some cure, some sort of fulfillment—that we can't even describe?


Maybe there's something to it. Could it be, as St. Augustine said a few centuries back, that our souls are restless until they rest in God? Could it be we're all really homesick for a native land we've never seen?


I'll bet the cassette players in heaven run at the correct speed.

"If Fame Comes at All"

I work at a large university, and my Internet home page at the office is a screen that has, among other things, a box listing interesting campus events: lectures, sports activities, performances, and so forth. I usually give it at least a cursory glance at various points during the day… Okay, I look at it more than I should, probably.

A listing from the other day caught my eye, and I haven’t quite been able to turn loose of it since. It was a single sentence, mentioning an upcoming presentation by a visiting professor of biblical literature. The title of his lecture was “Meneptah: The Pharaoh Who Mentioned Israel.” I regret to say that I neither attended the lecture nor actually read the referenced press release in its entirety.

But the headline got me to thinking and wondering about Pharaoh Meneptah—or Merenptah, or Merneptah, as he is variously known. Turns out that this pharaoh is the only one who actually mentions the land of Israel in the carvings and monuments created during his reign. Rather a minor mention at that, the inscription is on one of the four large commemorative stelae the pharaoh had erected to memorialize his decisive victory over an army of invaders composed of an alliance between Libyans and “Sea People”—possibly Minoans or proto-Philistines. The twelfth son of the long-lived Rameses II, Meneptah was already retirement age when he ascended the throne, but the aging monarch rallied the deteriorating Egyptian military machine sufficiently to prevent the invaders’ encroachment on Memphis. Perhaps this victory accounts for his name, which means “beloved of Ptah:” Ptah was the god of Memphis.

Apparently, Meneptah was not only successful at repelling the military threat from the west, but also in putting down a revolt in the Palestinian cities of Ashkelon, Gezer, and Yenoam. He also engaged in various feats of diplomacy.

What struck me was that of all the accomplishments for which Meneptah may have expected to be remembered by posterity, it turns out that he is perhaps most famous for mentioning a relatively minor military exploit in a territory on the periphery of his kingdom. I seriously doubt whether the pharaoh, as he was ordering the carving and erection of his commemorative stelae, would have imagined in his wildest dreams that three millennia later, scholars in a land completely unknown during his day would be referring to him as “The Pharaoh Who Mentioned Israel.” In fact, I can almost imagine the good pharaoh pausing in his voyage through the afterlife to look back and say, “After all the really important things I did… this is how they remember me?”

That causes me to wonder what unsuspected thing—if any—I might be remembered for. What minor act—by my own reckoning—have I performed that will turn out to be the most important thing I ever did?

Maybe Alexander Pope was onto something when he wrote, “Nor Fame I slight, nor for her favours call; She comes unlooked for if she comes at all.” That seems about right, doesn’t it? Perhaps Ecclesiastes 11:6 gives us another angle on the same idea: “Sow your seed in the morning, / and at evening let not your hands be idle, / for you do not know which will succeed, / whether this or that, / or whether both will do equally well.” St. Paul might have said it this way: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart…”

One thing seems certain: fame is a fickle mistress, and her sense of humor seems ironic, at best. Better to focus one’s allegiance elsewhere.

Writing Advice

Every once in a while, I get a query from someone who wants to know about how to get started in writing. Here's one from about thirteen years ago. I think the advice I gave her still holds up... see what you think. (I've withheld my correspondent's name to respect her privacy).

***********

Dear Mr. Lemmons,
I am 30 years old with a wonderful husband and 3 children. I have been praying about becoming a novelist. I was hoping you could give me some advice since I heard so many good things about your writing.

I want to write Christian romance novels that are inspirational and not too frivolous. I want to leave my reader inspired and encouraged to walk with God as I guess every Christian author does. Can you give me some advice based on your own experiences? How do I begin and how do I hold on to my inspiration to keep writing for the Lord as my main purpose?



I'm looking forward to writing and already have so many ideas for story plots in my head. I dont want my stories to be frivolous but serious and heartwarming. How can I start and what do I need to look out for? But most of all what will writing require of me? Anything you can share with me will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you
(name withheld)


***********

Dear (correspondent),

Thanks for your note. I'm honored to be of service. I must say at the outset that I can't help too much with specific advice about writing romances, since that's not really my preferred genre.



By way of background, I would say that the most important thing for you to do is focus less on any message you want to send your readers, and focus most of all on telling a good story. I think it was William Faulkner who said something to the effect of "Trust the tale, not the teller." What I think he meant is that a story is something to be handled with care, for its own sake. If you are a Christian, that cannot help but come through in your work. Don't worry so much about leaving your readers "inspired and encouraged to walk with God" as about giving them an honest view of reality as conceived within your heart and consciousness. If you can do that best by writing romances, fine. It really doesn't matter what sort of fiction you write, as long as you bring your passion and your honesty to it. Good fiction is good fiction, whether it's Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or pagan. God isn't well served by bad fiction, even if it's written in His name.



I would advise you to read widely. Read those writers whom you respect, and would like to emulate. Don't be afraid to imitate at first: that's how babies learn to talk. Not that you're a literary infant; it's a valid principle that I still employ. I read authors whom I respect, and try to figure out how they do what they do.

As to what writing will require of you--I think the answer depends on what you want writing to do for you. Writing can demand everything you have. Not necessarily all your time; spending all day writing is a luxury few of us can afford. What I mean is that writing can cause you to face things within yourself that you'd rather not face. Writing (for me, at least) is not a release; it's more of an expense. It's hard to write well, and it demands a sort of uncomfortable honesty about myself and what I'm trying to do.



I hope my rambling has helped you somewhat. Good luck, and God bless. If I can be of future assistance, let me know.

***********

As I reread the above exchange, I can't help wondering how my correspondent is getting along. Lord willing, she's in her early forties now and still has a wonderful husband and three children (some of whom are probably adults by this time). I hope that she was able to write and that the experience was a good one for her. I hope that trying to make the words say exactly what she means and feels has enriched and challenged her, as it has me. If she has been fortunate enough to be published, I hope that someone, somewhere, was touched by her words and changed for the better. And I hope that they let her know.

Flood and Drought

Here's a piece that ran a few years ago in Wineskins and on Heartlight.org...
******

If you live in west Texas long enough, you have to come to terms with drought. We were in the middle of one a few years ago. We could only water our yards once every two weeks, after dark and before the heat of the day. The bottoms of our lakes looked like vacant lots, overgrown with shoulder-high weeds. Everything turned brown. Trees died⎯big ones.



People everywhere were praying for rain. You could see it on the marquees in front of many church buildings. Back in the spring, a town west of ours had its prayers answered; a line of thunderstorms dumped seven inches of rain squarely on the watershed for the town lake, which quickly became just about brim full—one of the few towns in the area with more water than they strictly needed. There was a flash flood; the creeks feeding the lake went out of their banks, making some of the roads around the town impassable for several hours.



The newspaper reported that Suzanne Clements was trying to make it home during the storm. She had her kids in the car with her⎯six-year-old Carson and his 19-month-old sister, Kenyon. In retrospect, it’s easy to see she shouldn’t have tried to drive across the flooded place in the road. Who knows? Maybe the baby was scared of the storm, wailing in that unnerving way only babies possess. Maybe the kids were hungry. Maybe Kenyon was wearing a soiled diaper that also happened to be the last one in the diaper bag. Whatever the reason, Suzanne decided it made more sense to drive through the reddish-brown water flowing across the road than to turn around in the middle of the highway and go somewhere else to wait for the runoff to subside. That water was between her and home. She decided to try to get home.

But the water was deeper and swifter than Suzanne realized. Within seconds of entering the crossing, she realized she was in trouble. The car wouldn’t respond to her attempts to steer. It slid sideways across the flooded crossing and then, to her horror, swept over the side and into the flooded channel of Mustang Draw.

What went through Suzanne’s mind as the water began to gush into the car? What did she hear, think, and feel as she pivoted frantically in the driver’s seat, trying to get her door open, trying to free her seat-belted children, trying to get herself and her kids out of the sinking car?



Searchers found Kenyon’s body about twelve hours later. Twelve days later⎯five days after the funeral service⎯they found her brother’s body.

I wonder what Suzanne thought about in the days that followed. Aside from the numbing shock and self-damning guilt any parent would feel in a similar situation, did she find herself emotionally at odds with the rest of the community? On the way to her childrens’ funeral, did she pass a church marquee that said, “Praise God for the rain”? I wonder if it occurred to her that, though the town’s drought had ended, hers was just beginning. I wonder if anyone tried to comfort her with that venerable clunker, “It was the will of God.”

What was the will of God? The rain? Maybe. There’s plenty of biblical precedent for the notion. And lots of sincere people had been praying for this very occurrence. In all honesty, I wouldn’t want a single one of those who gratefully received the rain to think for an instant that the refilled lake wasn’t a direct result of their simple, trusting entreaties of the Divine. After all, in parched West Texas and everywhere else, water is life.

But I can’t rid my mind of the picture of a young mother with two dead children, children sucked away from her by the waters of a flash flood. How is she supposed to make sense of the will of God as she wanders the wasteland of bereavement, guilt, and confusion? How long will it be before she can hear thunder without remembering the panicked screams of her trapped children? How long before she can abide—never mind enjoy—the sound of rain on the roof? Will she ever again be able to bring herself to pray for rain?



Sometimes I think paradox is the underlying principle of the universe. It must surely seem so to Suzanne Clements. That which brought relief and renewal to a thirsting community brought her devastation and loss. It’s almost proverbial in West Texas that you don’t complain about moisture, whatever form it takes. I wonder how Suzanne feels about that.

Thinking about Suzanne Clements reminds me of the words of another mourner. “If only my anguish could be weighed and all my misery be placed on the scales! It would surely outweigh the sand of the seas... What strength do I have, that I should still hope? What prospects, that I should be patient? Do I have the strength of stone? Is my flesh bronze?” The man who spoke these words had just lost his fortune, his children, and his health. He had nothing left except his faith, and even that was being mocked and questioned by those closest to him. Even his name⎯Job⎯means “one who is hated.”

I wonder if Suzanne ever got the feeling that the universe had turned against her. If so, she’s in pretty good company. When everything that’s most precious to you is violently yanked away, I guess you can start to wonder. I guess, like Job, such all-encompassing grief can even make you question God’s fairness. Like the psalmist, you can start to think God is hiding from you at best, mangling you at worst. Like Jeremiah, you can start to view God as a patron of the wicked and a deceiver of the innocent. “He has walled me in so I cannot escape,” the writer of Lamentations says of God. “He drew his bow and made me the target... He pierced my heart with arrows from his quiver....” If he’s absolutely in charge and he’s absolutely good, how can things like this happen? you ask.



Good question⎯one God chooses not to answer, by the way. When, at the end of Job’s story, God does appear, it’s not to respond to Job’s complaints and accusations. Instead, it’s to say, in effect, “Job, hush up and listen. I’m God, and you’re not.” To Jeremiah’s lament, God responds, “You think it’s tough now? Just wait!” Even the psalmist, when he finishes up his catalog of undeserved miseries, pleads for God’s intervention, knowing there’s no hope left if God remains silent.
If God remains silent... Maybe that’s what we’re most afraid of. What if there is no answer for my pain? What if my loss turns out to have no meaning, to be the aimless act of a random universe? What if God’s not absolutely in charge? Or, maybe even worse... what if God is there, but my hurt just doesn’t matter to him? What if he’s absolutely in charge, but he’s not absolutely good?

Seems like we’ve traveled a long way from a flooded road crossing in West Texas, doesn’t it? Grief and loss can do that. They can send you on a journey you never wanted, a journey that takes you far from home, far from everything that used to seem so safe and secure. What’s the destination of this trip? Where will we end up?

I guess that’s up to each of us who makes the journey. Fortunately, some of the others who’ve made the trip ahead of us have left some markings along the trail. For the psalmist, remember, it was the decision⎯perhaps from sheer desperation⎯to continue trusting in God’s eventual deliverance, even in the midst of ongoing pain. For Jeremiah, the picture was a little less clear; though he continued to testify to God’s presence and comfort, the prophet died in Egypt, a refugee from a land devastated by the very disasters he foretold. But my personal favorite, the dog-eared, creased fragment of map I return to most often, is the statement from Lamentations, just after the writer has accused God of lying in ambush.



I remember my affliction and my wandering,
the bitterness and the gall.
I well remember them, and my soul
is downcast within me.
Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope:
Because of the LORD’s great love, we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.
I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him.”

Somehow, the writer remembers the old stories of God’s longsuffering love. He catches the faint echo of hope and he follows the sound through the ashes of burned out dreams, past the ruined foundations of comfort and security, through the dry wasteland of harsh reality. And there, in the desert, he peers around the blasted landscape and decides to hang on. He decides, in the face of all the visible evidence to the contrary, that God can be trusted. This drought won’t last forever, he thinks. Rain will come again, someday.



I don’t know if Suzanne Clements has heard that faint echo. For all I know, her faith may be so strong that even at her childrens’ gravesides she could still hear the song of hope. Or, she may be sitting among the ashes, wondering why God sent everybody else a flood, but left her high and dry. I don’t know.

I don’t know where you are, either. Maybe you’re one of those fortunate souls who have never experienced gut-wrenching sorrow. Or maybe you’re one of those blessed ones whose faith remains unwithered even during the most desperate dry spell. If so, I kneel before you in admiration and humility.

But for me, it’s important to remember⎯another paradox?⎯that doubt and faith aren’t necessarily opposites. That it’s okay to beat on God’s chest and wail; he’s big enough to take it. That no matter how deep my grief, my suffering, my loss, I can’t go somewhere no one’s ever gone. Others have been there before me, others will go there after me: into the dry country, into the depths of the drought-stricken land.




And some of them, at least, found water.