I managed to hear half of my Quick Word radio show this afternoon.  It was not the show I had recorded for today; that suggests that the radio station had trouble downloading the programs, probably because of the file size problem.  I’m going to have to go back and see what I can do about that.

Speaking of file size problems, I ran into one in connection with the cover of Do You Trust Me?  Yes, the good news is I have the front cover; I’m working on the back.  It was delivered to me last night on paper, and I scanned it this afternoon.  I used the very best quality scanning my scanner would provide–and the result was a file so large than none of my art programs could resize it.  I wound up scanning it again at lower resolution, and it is now ready.  I had a couple of quotes I wanted to include on the back from a couple of ministers who read it a few months back; I’ll have to hunt for their letters.  I have been getting eager to the point of antsy to get this in print.

I fixed a few things since Friday, mostly yesterday evening.

The big one is probably the Collision MySpace.  After a fair amount of hair-pulling, I managed to pull the black background out from behind the black print, so the site can now be read.  I also sent some friend invitations (to people who already know the band, so that means locals), added a brief history (which needs some editing), and uploaded the lyrics of our first song to the blog (since I didn’t see a place for lyrics).  I sent Baxter and Brittany notes alerting them to this.  I also took note that our MySpace site name is CollisionAtHopewell.  Checking in briefly now, I note that we’ve had positive answers to two of our invites.  If I tell you that they are from my son and Baxter’s sister, I hope that doesn’t make you think less of us.

The second repair job, which I actually did before that, was on the Temporal Anomalies site.  I proofread my response to Vazor’s blog, made a few minor corrections, and then redid a piece of the directory structure for the site, changing the section name that was “Correspondence” to “Conversation“, adding to the subindex of that section the new page plus the four pages which were responses to questions on another site years ago, and redoing the links on all the pages in that site to include those five along with the two dozen letters.  Hopefully it will make site navigation a bit easier.  Meanwhile, I note that Vazor has thanked me for my response, on his blog, and promised a followup post; I will have to keep alf an eye there, although I have asked that he notify me when he posts it.

The third thing that got repaired is really the first.  I started once more reading through the book Do You Trust Me?, and fixed two or three spots that could have been said better.  There is a rule in this business that if you wait until something is perfect it will never go to print, and I can feel the pain of that rule with this book; however, the reason for my delay is entirely that the cover art is not ready (which seems to be a reason that delays most of my books at some point), so the fact that I am still tweaking the text is not an issue.  I do have to format it to page size and add the page numbers to the table of contents, but that will come soon enough.

I have been giving serious thought to combining the three books, Do You Trust Me?, What Does God Expect?, and About the Fruit, into one volume, tentatively entitled A Christian Primer.  I could sell the one book for less than the three individually, and I think that they fit together in a coherent package.  I am minded in this that C. S. Lewis originally published the three books we know as Mere Christianity separately–somewhere I have a copy of the second, Beyond Personality–but that combined they make a coherent whole.  From a marketing perspective, the single volume would probably cost the reader less than the three books separately without impacting my profit.  I would keep the individual books available, though, because someone interested in only one would still be able to buy it (and then come back for the other two eventually).  Anyway, it’s on the table for consideration.  The Trust book has to go to print before anything will be done on combining them.

I accomplished something.

–M. J. Young

My thanks to those who have encouraged me to get some rest. I slept reasonably well last night and this morning, and although I am fighting occasional hints of queasiness I am not certain whether it is from the early stages of being sick, or merely from thinking about it.

I am considering cancelling tonight’s Collision rehearsal. I am loathe to do it, as Baxter missed last week, and Brittany’s mother will be going in the hospital mid-month which will put sufficient demands on Brittany that she will probably miss a few, and we are nowhere near as far along as drummer John would wish us to be. I think I will not cancel; but I will have a lot of work because of that. The man who loves to cook is fighting the illness, and last night was losing, so I have already started working on dinner in the expectation that he will not be able to manage it. I’ve already told Adam that I will want to practice with him even if no one else shows, as we are badly behind and he’s missed a few rehearsals himself.

I received an encouraging letter about the forthcoming book, Do You Trust Me? I had sent electronic copies to a few people in ministry I know (I had asked on a private list whether anyone was willing to give it a once-through and let me know if it was sound, and these people wrote to say yes, they would read it). One has responded, praising the work. I guess I should pressure my daughter-in-law to move forward on that cover art.

If I’m to accomplish everything, I must keep moving, so here I go.

–M. J. Young

It slipped my mind yesterday that I had accomplished something, of a sort. I have been making practice cuts of the Collision repertoire, and I finished a song (I Use to Think) and forwarded it to the drummer last night; I finished another, Free, this afternoon, partly because I’d started it before I I finished the other one, and partly because I’ve become rather facile at the midi composing software so I can crank them out pretty quickly. They’re not supposed to be particularly good, only reasonably accurate representations of the arrangements we’re doing so the band members can figure out their parts and work with a recording.

We also had a decent rehearsal tonight, with Baxter, Brittany, Adam, and me. As of tonight we have learned six of the eighteen songs, and we have tentatively agreed on seventeen of them which means there’s one slot left to fill in the repertoire. That’s a milestone, I think.

I’ve also e-mailed the text of that next book, Do You Trust Me?, to a couple of people whose opinions I respect, to get some preliminary feedback before I go to print. Now I’m going to have to practice patience while I await their responses.

Meanwhile, it’s all put me behind a bit behind tonight, so I’d better turn my attention to catching up.

–M. J. Young

It is Monday, so of course I took my mother-in-law shopping. I took advantage of the trip to pick up a son from his brother’s house, who will spend a few days and go back on Thursday, when there are several people needing to travel north (enough that I am not certain how we will all fit in the car, in truth).

I also remembered that for Christmas we bought art supplies for someone, and after wracking my brain a bit I remembered who (it has been a stressful holiday season). My daughter-in-law dabbles in art as a hobby. She has agreed to undertake creating a cover for the forthcoming book, Do You Trust Me? I am particularly encouraged, as when I explained the essence of the book to her over the phone, she described an image very like what I had imagined (and knew was beyond my abilities). She has already shown me an initial pencil sketch, as I delivered to her a copy of the text of the book to help her better understand it, and I like what I see.

She keeps asking when I need it; I keep saying that I’m not pushing her. It took too long to get previous covers finished, and I can’t imagine it will take her so long to do this one, so I’m happy already.

–M. J. Young

Moments ago I was again reading the draft of Do You Trust Me? and I again spotted a needed correction; in making an edit just before printing, I had deleted one too many words in a string, leaving no sense in the sentence. It was simple enough to replace the missing word, which has been done.

Not yet done is taking a son back to his brother; he went with his mother on a middle-of-the-night shopping trip which short-changed her significantly on sleep (I had told her that I would take the boy shopping today, if necessary, but she felt that he wanted her with him, so that’s what was done). This trip is the more complicated, because one of our houseguests has some furniture that needs to be removed from a previous address, and the brother needs some of that furniture (and actually, we could use some chairs ourselves), so we’ll be organizing this as a truck delivery. This is in turn complicated, because the brakes on the pickup decided to go from leaking slowly to leaking rapidly over the weekend, so I’m going to be taking it into a shop tonight and will be renting a vehicle once again for the effort–Enterprise is even now on its way to get me. But you do what you must.

Finding myself alone last night, I turned my attention back to the temporal anomalies in Primer. I did more writing, in which I resolved a few more of the problems and reached some critical conclusions, but then being too tired to continue I retired to the bedroom, started the movie, and fell asleep in the first ten minutes. I awoke a few hours later, still alone, with the movie playing the menu screen, and restarted it. This time I was asleep before the opening dialogue, and I slept through to the alarm. I can’t say it helped my analysis, but that’s coming along pretty well.

There’s also been some discussion on the first of the Multiverser Triple Play collections, the horror group. My title Slasher Summer Camp is supposed to be a multiple-murder scenario in which no one knows who the killer is until it’s solved; but my crew tell me that if I call it “Slasher” it’s going to require that my villain wear a mask when he kills–and this is problematic, because part of the point is that even when you see the killer and the last victim together, you don’t know which is who unless you solve the mystery. A mask just ruins the whole thing. Of course, I’m thinking of this along the lines of Ten Little Indians, and not being a horror movie fan I’ve never really paid attention to all those nightmares on Halloween. I like the ring of Slasher Summer Camp, but do I really have to change the title to Seven Little Campers or something?

We’re working on resolving it. I’ll let you know if we change the title.

–M. J. Young

I did not get much done since yesterday, really. As mentioned, I made the trip to pick up my son from his brother’s house; he slept a good part of the way home, and is sleeping now, but apparently he has to come home to sleep well. I finished up the online work, and then crashed, falling asleep atop my bed in front of the television, with the quilt pulled over me.

My wife woke me when she came in; I do not know what time that was, but she went out again, and I dozed for a while fighting to awaken sufficiently to get changed for bed. Eventually I did so, somewhere close to three, and realized that I had forgotten to do the weekly computer maintenance. I set up the backup and went back to bed; it would be done inside a quarter of an hour, but I would not be awake for it.

When I got the boy off to school before seven this morning, I remembered the backup, and so stored the disk, and started running the maintenance programs–scan, clean, defrag. The defrag program takes a while, but once it was started I returned to bed to get the rest of my sleep, and when I rose, after I attended to getting coffee started, I found the computer awaiting me. I still got off to a somewhat groggy slow start, but I’m progressing.

At some point in that, I picked up a printout of the book Do You Trust Me? which, as I think I mentioned, I’d printed for comment. Someone had moved it to the bathroom, so I started reading through it. I realized that when I was discussing the sacrifices of Cain and Abel, I observed that some claim Abel’s sacrifice was better because it contained blood, and Cain’s did not. I explained why that did not fit, but did not mention (and feel silly now that it had not occurred to me) that blood is not mentioned at all in the text. That suddenly struck me as a significant point, so I added it to the text.

All of which means that I actually did some work on books, but that it was less altogether than it took for me to explain just now what it was I did.

I still have to visit my mother-in-law to take her shopping, and there’s talk of picking up a Christmas tree and something for her, but I’m not sure when any of this is going to happen, so I’m going to keep working until it does.

–M. J. Young

A couple months ago I completed a first draft of the text of another book, entitled Do You Trust Me? The odd thing is that since I finished it, I keep getting questions which are answered in the book. This is the odder, since I am not completely happy with the structure–it feels to me like I didn’t know what to write next, so I wandered from issue to issue, but as I attempt to reorganize it in my mind it there doesn’t seem to be a better sequence for the material. Thus I’m thinking I need to get this in print; people apparently need it. I find it difficult to say that about one of my own books, but apparently that is the case.

Thus motivated, I went through the text yesterday evening in a major edit. When I wrote the draft, I inserted footnotes, but did not write the text of the footnotes; this involved looking up verses I had quoted or cited from memory, remembering the asides or explanations I had wanted to add outside the text, and sometimes inserting new footnotes or deleting some that weren’t really useful.

Now I have a completed text for it. I have no cover art; I don’t have so much as a concept for the cover, in fact, although the image of an oustretched hand, palm up, waiting for another hand to be placed in it, comes into my mind sometimes (an image I could not possibly render, I note). I have no proofreader/commentator available to tell me whether I’ve made any glaring errors. However, I really feel like this needs to get into print, if for no other reason than that it is a lot more fundamental than my other two books, and answers a lot of questions people just don’t get.

My son got a ride from his mother Friday night, to take him back to his brother’s house in time to work the weekend; he is now awaiting my arrival to bring him back here for a couple days, and then hopes to return on Tuesday night. Oh, and the missing houseguest reappeared sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning, but not before his son, who has abandonment issues, started really freaking over his absence. I’ve not yet heard what happened, and don’t know if I ever will, but things seem to be returning to abnormal.

–M. J. Young

The next book in my independently-published Christian book series is tentatively entitled Do You Trust Me?. I had started it in parallel with the current Quick Word radio show series on faith, but the two lines had diverged significantly–the episodic examination of examples of faith from Hebrews 11 is working extremely well for the radio series, but was starting to create a rather disjointed book text, which needed to cover some points in more detail and others not at all. I had reached the point at which I knew two conflicting facts: one, that there was no point in writing much more about examples of faith in the Old Testament, and two, that the book was not finished, but needed to say something more.

Over the past week, that something more started playing in my mind. It came to the fore in a discussion with my wife, and pushed itself a bit more solidly into shape in the days since. As of yesterday, the final chapter was drafted, a piece about the Big Picture, looking at creation not as a project derailed by man’s sin, but as a perfect plan unfolding perfectly, in which suffering is a needed tool toard the desired outcome, the perfection of eternal sons and daughters of God. Well, that’s the synopsis; whether that says too much or not enough I won’t guess.

What I did not do which I should perhaps have done is work on Multiverser projects, particularly the second edition of the rules. I am hoping that I can tackle this later tonight. I’ve been feeding draft sections to insiders via that private development forum previously mentioned, and I’ve just posted the last section of the last chapter I’d finished drafting, so I have to get the next chapter organized (it is partly written) so I can post pieces of it for comment. Not that I’m getting much in the way of comment, but we’ve started talking a bit about the artwork, which is a positive thing.

–M. J. Young