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

I did a bit of editing on the Romans notes last night, but I never did get into the pool.

Today was one of those days when there was just too much to do. In fact, it is one in the morning, and there’s still too much to do. I just finished serving dinner, my own plate now sitting beside me awaiting moments when my hands are not needed for typing and can move food to my mouth. I can’t say I got a late start; it just was not an early start. My mother-in-law had to go to the store, but one son who was going to stay with one of his brothers came home with his mother two nights back and was obligated to return to his brother’s house today, so that also had to be done. He was taking maximum advantage of his visit home, and so asked if we could delay our departure while he had lunch with a friend. I consented.

My consent was in part because I wanted to talk with my pastor about my next book–not exactly about the book itself, but about whether it would be inappropriate to give a copy of this terribly rough first draft to our Sabbath school teacher, in view of the fact that the Sabbath school program for the next quarter seems to cover a great deal of the area covered by the book (in different ways). I knew he would be at the church picnic, so I ran down there to see him and to visit with some of the others before making my trip. He thought it a good idea to pass the book to her, so I did. That set me back a bit, but not terribly as by the time my son was back from lunch I was headed back to the house to get him. My mother-in-law was not so prompt, and it was late by the time we were out of there, and I had to drive to Delaware to drop off the boy, and so it was ten thirty by the time I managed to get the roast in the oven, which I had had the foresight to defrost before leaving.

All of which puts me here, now, with much still ahead. That makes it time to move ahead.

–M. J. Young