Outside the Camp: The E-Book!!

 Here's what I did. I took the most popular biblical posts from the last couple of years  and put them in a book format and they are now available on Kindle.  Starting this Friday ( Oct 3), you can  get this  226  page book for  free!
  Now since I have  apparently absolutely no talent for self-promotion, I would really appreciate  it this  blog has been  a blessing to you  if you would be so kind as to get the word out.  Put it on FB or Twitter or whatever it is  you crazy kids are doing nowadays! Thanks!

The Happiness and Sadness and Wonder of Books

 As I have mentioned before, I love books. Much of my reading is either Biblical in  nature, or doctrinal in nature, or historical in nature, or all three at once.  I  read more church history than  anybody else I know (three or four books a year on it, and there aren't even that many out there), and to be honest, most of the time it's like chewing rocks while wading through peanut butter.   It seems there is always some weighty matter grabbing my attention,or my opinion and perspective is being sought on some  point of doctrine or history and just as some people never read anything  that's  heavy, I  hardly ever read anything that's light.
  However,  having  made my way through  'History of the Baptists' and having semi-completed the notes for a Bible class, I was in the mood for something light.  I wanted a break. I wanted a novel. I have a stack of books given to me by a friend that had belonged to  his  minister grandfather and  had  been merely sitting in plastic bin in a musty garage for  years. In that stack was a book   written in 1911.  The cover said simply, in black letters "QUEED: A Novel by Henry Sydnor Harrison".
  Now for me, there is  an entire process of reading that involves multiple senses.  I sat there in my bed and  looked at the  faded cover. I ran my hands over the threadbare cloth. I  opened up and saw that this was a 1927 reprint. I  put my nose in the book and smelled the yellowed pages ( try that with a Kindle, I promise you'll be disappointed).  I  perused the table of contents and  then I started to read.  An enjoyable book so far, but in the middle of reading it, a thought struck me; when was the last time this book was read?  Not just when was the last time 'Queed' was read, (if Amazon reviews are any indicator, never) but when was the last time this particular copy was read?
  I am an author, and I understand the process of distilling the  brew of your imagination   and  trying to   put that vision on  a printed page. I know about  creating characters. I know about research. I know about rewrites and rereadings, and moving  things around in a manuscript. I know about  spiral notebooks  crammed with notes written in pencil. I know about   putting  months into a work and then deciding to abandon it.  I know about  asking people to  look at what you've done.  I know about he  fear that  they will think what you have written is as insufficient as you suspect it is.  Creation for consumption by another  is a frighteningly intimate act. If you write, or create in any way, you  know exactly what I mean. I must assume that Mr Harrison knew about it as well. 
  I will never meet Mr Harrison. He'll never even know if I  liked his book or not. I will never have the chance to sit down with him and  find out what sort of person he was. Yet here I was, holding the essence of his  imagination in my hand. He had written it, and published it, and now he lies somewhere moldering in his grave as I sit in  my bed over 100 years later, and the  chasm of time that separated  us had been closed by this  wonderful and marvelous  conglomeration of  ink and paper and  glue. I had as much access to the inside of Mr Harrison's head than I would have ever had if we been contemporaries. His words retain as much life as they ever possessed.  Ink on a page has the  ability to  evoke images and passions,  and skillful words can  endear you to people that don't technically exist. That is part of the wonder of the printed word.
  The other side to that equation  is that  Mr. Harrison's words were typeset, committed to paper, bound in a book, and sold. That book was purchased  and then, after some unknowable time and circumstances , became resigned to a plastic bin in somebody's garage. The creative sweat of Mr. Harrison languished in  unappreciated anonymity for decades. That seems  horribly tragic to me, but at the same time, somewhat inevitable.
   There is only so much time in a man's life and he can only read so much.  You couldn't read  everything ever written, nor should you feel compelled to do so. There are printed works that frankly aren't worth the shelf space in your brain. To qualify as 'well read' you have to literally be at least passingly familiar with hundreds of works written over thousands of years. But there is a certain amount of wading and sorting that one must endure to find those little treasures left behind by  the  minds of the past.  When you  rescue the  contents of another man's heart from the plastic bin in the musty garage, and put those contents into your own heart, you have returned  a small flicker of life to someone who once wondered if what they were writing was ever going to be read by anyone. You have  confirmed and given credence to those hours spent writing and rewriting.  You have validated the time spent, which  was just as precious to them as yours is to you, and you have literally stepped over centuries in a single bound to commune with someone you will never meet.
  Isn't that  absolutely  amazing?
 

More Book Covers!!

  Rather than add anything particularly useful to the internet, I have instead opted for the crowd-pleasing fodder of more book covers, including a magazine cover.
  First up, yet another offering from our dear friend "Dr" Jeremy Nascimento, who  lends his voice to the self-help genre.  I honestly don't know where he finds the time to  write all these books.

 

  "Dr" Nascimento (who holds an esteemed laureate chair at Wassamata University in Moosylvania) continued his servitude to the general public with his  next tome, in which he compiles and distills  all of his  homesteading wisdom into an easy-to-read guide for anyone who 's not afraid to take the very real risk they will starve to death.

 

Soon afterwards,  yours truly found himself the subject of much scorn following a real 'hit job' expose in a once prestigious magazine that arose over what was really a very innocent misunderstanding. The bottom-feeding paparazzi will never rest until they get the incriminating , out-of-context photo that  is a  key feature in their livelihood. It is included here not to give any free press to my critics, but rather to give you, my loyal readers, some idea of the muckraking that passes for serious journalism these days.

 

   As they say though, there is no such thing as bad publicity, and I'm sure my  opponents were astonished  when all the  brouhaha  catapulted my latest work  to the bestseller list.

 

  Just a few days  later though, I found myself being misquoted in a popular  entertainment  magazine. These chuckleheads can't even properly spell cannibalism!!

 

  Fortunately, being the unflappable work-aholic that I am, I  pressed on with some ghost-writing, dipping into the biography realm with a man that is  practically a household name.

Let this be a lesson to you young writers out there. work is always the solution.

Mostly Imaginary Books and Other Diversions

  Now these may be a lot less funny to the public at large since you don't know the players involved, but I thought it turned out pretty well, all things considered. You see, my friend Jeremy Nascimento has been working on a book for quite some time now, and I was bored, so I decided what he needed was a cover for his book. I made one, on a lark.

  I am pretty sure you can  put "Dr" in front of your name as long as it's in quotations.
  I then got creative and decided to do some covers for books that Jeremy MIGHT write in the future.

  Now Jeremy and I disagree on some key tenets in his  book, so I felt  that after it was all over he might write a book about how to deal with disagreements among the brethren.

 

  I emailed  Jeremy and he thought they were hilarious. He sent them to his wife and I can  just picture her eyes rolling.   His wife and my wife are  cut from the same strip of cloth. About that time I decided I needed to prove I wasn't above poking fun at myself.

  By now Jeremy was having lunch with his brother in law David and I was beseeched to make a book for  David.

  Now I was on a roll, so it was obviously time to take myself down a notch or two, lest I get the 'big head'.

     It's all a matter of perspective, right?  Oddly enough, I would sit down and read any of these books! Wouldn't you?

 By the way, there is a Part 2 to this.

Creative Destruction

  I'm not a procrastinator, I just very rarely  get  anything done all the way through.  I get the big stuff done. I get the immediate stuff done.  I  go to my day job every day because  if I don't, it has an immediate effect on those in my care.  I fix the family vehicles because that also, has an immediate presence and pressure in  life.  I study for my Sunday School class because Sunday will be here before you know it.   There are always kids that need to be bathed, or stories to be read, or meals to be cooked and eaten. In the  crush to take care of the immediate, everything is  is not immediate gets  put on the back burner.  So I'm not a procrastinator, at least I don't think I am.  I  just am overwhelmed with the immediate, most of the time.  I also  have an overinflated sense of duty.
  There is a second tier though, and that are things that aren't immediate, but are a result of my obsessive personality.  I play my accordion every day because I need the practice. I  read my Bible every day because  I really need the practice.  There are certain people whom I pray for every day (one of them is named Katherine) because I  made a commitment in that area, often years ago.
  The  third tier are things that  would be nice to do, and eventually do need to get done. My property is a monument to unfinished , non-urgent projects. There is a swimming pool that needs to be  assembled, and a lawn tractor that needs a new carburetor. The chickens are escaping, and  somebody needs to fix their pen.  You get the idea.
  The fourth tier ( but who's counting) are simply things that I would like to get done. These generally are creative projects that are being done for no real monetary reward. This blog is one of those. In addition to this, I am  writing, in bits and pieces, at least 3 books. I also am an artist, but more on that, in a moment.
  I am laying all this out there because I want to make it clear, I'm not a procrastinator, I'm actually an obsessive perfectionist work-aholic who happens to be very lousy at finishing anything because all of these tendencies tend to work against each other.  I also  want to give you an example of  not finishing something because I  just can't stop fiddling with it.
  A few years back, I  decided to do something with my art, and  picked up a long-neglected project, transforming it into a webcomic. It was fun, and I had a small following, but soon became overwhelmed with the  pressures of  putting out  an appropriate level of quality on a semi-regular basis.  After all, it was being done for  free, and at the time I was working  2 jobs.  I walked away from it, for the time being.
  Years passed, and I decided one day to look into the viability of  picking up where I left off.  I looked at the success of  comics on Kindle and went "Yeah, I could do that, and  even make a buck or two".  The first step was to look at what I had already done.  Big mistake. It was horrible.  The art was bad, the writing  was  stupid. I was embarrassed that it had ever seen the light of day. Notice that I  am not linking to it, it really is that bad. I decided the thing to do was to start afresh, incorporating everything I had learned  since then.
  So I redid the characters, changed the  backstory, updated the look.  I then found myself obsessively  drawing and designing every little facet of this world I was creating.  The reader would never notice, but I would, and that was reason enough.  I was in 'the zone'. From doorknobs to lightbulbs, everything had to look just right.  As fun as that process is, it doesn't   lend itself to actually FINISHING anything.  The alternative appears to be settle for a work that is  slightly less than the  best I could possibly produce, and the very thought  of such turns my stomach.
  This is how I go from this:

To this....

And eventually this....

  Now multiply this panel  by several hundred, and  you see my dilemma.  I'm certain that, by the time I finish this run-through, I will look back at my current efforts and be horribly ashamed.  This will start the process all over again...
  Am I the only one like this?

Lesson Learned

  When I first published SWINDLED, and was beginning to get some recognition, I was approached by a well-known author.  This well-known author was actually a key component in my economic re-education, and he had an idea.  Several of us had written books along a similar theme, and he thought it would be mutually beneficial if we reviewed and promoted each other’s books.  I agreed , and a couple of other people agreed.  We all exchanged copies, virtual and otherwise of each other’s work.

  I was pretty excited to be working with and receiving help from somebody who I looked up to in certain areas. I told this story to a friend of mine and she warned me not to get my hopes up. She said that when she had first started out she had been similarly solicited, and in the middle of her flattery of being noticed and taken seriously, she agreed to a great deal of work that was never reciprocated.  She reminded me that the author in particular that had arranged this deal was an atheist with some pretty horrible opinions on the issue of abortion.  Her parting advice on this was “I hope it works out, but remember that he isn’t in the business of helping you, he’s in the business of selling books, and if you help him do that, he’ll use it.”

  Regardless of her advice, I took my end of the commitment very seriously, and I  plowed into the books. I took notes, and within a few days began compiling my review.  I tried to be honest, but fair. I finished all the reviews within weeks of receiving the books, and posted them everywhere I could. I sent links to the reviews to the other authors, and got busy with the rest of my life.

  As of the time of this writing, I am the only one of that group to keep their commitment.  A few months went by and I contacted the   ‘idea man’ for this venture and tried to gently remind him of what the arrangement had been. He assured me that his review of my work was coming out any day now.  I am still waiting.  I spoke to one of the other authors over the phone and he told me that he didn’t know if he would actually get around to what he had committed to. He apologized in advance if it didn’t happen.

  So what are the lessons here?  One lesson is that you should do the right thing, and keep your commitments not because of what it will earn you in return, but because it is simply the right thing to do. I cannot control the actions or work habit of anyone else, and if they  entered into a deal with no intent on following through, that is a reflection on their character, not mine.  This famous author continues to write and lecture, receiving accolades for his smartness. At the end of the day, I got a couple of free books out of it, and an invaluable education.

 I also reaffirmed within myself that if I ever make it ‘big’, I’m going to bring as many people with me as a I can. My inspiration from this is director Sam Raimi who made movies and let all his friends be in them, plus his car. Danny Dileo did the same thing. Make a note of this; the time to be nice to me is now.

  This incident confirmed yet again that Mrs. Becky Akers, in addition to being a great writer with amazing hair, probably gets migraines from being so brilliant.

No Paucity of Paper

 I have a deep ,dark, terrible, and  horribly kept secret. I love books. In fact, I  sort of hoard books.  If you came to our house in the last few years you would have noticed the  slow and steady accumulation of  bookshelves.  We had one or two in the living room, at least one in the back bedroom, and  one in the master bedroom.   There's a bookshelf my grandfather built and a small metal one we picked up at a yard sale somewhere. In addition to these  bookshelves being crammed with books on them, books lying on top of the books on them,  and books lying on their sides in front of those books, you  no doubt would have noticed the piles of books, and  boxes of books scattered around the premises.   I would say that its better now, but it's not, its just more centrally  located.  The entire  far wall of our bedroom is bookshelves and piles. In addition to that there are books stacked on  my nightstand and piled on top of every flat surface.  But the search and accumulation   never stops. I  cruise yard sales, and used book stores, and   I lie in ambush when our local library decides to  dump some books. I hit the  'free book rack' first, then I venture inside to  snatch up the dollar books. I dump them in the trunk of my car, and when I get home I try to find a  shelf or box or flat surface that they'll fit on.
   In my defense, if one could  hope to mount one, I don't  get books just for the sake of getting books. I actually read everything I  bring in. I suffer from an insatiable  curiosity about  a variety of topics. I recently picked up a tome  on how to conduct an exorcism. It's sitting in a pile right next to a book about the quest for the worlds largest small mouth bass. I have books on church history  snuggled right next to books on the search for Bigfoot.  I have a book of collected sea monster legends on the same shelf as a Ron Paul  book on Austrian economics.It is this eclectic  accumulation of dead trees that causes my wife to roll her eyes and causes me to sheepishly , and sometimes clandestinely, bring my latest haul into the house. Once someone gave us 17 long boxes of comic books ( about 250 a box), and I successfully  shifted them around the house to where my wife was never 100% sure of how many we had until I was able to sell off roughly half of them. But that's a whole different post.
  My insatiable hunger for the printed word seems to  chill when it comes to the  digital word. Yes, I wrote a book, and yes it was only available on Kindle for  a while ( I still am Kindle-less, cell-phone-less, and  ipod-less), but that was more a matter of economics than my love for small  flat e-readers. I just like books, and by 'books' I mean rectangular  compilations of pulpified  tree matter, not slim battery powered collections of magnetic ink and pixie dust.
  It may be a generational thing, but that's unlikely,  since my  wife loves her Kindle.  I got her a Kindle because a) I love her dearly, and b) her  collection of Amish romance novels was taking up valuable  shelf space.  I just like paper. I like the look of it, and the heft of it, and the smell of it, but I also like the fact that it  doesn't change.  I can write this blog, post this blog, then go back and edit this blog and you would have no indicator that I had changed anything. It is intangible, and subject to alteration.  Physical books are a set  quantity, and the   book I have from the 1800's ( yard sale) still say the exact same things, contain the exact same facts that they did when they were printed. They are  off-grid, untraceable and here to stay, at least until the paper rots.
  I can  justify my habit with  the best of them. After all, I'm always researching one thing or another, and I do refer back to them as needed, assuming I can find them. Ironically if Im doing  very mch internet research I will print it out so I cn hold it in my hand.  Plus we're homeschoolers! We're supposed to  have lots of books, it's part of the Code! Why just  yesterday my son needed to know the  difference between two different types of clouds (cumulus and stratus), and without the  Latin-English dictionary I snagged at an estate sale, why we'd be sunk!
  As vices go, I suppose its one of the more harmless ones. I dont do drugs, I dont chase wild women, I  pay my bills on time. But I'm always on the  prowl for more epistles. When the kids finally move out, one by one I'll probably take their rooms and convert them into more bookshelves. My  ever-patient wife will no doubt  accompany in my decling years, holding my hand and taking pity on me as I rummage through the local penny-saver  saying "Oh look, an estate sale!"
  Well I certainly feel better now that I've gotten this off my chest. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some things to get out of the trunk of my car before my wife gets home.