A World of Speculation An Orthodox Christian looks at literature and life Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 2 0 7 1927

Articles from A World of Speculation

Stop Editing 2006-09-12 00:50:00 Life lessons can come from surprising places.Over the weekend, I was looking on the web for magic formulas to help me progress faster in my court reporting course. Actually, I ran across this article in some practice material, and it offered one of those lovely categorizations: If you can fix these problems, you will be assured of success. (Tell me, Doctor, what is wrong with me that I keep going into pursuits where success is an ever-receding horizon?)Anyway, the article helpfully informs us that there are four classifications of problems: clarity, hesitation, carrying and editing. If you're overly persnickety, as I am, you will note that they overlap and and feed each other, but when I read the description of "editing," I realized I was nailed:4) Writers who edit while writing:A. This is the strangest group of all (I rest my case). This group looks backward to check the accuracy of previous strokes. This is not conducive to learning. It must be stopped.This is the same reason ...

When I'm Not Blogging 2006-09-11 00:16:00 Despite good intentions and not-as-good efforts, blogging has fallen off over the past couple of months. I'm pleased to report that there's a good reason.I've gotten to the text phase of my novel.It's been longer in production than I care to admit. I started writing it in the 1980s. It was going to be "Left Behind" before there was a market for "Left Behind."Then I read The Gulag Archipelago (the whole thing--I was riding the bus to and from work every day and had lots of time), and the idea that American Evangelical Christians would get a free pass on persecution seemed empty. But I still had these characters and their experience seemed to have the capacity to go deeper, and so it changed and changed and changed, and I "finished" it. That was in the mid-90s, I think.So I tried to market it. I got some "good" rejections (if you don't write, you probably don't know that there are levels of rejections, sort of like Dante's hell, but I'll spare you the misery; if you do write, you ... Blogging

A Shameless Paschal Promotion 2006-09-10 01:51:00 What it lacks in theological nuance it makes up in . . . pink.H/T: Marie. ...

My Name, Too! 2006-09-08 10:28:00 I went to the schoolyard to interview a teacher for a story. When I was done, I called to a few of the little girls playing nearby to have their picture taken with the teacher. I got three of them, about third grade, and they stood smiling in a cluster around Mr. G. They called to their friend to join them in the picture. She thought about it, but decided against it.After I had snapped the photo, I stopped the girls in place to write down their names, and first in line suddenly was the girl who didn't want to be in the photo.Some people are visual, and some are literary. ...