Yesterday my agent confessed that she “messed up royally.” Actually, Rachelle’s post was a clarification of her previous post entitled Will My Publisher Let Me Self-Publish Too? This post stirred up lots of pushback, most notably from self-published authors who felt she was siding with “Big Pub.” Frankly, I thought it was an overreaction on [...]
It’s been said that most people spend the first half of their life making the last half miserable. This adage seems equally applicable to the writers I know. In this way: We spend the second half of our writing life unlearning the rules we learned in the first half. One such rule that I’ve had [...]
First pro-lifers are accused of NOT adopting. Then pro-lifers are accused of WRONGLY adopting. If you get the sense it’s a no-win situation, you’re probably right. The article in Mother Jones that started the latest round of attacks on evangelical culture, Orphan Fever: The Evangelical Movement’s Adoption Obsession, argues that one result of Christians’ efforts [...]
I wasn’t forced to write horror. I didn’t choose that genre — especially as a Christian! — because it’s a hot genre. I don’t read horror as a psychological outworking of some hidden rage or trauma (at least, I don’t think so). Still, horror fiction holds a special place in my heart. But why? After [...]
Wired magazine recently reported how some businesses are using an applicant’s Klout score as a criteria for employment. Much as Google’s search engine attempts to rank the relevance of every web page, Klout—a three-year-old startup based in San Francisco—is on a mission to rank the influence of every person online. Its algorithms comb through social [...]
Stephen Hawking recently appeared at nearby Pasadena California Institute of Technology where he laid out the case for a Big Bang without God. Hawking himself has admitted, “Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.” Which is why atheists have gone to great pains [...]
I am not a theologian. I have not attended seminary. I’d like to think of myself as an average Christian who reads their Bible and grapples with its message and implications. That said, the trend to mythologize certain Bible stories and figures always seems to end up in bad places. NY Times columnist Ross Douthat, [...]
The godly care for their animals, but the wicked are always cruel. — Proverbs 12:19 NLT I’ve always loved this obscure little verse. It employs the brief, contrasting style so typical of the wisdom author: The righteous are THIS. The wicked are THAT. In this case, the righteous, or the “godly” in this translation, are [...]
I was not entirely surprised at how many comments THIS POST on Facebook generated. You see, some people — writers, to be exact — can get downright ticked when you insinuate that self-publishing MAY be an over-reaction to “the system.” In other words, SOME authors become so disgruntled with the traditional publishing system — the [...]
