I’m delighted to report that I have received verbal (actually e-mail) acceptance of one of my novels by a new publisher.
I’m going to be discreet about naming names at this point, before a contract has actually been signed. I’ll say that the publisher is a newish Christian house, and that I will be their first fiction author.
The novel is West Oversea, the third volume in The Saga of Erling Skjalgsson.
Thinking this was today’s review (it’s actually last Friday’s), I will proceed to link to the NYT’s review of Expelled.
One of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry. . . . Mixing physical apples and metaphysical oranges at every turn “Expelled” is an unprincipled propaganda piece that insults believers and nonbelievers alike.
Typical. In other news, Richard Dawkins explains himself and why Intelligent Design isn’t a scientific theory in the LA Times.
Entities capable of designing anything, whether they be human engineers or interstellar aliens, must be complex — and therefore, statistically improbable. And statistically improbable things don’t just happen spontaneously by chance without an explanation trail. That is what “improbable” means, as creationists never tire of assuring us (they wrongly think Darwinian natural selection is a matter of chance). In fact, natural selection is the very opposite of a chance process, and it is the only ultimate explanation we know for complex, improbable things.
I know I have much to learn about modern evolutionary science, but I don’t buy this non-chance argument. Regis Nicoll comments on the above.
Now and then Phil gets offers from publishers willing to send us books for review. When he thinks they might be of interest to me, he forwards them. I like this. I like anything that provides me free books.
I got one recently, from a publisher in England. As a gesture of gratitude for their trouble and generosity in sending the book, I’m not going to review it.
Because if I did review it, I’d have to give it the lowest grade I’ve ever given a book on this blog. It is amazingly, egregiously awful and amateurish.
Instead I’m going to write, in generalized terms, about some of the author’s failures. They might be helpful to those of you who are writers, or want to write. Continue reading How not to write
Congress is talking about Internet Neutrality today, and the president of the Writers Guild of America, West, and other interested parties are giving their POV. A new bill, Internet Freedom Preservation Act 2008 (HR 5353), intends to “enshrine Net Neutrality,” according to SavetheInternet.com. It will place Internet Neutrality, “the longstanding principle that Internet service providers cannot discriminate against Web sites or services based on their source, ownership or destination, into the Communications Act.”
It also requires the Federal Communications Commission to convene at least eight “broadband summits” to collect public input on policies to “promote openness, competition, innovation, and affordable, ubiquitous broadband service for all individuals in the United States.
This makes sense to me, as far as I understand it. We don’t want a large corporate conglomerate to own certain web hosts or service providers and be able to deny or delete content critical of their leadership or companies. If that’s what this bill does, perhaps it is good law.
The Together for the Gospel conference was last week, and Challies has been keeping up with it. Here’s a list of audio downloads.
A romance author and her publisher are divorcing after “irreconcilable editorial differences” developed over the last few months. At first the publisher defended the writer, saying copied passages from resource material was acceptably or fairly used, but they have since changed their minds.
Author Nora Roberts commented, “By my definition, copying another’s work and passing it as your own equals plagiarism.”
Frank Wilson points out an interesting mystery quiz.
I hear there was an earthquake in Illinois last night. We did not feel it here. Or if we did, I slept through it. Just in case you were wondering.
I went to give blood tonight, and was rejected. My hemoglobin level, apparently, is a little low. This has never happened before, and I’m nonplussed (I ask you, how many blogs use words like “nonplussed” these days? We give full value at Brandywine Books). My chief suspicion is that it’s a result of dieting fairly severely this week. I’d slacked off for today, just to prepare my corpuscles, but apparently it didn’t do the job.
Or maybe it’s the first sign of a lingering, fatal disease. Whatever.
I’m going up north this weekend for the confirmation of my nephew and godson, The Youngest Nephew (note to burglars who may be reading—my renter will still be here and he’s a survivalist and former Navy Seal, clinging in Midwest bitterness to his collection of classic Uzis). I suppose I ought to sit TYN down at some point and give him a lot of good advice. I’m sure he’d appreciate that a lot.
But somehow I suspect I’ll keep my mouth shut all weekend.
Finished another Koontz today—Hideaway. I’m not going to review it, because I’ve done so many Koontzes, but I’ll mention that I liked it a lot, yet found it hard to read. I liked the good characters so much that I didn’t want to see anything bad happen to them, so I actually resisted picking it up a few times, not wanting to know what happened next.
Joan Hunter Dunn died last week. She was the subject of the English poet John Betjeman’s most famous poem, “A Subaltern’s Love Song.” Betjeman asked her permission to use her name, and apparently they were only friends, not lovers.
The poem (I’ll confess I’ve never read it) is a wartime elegy to normal life and love in pre-war times.
Betjeman was a pupil of C. S. Lewis’ at Oxford. He never took his degree, and always blamed Lewis for not supporting him when he got into academic trouble. They were reconciled in later years, but never became friends.