How do I “hate” thee, Jeff Gerke? Let me count the ways…

First, thanks to one suggestion in your wonderful book (see left), I found myself having to reorder the chapters in my manuscript in progress. Then, thanks to another suggestion I had to change the main protagonist in order to make sure I was telling the right person’s story. Then, I had to make sure there was an “inner journey” for that protagonist – someone who in earlier writings I’ve done has already progressed to a formidable level of maturity – as well as an “outer conflict” or “ticking bomb” that he faced. Then, you advised that I should stay very plain in dialogue (“stick with ’said’”). Then, you advised doing something I’ve seen Robert Heinlein do in some of his most interesting fiction but which I feared would be too artsy-craftsy and too self-aggrandizing: work from first-person viewpoints, more than one if I can make that work. [EDIT: As you point out in your comment, you actually suggest havine one 1st-person POV and other 3rd-person POVs. I've never seen that done. Robert Heinlein employed one or multiple 1st-person POVs brilliantly.]

Oh, how I “hate” you, now that I’ve finished your book (my first read-through, that is). Now I have to rewrite my manuscript from the beginning. And I will have to figure out how to plan ahead, which by your own admission is not exactly something most novelists can do.

May the anchovies of a thousand pizzas give you thirsty nightmares.

Best wishes in Jesus Christ (ברכות בישוע המשיח),
John Wheeler (יוחנן רכב)

[EDIT: The links to Marcher Lord Press and its associated Web pages (The Anomaly and Where the Map Ends) are well worth checking out.]

I’ve progressed to Chapter 5 in my initial manuscript. But thanks to information and tips given in an excellent handbook called THE ART & CRAFT OF WRITING CHRISTIAN FICTION by Jeff Gerke, and due to other considerations, I believe that I need to revise what I have from the beginning. The basic ideas and themes will stay the same, but the chapters will be in somewhat different order and the cast of characters somewhat different.

This is going to be a long, long road. But if (as Jeff says is the sine qua non and rightly so) I’m to glorify God in my writing, then nothing less than the best results for the right reasons will do the trick.

Blessings in Messiah (ברכות בישוע המשיח),
John Wheeler (יוחנן רכב)

The Ark of the Covenant

As if I didn’t have enough to do, I’ve learned that there is something seriously wrong with my personal Web site. In fact, it might’ve been removed without notice. If so, that was my fault for not reading the Terms of Service carefully enough. The problem is that it’s proving no quicker to set up a new site (with potential areas of conflect) than it is to figure out what in the world happened to the old one. I think I’ll have to find a new host!

Meanwhile, some of the theological articles (at least) can be put up on my WordPress blog called LCG Scribe. Here are three links I just put up (the first is but a sort of ad blurb):

Making Use of LCG Scribe’s Full Power (very short)

The Church of God, Messianic Judaism and Gentile Christianity (moderate length)

Genesis 6:9: “…Perfect in His Generations…” (considerable length)

Blessings in Jesus Christ (ברכות בישוע המשיח),
John Wheeler (יוונן רכב)

I’ve been too snowed under figuratively to report on the literal snow that we got on Friday, December 4: six days earlier than last year’s snow and (if memory serves) the earliest snow on record in Houston. The photo on the left is of a plant in front of my landlords’ house: a good place for the snow to gather without melting. In some places it thoroughly whitened the grass.

A friend cheerfully groused that he was getting tired of all this global warming. He’s been a longtime skeptic of the idea that man’s responsible for any major climate change. Perhaps it’s appropriate then to mention that the Copenhagen climate talks have opened, right after “Climategate” has come to light. The world may be about to make an agreement based on deliberately manipulated and thus inherently flawed data, according to allegations. (For the record, there is this counterargument…)

Of course, early snow in one area is no indicator on this issue. Here are some photos I took of the phenomenon…

Blessings in Jesus Christ (ברכות בישוע המשיח),
John Wheeler (יוחנן רכב)

The recent end-of-the-world movie 2012 has been very well-received in China. I have to wonder if the following (taken from ZAM News online today) is related in any way…

China Poised to Own Half of Online Gaming by 2012

Despite its strict censorship laws and recent political snafus, China is expected to claim half the world’s online gaming market by 2012, according to a story in last week’s Wall Street Journal [via Massively.com]. In just a little more than one year, China’s total revenue from online gaming—MMOs or otherwise—will reach 41 billion yuan ($6 billion), reported by the Beijing-based data analysis firm, Cnzz.com. This may come as no surprise if you’ve been following the global market trends, but the Chinese government’s seemingly oppositional stance regarding online gaming might have inferred the opposite. As we reported last month, the ongoing power struggle between two PRC agencies left Chinese gamers caught in the middle; World of Warcraft, for example, still isn’t available in mainland China.

Nonetheless, online gaming—as a whole—is on the rise. “Two-thirds of China’s 338 million Web users are now online gamers,” according to the WSJ’s article. “The online-game industry, which currently accounts for more than half of the total Internet economy, will see strong annual growth at a rate of 20% future years, the report says.” MMOs still account for the majority of China’s online gaming market, but Web- and browser-based games follow closely in second place. The WSJ notes that despite the Chinese market’s loss of WoW, other MMOs like Aion are beginning to fill that void. In fact, China is likely to pull ahead of the U.S. online gaming market by the end of this year, as the newspaper reported last spring.

Today the fantasy world, tomorrow the real world?

Meanwhile the New Europe continues to rise in the real world with the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. So far much has been done in the refashioning of the European Union into a genuine “United States of Europe“ without the meaningful approval of the general population, sometimes against its wishes. But as threats such as a declining United States of America on the one hand and an ascendent China, Iran and Arab-dominated Middle East on the other threaten the Pax Romana Nova, how quickly will the Europeans change their tune?

Expect 2012 to bring a world very different from that of 2010, ripoffs of an otherwise almost meaningless date in the ancient Mayan calendar notwithstanding.

Blessings in Jesus Christ (ברכות בישוע המשיח),
John Wheeler (יוחנן רכב)

As of the end of yesterday morning, I got Chapter One sketched out. It’s enough to establish the general direction of where I want to go with the story. I hope that the direction I chose will allow me in due time to introduce as much of the richness of my “backstory” as possible.

Of course a blog format suggests that I could give a chapter summary every so often. But since the book is as yet unpublished and may undergo great revisions before it is, that seems not to make a whole lot of sense. So other things will have to fill in, at least for the moment – when I think of things that are appropriate and worth reading.

So let me “fess up” to a potential obstacle in this particular quest. I’ve been battling against bipolar disorder, then high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and taking medications for all of these. Now on top of all of that, I’ve been diagnosed with diabetes. Dealing with all of that is going to take a lot of time both from my normal paying work and from this particular project. So I’ll have to decide what is most important to me and do those things first.

Yes, I know that last is no great revelation of truth to many of you. It isn’t to me either, yet a weakness of my personality type (ENFP) is to take things “on the fly” too much. Type counselor Vicky Jo Varner (INFJ) told me about a very helpful analogy. If you put the sand first into the jar, the sand will keep the big rocks out; but if you put the big rocks in first, then the sand will fit in too as you pour it around the rocks. A fellow ENFP must’ve seen me on days when I managed to remember that principle, for he gave me an almost mythic description of how I used to handle time effectively in high school and college. I do recall that I paid an enormous cost in mental and physical energy to do it – perhaps a sign that it’s not something natural or easy for ENFPs.

Blessings in Messiah (ברכות חמשיח),
John Wheeler (יוחנן רכב)

P.S.: As of this morning, the first draft of Chapter 2 has been finished. (I likely will need to fill out these chapters, unless I write a lot of very short books!)

This morning marked a turning point for me as an author of speculative fiction. In the wee hours of last night I decided to write a proposal letter to the editor at Marcher Lord Press concerning my fictional ideas. This morning I received a short but very encouraging note for him. So now, as I have the time, I’ll be preparing my first draft of what I hope will be Book One of a series of books.

Heretofore (on Triond.com) I’ve been using the umbrella title of A Ring of Stars. But the scope of my fictional scenario is theoretically and potentially so incredibly vast that really it seems to make the most sense to call the scenario by what makes it possible: The Portal of Light. And it also seems to make the most sense to start the series at its historical beginning. Thus the working title of my first book is The Portal of Light: Covenant.

I should’ve taken down the name of the person who came up with that neat graphic on the left; it makes a good template for part of one of the flags of my fictional Realm. Anyway, it certainly seems as good a graphic as any to mark the blogs in this series.

Really the implications of what has happened today are more than I can talk about here; it would reveal more about me that I yet feel comfortable saying just anywhere to anyone.. Let me just say that I feel as if in many ways I’ve traveled my whole life to get to this point, not certain of what I’d find when I got there, and now…here is this challenge of bookwriting, and all that it will bring to my life, looming like a snowy granite mountain in the middle of a clearing in the middle of an endless forest that I’ve finally passed through. And only I can climb this particular mountain to reach the sunlight glinting at the top of its peak.

Blessings in Messiah (ברכות במשיח),
John Wheeler (יוחנן רכב)

The Barbados Beach Club

Though this may come as a surprise to some people even yet, New Testament Christians didn’t observe Sunday, Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, “saints’ days” or any of the syncretic celebrations that accreted from the second century of our era onward. They observed the Sabbath, Festivals and Holy Days – “the appointed times of the LORD (מועדי יהוה)” – that Israel (when obedient to God) had always kept (Leviticus 23). The first Christians (who were Jewish by descent) taught the Gentiles who joined with them to do likewise (cf. Matthew 5:17-20; 28:18-20).

Colossians 2:16-17 (a most misunderstood passage) shows that the first Christians kept these days in a new spirit, as “shadows of the things to come”: of what Jesus Christ had done, continued to do and would yet do to save His Church, His nation Israel and ultimately the whole world. They were not limited by all the strictures of the Law of Moses (let alone of later Judaic halakhah or Gnostic philosophy) in their observance, however (same passage, rightly rendered from the Received Text: “but [let the Church,] the Body of the Christ, [judge these matters]“).  Nor were they limited to Jerusalem as their place of observance (cf. John 4:19-26). These realities became all the more pertinent when Second Temple Jerusalem fell in 70 AD and it was no longer possible to carry out the ceremonies associated with the Law of Moses.

The Living Church of God, being an organization with congregations all over the world, has sites where it observes the Feast of Tabernacles in many different countries. This year I had the opportunity to keep the Feast outside my native United States for the first time, and I chose to go to the island of Barbados. I already had a pen pal there (what does one call a “pen pal” or “pen friend” in this age of the Internet?) and wanted to meet him; but I also wanted to “stretch myself” by encountering a cultural and ethnic mix different from what one can find in the U.S., or what I had found even in Israel or London, England. As it happens, the LCG kept the Feast of Tabernacles this year at the Barbados Beach Club.

Part of my pre-trip research was in that ever-handy starting point, Wikipedia. Interestingly, this source claims: ”Barbados’s Human Development Index ranking is consistently among the top 75 countries in the world. In report published on October 5 2009, it was ranked 37th in the world, and third in the Americas, behind Canada and the United States.” On arrival I found that true to Wikipedia’s hints, Barbados has a fascinating blend (even in its often-flagrantly-unzoned architecture) of old and new, rich, middle-class and poor, African, European, and Asian. Economically (I was told)  it is much better off than most of the Caribbean, although I suspect that could change quickly if world finances seriously impact its chief source of income, tourism.

The one obstacle I feared on my trip – tropical heat and humidity – was there as expected. Mercifully, Barbados has and uses air conditioning, although perhaps not as much as Houston, TX. Also the weather was unusually rain-free for that time of year. I found that even the insects were rather laid-back. Mosquitos that would lunge for the capillaries in desperate hunger in Houston seemed surprisingly few and lazy in Barbados, as if to say, “There’s no hurry, really. The human has to go to sleep sometime.” And that was the only time I got bitten by anything: while I was asleep (twice). Maybe I was just specially blessed, or maybe the bugs are worse in the interior. But on a bus trip there, I wasn’t bothered at all. Nor did I get more than a touch of sunburn (one application of sunscreen, on the day in question, did the trick).

And as for the seven-day Feast of Tabernacles itself, plus the eighth day – what the Jews call (based on biblical Hebrew texts such as Nehemiah 8:18) Sheminit Atseret, and what we (based on John 7:37) call the Last Great Day? The focus of this period is on the services: hymns, sermonette, sermon, and Special Music (not necessarily in that order). Between the featured local elders and the visiting speakers, we had outstanding spiritual nourishment, just as I hear was true elsewhere this year. The Special Music was good to outstanding, and I was kept busy playing hymns most of the Feast. And meeting the brethren – sometimes-challenging local accent and all – was a blessing. It took me some time to break the ice with some of the older people, but my own turn at Special Music did the trick at last (thank God, my musical performances usually do). There were also abundant opportunities for fellowship on trips (island tour, caravan cruise, submarine cruise) and over meals.

Oh yes…let’s raise a glass of local rum punch to that fine local delicacy, flying fish! This is the official national fish of Barbados. Unhappily (as you will read), the flying fish is encountering serious problems in that part of the world.

I have on Photobucket two slideshows of photos from Barbados: all that turned out. This slideshow (250 photos) and this slideshow (40 photos) will give you a good taste of my experiences in Barbados. (No, the young man in the first slideshow isn’t dancing; he’s demonstrating kung fu moves for me. I have a video of another demonstration he did for me – maybe, with his permission, it will show up on YouTube.)

Best wishes in Jesus Christ (שלום בישוע המשיח),
John Wheeler (יוחנן רכב)

"The Spirit or Genius of the European" - Emil Pearson

Recently I received something new from Interstrength Associates (founded by Dr. Linda Berens). (Its book list is here; a list of related links is here; and one of those links, a PR release of interest, is here). I refer to the workbook Character and Personality Type by Dr. Dario Nardi (whose “best-fit” personality type, he says, is INTJ).

The workbook was written in 1999, before Dr. Berens set aside Dr. David Keirsey’s famous names for the four temperaments in favor of names more suggestive of the roles those temperaments play in organizations (those newer names are the subject of the PR release). Thus the workbook uses Dr. Keirsey’s names. Otherwise, Dr. Nardi’s writing style is as closely reasoned as a computer program, which gives quite a different flavor from the workbooks authored by ENFP Dr. Berens. (Not surprisingly, I as an ENFP find Dr. Berens’ workbooks somewhat easier to follow! I really have to engage my “developed-self” INTJ mode to follow Dr. Nardi.) But I find the book fascinating and helpful in its insights, which have to do with “life themes” and the “flavors” within various personality types.

I could sum up what I’ve learned about this subject in one sentence: “Character is what you do about your personality.”

Best wishes in Jesus Christ (שלום בישוע המשיח),
John Wheeler (יוחנן רכב)

"The Spirit or Genius of the European" - Emil Pearson

While looking for an article I wanted to show a friend, I stumbled across something more useful in the long run. Here on Google is the text of a workbook called “Multiple Intelligences and Personality Type” by Dario Nardi, who co-authored the article I was trying to find. I’ve been wanting to order this workbook (part of a series of which I have four, all authored or co-authored by Linda Berens), but for the moment I can now read it online. And now that I know this book is online, perhaps Google Books has the workbooks I have online too so I can point others to them. But that can wait – I have other fish to fry!

Best wishes in Jesus Christ (שלום בישוע המשיח),
John Wheeler (יוחנן רכב)

(Update 2009-10-13: I found the workbook for resale via Amazon.com and a third-party supplier. Not only must it be out-of-print, it must also be much in demand, for it was selling for what was probably seven or eight times its original price. I can hardly afford that much for a book of any kind, but on the other hand the information is so important to so many things I’m doing that I can hardly not afford it either. And in addition, I’ve ordered Dr. Nardi’s latest workbook, which is in print by its original publisher and apparently much-anticipated and appreciated. It’s also much more reasonably priced.)