All posts by David Todd

Carlyle, Church History Novels, Documenting America, The Forest Throne, The Gutter Chronicles, Writing

The Lasting Effects of “Genre Focus Disorder”

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I’m hoping that, by the end of the year, this will not be the only Bible study in my bibliography. Alas, I wrote that caption in 2022, and here it is 2023 and it’s still my only published Bible study. But I’m much closer to that goal.

Since early February, my main writing focus has been the Bible study on Holy Week that I developed. I wrote about it here. With a good writing day Saturday, reaching back to work on Part 5 (Part 7 being caught up), I got to the point where I can see light at the end of the tunnel on both Part 5 and Part 7. An introduction for the series, to go in the as-yet-un-started Part 1 also came to me this weekend.

Thus, it’s time to be thinking about the next thing to write. The second book in The Forest Throne series, The Key To Time Travel, is done, just waiting on cover creation. I will most likely give it the once over, checking to make sure the dates are correct. That’s a one-day task at most.

This was one of my two new publications in 2022. The sequel will be out within two months. When will I do the next one?

Somewhere around June 1, I will be looking to start something else—unless I take a month off from writing to do some major decluttering work, in which case July is the more likely date for writing something new. I actually started something else last week, the first volume in the Alfred Cottage Mysteries. That was mainly to have something to bring to critique group. I don’t know if I’m ready to begin work on it as yet.

But what do I write next? My Genre Focus Disorder (GFD) is so severe, I have any one of several directions to turn. I’ve spoken about GFD before, and if I can find the posts, I’ll put in a couple of links. It is a self-defined, self-diagnosed writing condition. It’s the inability to stick to one genre and build an audience in it. I’ve got it bad. I’ve met a few other writers with it, but I believe their cases are less severe than mine. Now that it’s time to pick a new direction to go in, what do I choose?

This was the last volume published in my Church History Novels series. When Ill I do the 5th?

I could write the next book in the Documenting America series. I have sold more in that series than any other. I did the reading research for the next volume, which will be titled Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution, around two years ago. Hopefully my notes are comprehensive enough that I can jump right into the writing.

Or how about the next book in the Church History Novels series? I have four books in that complete. That’s my second-best selling series (which isn’t saying much). I know what the next volume will be about, though I’m not sure of the title yet. Actually, I know what the next three or four books in the series will be.

It’s been a long time since I wrote most of the poems in this, around 2005-6, I think.

Then there’s a book of poetry I’d like to write. It’s tentatively titled On Of My Wishes. I created the document last year and grabbed close to 30 poems from my “inventory” that will fit the theme. Alas, inspiration for the 20 to 30 others I need to write to flesh out the book hasn’t come. I’ve been so busy with prose, poetry is almost a distant memory. Could I rekindle the desire to write it, at least for one more book?

I could keep going with the Holy Week Bible study. I’ve completed Parts 4 and 6, and, as I said earlier, and very close to done with Parts 5 and 7. That leaves Parts 1, 2, 3, and 8 to be written. I could just continue on with them while that’s what’s been on my mind. Or, I have another ten Bible studies developed and taught, and a few more in development that would probably make decent books. Maybe that’s where I should go.

I have one Carlyle book published and two more started. And essays about him on my mind. It’s probably an obsession that I ought to get treatment for.

A couple of other non-fiction projects I started on are about Thomas Carlyle. One was a comprehensive, chronological bibliography. I’m well along with that, maybe 70 percent of the work, with the hardest parts complete. I pulled the document up Saturday evening to check to see if I had a certain of his compositions in it. I did, including documentation from his letters. Also, I began putting together a book about Carlyle’s Chartism, a pivotal work for him I believe. That may also be around 70 percent done, though I haven’t looked at it for at least five years. Why do either one of them, when the one volume about Carlyle that I edited and published doesn’t sell? Beats me. Mainly to complete unfinished projects. I hate leaving things unfinished.

A period of intense research is what led to this book. What will come of this new time of research?

Another thing that’s nagging at me is a genealogy book about my wife’s immigrant ancestor, John Cheney of Newbury, Massachusetts. I actually have much work done on it as far as research of his personal life is concerned. I researched, wrote, and published books about two of his descendants. I’d like to do a book about him, and maybe about four or five more about his children. This is more a dream, a hobby almost. Still, I’d like to get that done.

I could always stick with the Alfred Cottage Mysteries. They are cozy mysteries based on young Alfred’s genealogical studies. For some reason, I think they would sell. More dreaming, I guess.

One more short story to go in this already published collection has come to mind. Maybe that will be next?

And that’s not all that’s available for me to add to. The Gutter Chronicles could use a third volume. Ideas for series that I’ve fleshed out include The Waterville Dome, one about stock trading that’s partly planned, and…it seems that I’m forgetting something else. Oh, yes, the next two volumes in The Forest Throne series. The next one is partly planned out. And I haven’t even mentioned short stories.

See what I mean about Genre Focus Disorder? Maybe I do need to take that month off from writing, get some serious decluttering/dis-accumulation done, then see where to go. Whatever I decide, I’ll report it here.

book reviews, Christianity

Book Review: Great Voices of the Reformation

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Some books sound good when you make a decision about buying them, but upon reading, turn out to be difficult to get through. Such was the case of Great Voices of the Reformation. Edited by Harry Emerson Fosdick, t

A good book that I found a little difficult to read. Not sure if the lack was in me or the book.

his is a 546 page hardcover from 1952 that I picked up used somewhere.

The premise is good. Look at the people who were the main clergymen of the Reformation; give a brief bio of each and description of their publications; and provide lengthy excerpts of their writings. The documents included were mainly doctrinal writings.

Fosdick began with John Wycliffe, then John Huss, then Martin Luthor. From there he moved on to mostly familiar names, such as Zwingli, Calvin, and Knox. But he included some names I had either never heard of or hadn’t associated as being significant parts or the Reformation. One example was the Anabaptists, represented by a number of names I had never heard of. Another couple were Cotton Mather of New England fame and Jeremy Taylor of the church of England. I’d heard of both, but just hadn’t thought of them as main forces in the Protestant think tank.

One surprise was Roger Wiliams. He founded my native Rhode Island when he was banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony. I

learned about him in school, but hadn’t thought about him in years. I found his writings refreshing and his colonial methods better than many others. He believed in buying land from the Indians rather than just taking it. He was also in favor of religious freedom. This contrasted with the Puritans, who wanted freedom for their own worship but not for others—at least not in their own colony.

Part of the problem with this book was the archaic English in some of the writings. Most of the oldest texts have had the English modernized or been translated into modern English. However, I suspect they kept the English purposely a little archaic, for I found it difficult to read. Some was sentence structure, not necessarily the words.

Another difficulty was how the writers had approached their subject matter. It’s hard to explain, but the older documents tended to put me to sleep. I would settle in my reading chair in the sunroom at noon and open the book to John Huss. Knowing his story was so inspiring, I had high hopes, but I fell asleep more than once after reading a page or two. I should probably chalk that up to my failure, not the failure of the document.

The later writers—George Fox, John Woolman, and John Wesley, were definitely easier to understand. I’ve read a lot of Wesley’s works independent of this book, and, being last in this volume, it was enjoyable to wind up and end up with a familiar voice.

I had thought this was to be a reference book, permanently in my library. After reading it, however, I think it i unlikely I’ll ever come back to it. I made some marginalia in a number of places. Before putting it on the discard pile, I’ll flip through the pages and see if I should copy out anything for reference.

I give the book 3-stars. Maybe had I read it at peak powers of comprehension, it would have been 4-stars. Certainly, if you are interested in the history of the Reformation, especially the doctrinal views of the major participants, pick up a copy. Of course, everything in this book is in the public domain (except the biographical introductions written by Fosdick) and available on the internet without too much search.

Bible study, Christianity, Writing

Progress on “A Walk Through Holy Week”

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I’m hoping that, by the end of the year, this will not be the only Bible study in my bibliography. Alas, I wrote that caption in 2022, and here it is 2023 and it’s still my only published Bible study. But I’m much closer to that goal.

I don’t think I’ve written before about the Bible study I’m writing. I know I have in my monthly progress reports and goals. But I’m not sure I’ve done a post about it describing the project. The genesis of it goes back a few years.

I think it was around six or seven years ago that the co-teacher of our adult Sunday school class said he would love to have a class lesson series on Holy Week, going passage by passage through it, ending up with Easter. Based on the harmony of the gospels I had written, I told him that was something like 67 passages and it would take more than a year or continuous study to get through it all. Obviously, that wasn’t going to happen.

But I brainstormed it and came up with a way to do it. We would take it in chunks over several years during the season leading up to Easter, commonly called Lent. Ten lessons or so over six years would do it. I suggested that to Marion, my co-teacher, and he agreed it would be a good thing to do.

So I made an outline of six years of lessons. The text would be my harmony. We began teaching it in 2019, covering the Triumphal Entry and teaching on Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week. In 2020 we covered the Olivet Discourse, mostly by Zoom because of the pandemic. 2021 was the Last Supper, 2022 the time in Gethsemane and the Jewish legal actions. This year we have moved on to Good Friday. Lent and Easter is over. We’ve had seven lessons from this part with three or four to go. That leaves Easter and the times after Easter to be covered in 2024.

We got through the first two years, and were in the midst of the third one when I suddenly realized that this might make a good Bible study to write and publish. So part way through year 3, I began writing the book for that year simultaneously with teaching the lessons. It was slow going at first. I wasn’t sure what I wanted in the books , how long they would be or even how long each chapter, corresponding to a lesson, would be. But I worked on it until the lesson series for that year was over, then put it aside.

Then last year, I decided to write simultaneously from the start of the lesson series and keep up with it. I found I could do this fairly easily. That gave a couple of days each week to go back and work on the lessons from the previous year. By the end of the then-current series, I was within a couple of thousand words of being finished with the volume.

Except I came upon a flaw in the series. The lesson series from year 1 was too long at 21 lessons. So was the one from year 3 at 14 lessons. So this year, during the “off season”, so to speak, I worked on the overall plan for the series. I realized that, even though we would teach it over six years, it worked better as an eight year series and eight book volumes. I also finished the little bit left in last year’s series over a couple of weeks.

Once again, I began writing the chapters simultaneously with teaching this year’s lessons. And it’s working. As of today, we’ve taught seven lessons and I’ve completed seven chapters. It’s gone fairly well, I think. I’ve also had time to work on the books from the third year, which in the new organization are books 4 and 5. Volume 4 is finished, and Volume 5 is about 12,000 words away from being finished. EDIT: Actually, Volume 4 wasn’t quite finished when I wrote this post. It is now, though, with one editing pass completed. [23 May 2023]

So Volumes 4 and 6 are finished. Volume 5 is nearing completion. Volume 7 is fully planned and is on schedule to be done in about a month. Alas, I haven’t started on Volumes 1, 2 and 3, and Volume 8. I likely won’t start until next year. The word count of the four volumes done or partly done is just shy of 110,000. If I keep writing lessons at the current length, the entire series will be between 200,000 and 250,000 words, or maybe even more than that, though I’m sure it will be less than 300,000.

So that’s the current project. I’m working almost exclusively on it. For the last several weeks I’ve been able to add close to 7,000 words each week. That will be my goal this week. Possibly next Monday I’ll report on how I did.

I haven’t figured a publishing schedule yet. I don’t know whether to wait a year and publish them more or less all at once, or to publish the ones I have done (Vols 4 and 6) now. I’ll decided that in a month of two. By that time, I may have Vols 4, 5, 6, and 7 completed. That would make more sense to publish them and fill in 1, 2, and 3 when I can get them done.

That’s too big of a question right now. I need to concentrate on the writing.

 

Christianity

A New Pastor, and a New Thing

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Our new senior (or lead) pastor, Rev. Jeni Hall.

Our church has been without a pastor since last November. The pastoral search has been going on. I’ve not been part of the process, for I’m not on the church board. Thus I was on the sidelines all that time.

The way it’s done in our denomination, the church members vote on who the new pastor is. The church board typically acts as a search committee. They are aided in this by our district superintendent—a person roughly equivalent to a bishop in other denominations. In this case, our district superintendent was once pastor of our church, so he took—I won’t say special interest. Let’s just say he knew us well and certainly looked after our interests.

He went through some number of candidates, based on interest shown in moving to the North Arkansas District, or based on other information he had. Lots of prayers were also being sent up, as happens whenever we’ve had a pastoral change. Prayers, not only from our congregation, but also from our District Superintendent and also from those people who he contacted and who interviewed with our Board, either remotely or in person.

One day in March came the announcement came that a candidate had been identified to call as senior pastor. There would be a meet and greet of the candidate on Friday, March 31, and a vote of members on Sunday April 2.  Alas, we were gone to West Texas at that time, helping our daughter during her own pastoral family’s long move.

The next day, a post to a private Facebook group for our adult Sunday School class indicated the potential pastor’s name. Up until this point, I was fairly sure that the candidate was a woman. I can’t explain how I knew that. Divine revelation? No, I won’t go that far, though I won’t rule it out. I was just sure it would be.

Let me interrupt my own narrative to explain that the Church of the Nazarene has always welcomed women in ministry. And I don’t mean limited to children’s ministries, missions work, or other assignments that have the appearance of being “women’s work.” We have always embraced women to be ordained and step into roles as pastors of churches and evangelists. This is a 115 year history—actually more than that, as it probably goes back to around 1895.

This is a position I agree with and embrace. I know there are some scriptures that seem contrary to that, but other scriptures seem to point to a good number of women in New Testament times who fulfilled key leadership roles.  Each person must read the entirety of the scriptures, seek God’s guidance, and decide in their own mind about this issue. I have, and am comfortable with my decision.

That said, women have been in a distinct minority among the rolls of our pastors. Whether that’s because of churches having decided they won’t have a woman pastor for whatever reason, or whether it’s because not many of our women have sensed a call to pastoral ministries (and we can conjecture why that would be, including perceived or stated resistance among churches and parishioners to have women as pastors), is an open question. I’m not going to speculate further on that.

The Hall family. Anxious for them to arrive and being shepherding us.

So, all of that said, we will soon welcome Rev. Jeni Hall  as our senior pastor, the first female lead pastor in the church’s history. Her husband, Mark Hall, is also being called to be our worship arts minister, as that post is also vacant. Currently pastoring on the Oregon coast, they are moving closer to home, as Jeni was from Hartville MO and Mark from Coffeyville KS. They will be about equidistant between those places, I think.

The vote to call them was overwhelmingly favorable, well above the 2/3rds majority needed to extend a call. Rev. Hall accepted. Her first Sunday will be June 4.

Not only will this be the first time for our congregation to have a woman pastor, it will also be my first time to have a woman pastor. I have no problem with that. In fact, I welcome it.

And wouldn’t you know it, most likely we will be out of town that weekend and won’t get to greet her on her first Sunday. Welcome, Pastor Jeni and Pastor Mark, should you read this. Thank you for obeying the call of God, first into the ministry, then to our church. I’m looking forward to being part of what God has planned for our congregation under your leadership.

book reviews, letters

Book Review: Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence

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Two volumes of these letters are well worth reading. They are available without charge, being out of copyright, from Google Books and perhaps other places.

I had planned to write a post today about the pastoral change our church is going through, but I think I’m going to wait until Friday for that. So here’s a book review, of the book The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I first read this during the early 2000s, having found it on Project Gutenberg, downloaded both volumes, formatted them for a good mix of easy reading and concise printing, and printed them. I read them rather quickly, my second foray into the world of letter collections after the letters of Charles Lamb. Recently I learned that you can upload a Word file to Kindle. I did so with these two volumes and read them again on my phone.

At that time, Carlyle I was just beginning to know, and Emerson was a total mystery to me. Neither man had been part of the curriculum in my school years, and my adult reading up to that point had been in different directions. Why I happened upon these volumes, why I downloaded and formatted them, and why I shoved other reading aside for them are all mysteries to me.

But read them I did, and loved them. These two literary giants, from opposite sides of the Atlantic, both influential in their milieu, both men who enjoyed friendship. Carlyle was probably the more brusque of the two, Emerson the more gentle. They divided over politics, including the question of slavery. Hard to believe in this day, but Carlyle was pro-slavery, and this became a wedge between them.

Yet the friendship endured. Emerson, who had both inherited ad married into money in America, took note of Carlyle’s poverty and became his promoter in the New World, where he thought Carlyle would find an audience. He found publishers and negotiated deals favorable to Carlyle. Soon, dollars were sent eastward to be converted into pounds, and Carlye could soon say he was not poor any more. Implied was he was now free to write what he wanted rather than to write for money.

The friends met during Emerson’s three trips to Europe. The first time, in 1833, Emerson (who was totally unknown to Carlyle) sought out Carlyle, whose magazine articles Emerson had taken special note of. They had a 24-hour visit before Emerson left for the return voyage. But the conversation was stimulating. Eight months later, Emeron wrote to Carlyle, and the forty years of letters commenced.

The letters are rich in the words of friendship. They discussed their writings, their homes, their families, their lives. At one point, Emerson pulled back from immediately returning Carlyle’s letters, at least in part due to the rift over politics. The correspondence never ended, but it tapered off. The first twenty years include at least twice the number of letters than the last twenty.

The Emerson quote I include on my website comes from one of his letters to Carlyle. In this, my second reading of the letters, I found great enjoyment. I suspect someday I will read them again.

family

A Productive Two Weeks

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Nuisance on the floor next to me, tired after walking 1.91 miles.

We drove to Texas on Tuesday, March 28, to help our daughter out while her husband is away, beginning his pastoral ministry at a new church. We head home on Friday, April 7 (out daughter’s birthday). It’s been a good two weeks. Busy, but good.

I’m starting this post at noon on April 5th. I’ll have to interrupt it to walk the dog, eat lunch, and do some yard work. I’ll schedule it to post on Friday. But let me tell you what has gone on and edit it tomorrow to add a little more.

Walking the dog has been one of my main jobs during this stay, along with cooking and dishes. The dog, which I have nicknamed Nuisance,  is a handful. She’s big at 65 pounds, likes to play by biting you, and is just a nuisance all the way around. The first day we were here I walked her about a mile. Her walks aren’t for doing her business, which she will only do in the back yard. The walks are for getting some energy out. With no dog parks nearby, the walks are in the neighborhood.

That’s good. The slopes are gentle, and so long as I don’t push it on the uphill slopes, the angina doesn’t come on. The second day I went a little further with her. My natural pace is slower than what she wants to go, so she was constantly pulling. Anytime we passed a side yard and dogs were in it, a sniffing episode followed by much parking and pulling resulted.

Day by day, I learned where the dogs were and adjusted our route to stay away from them as much as possible. And I began to lengthen the walk. By the sixth day we were going 1.75 miles. She had adjusted her gait to mine (for the most part) and didn’t pull as much. My legs felt stronger most days. After Saturday, that is, when yardwork before the walk caused me to struggle that day.

As soon as we got home from the walks, I fed her. She ate and drank voraciously and hurriedly, then found a cool place on the floor to take a nap. For me, more work kept me from taking my nap.

We just got back (now on Thursday) from our last walk on this trip. Nuisance is lying on the floor right next to my chair. I think she has come to like me more than I have her. Tomorrow we head home. We’ll be back later in the month and do the same thing. So she has lots of walks with me yet.

I should probably hate to say this, but I won’t miss her in between these trips. We understand each other a little better. And I’m glad for the exercise these walks have given me. But I’m still not getting a dog.

Bible study, family, travel

On Duty

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Three of these are our grandkids. The oldest is a teen, so not in this children’s program.

My wife and I are on grandparent duty, again. Our son-in-law has taken up his new pastorate, further south and east in Texas. The family won’t move until school is out. He will follow a schedule of two weeks in the new location and two weeks home until they make the final move, probably near the end of May.

Since that left our daughter alone with the four kids, we came to dusty, dry, and windy West Texas to help her out. I’ve been taxiing kids to school, taking them to the library, reading with them, and being chief cook and bottle washer for 11 days.

I’m also getting some work done. Did my stock trading each market day. Worked on my Bible study book each day. Following up on author items. So it’s not been a bad gig. And with our daughter here the work is spread out a little more than when we babysat the grandkids for 11 days not all that long ago.

We head home on Friday. Hopefully I’ll get a better blog post done in a timely manner for Friday.

Bible study, goals, The Forest Throne

March Progress

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March has been a mixture of good and difficult days. Here’s a look at my progress during the month.

  • As always, blog twice a week, on Monday and Friday. Got this done. A couple of times I almost forgot, but managed to post something.
  • Attend four writers meetings this month. I already attended the first one, held last Thursday. Got to all my writer’s meetings this month, including the Letter Writers Society, where I was the presenter.
  • Keep up with A Walk Through Holy Week writing simultaneously with teaching. You never know what curve balls life will throw at you, but, based on how this is starting, I think it is doable. By the end of March, I should be through Chapter 5 and have started on Chapter 6. I’m up to date, though the schedule is slightly different due to some reorganization of the book. I am currently working on Chapter 5.
  • Finish either Part 4 or Part 5 of AWTHW. I actually worked on this a little last month. Or maybe that was Thursday-Friday, which would be this month. I spent time reading where I was when I pulled of this last year, split and organized files in the new part designations, and put a few words down. Part 5 is farther along than Part 4, but I feel like I want to get Part 4 done first. We’ll see. I worked on Part 4, and made some good progress, but didn’t finish it. I decided that’s the one I’ll work on first.
  • Organize some writing ideas files. I began this last Thursday and presented them to the Scribblers & Scribes critique group. They liked one idea a lot, but not the other. A new idea came to me on Saturday and fleshed out a bit with brainstorming yesterday. I plan to document that on Monday—today—the put it out of my head until the time is right. I did some of this, but not as much as I hoped for.
  • Get any needed edits done to TKTTT according to feedback from beta readers. Alas, I haven’t received any feedback from my beta readers yet. I’m not sure when I’ll be getting that feedback.
  • Make a handful of edits to Letters Between Friends, and republish it. This is based on feedback from copyright holders. This is not really urgent, and I may put this off until AWTHW and TKTTT are further down the road. In a fit of effort, I actually got this done. It is corrected and re-published. Strange how the things you don’t expect to do take over.

I’m not going to, at this time, establish goals for April. Maybe I’ll do that on Monday, or maybe not at all.

letters, miscellaneous

Learning a Word: Ontological

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Unlike the last word I took note of on this blog, today’s word is not archaic. I came across it in a magazine article I’m reading on-line. Here’s the quote.

Annabel Patterson, [her section], in her [article], explores the “peculiar ontological status of letters as texts, as generic modifiers, or as members of a distinct and in some ways unique genre,” arguing that the correspondences of [three old Englishmen] a natural Ciceronianism.”

The article I’m reading has to do with collections of letters. Having just done my talk on collections of letters to the Northwest Arkansas Letter Writers Society, my urge to read more about the topic has not yet run its course. Hence, I did a search for “letter collections” on JStor, and this is one that popped up.

The definition I find for ontological is:

  1. relating to the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being: “ontological arguments”
  2. showing the relations between the concepts and categories in a subject area or domain:
    “an ontological database” · “an ontological framework for integrating and conceptualizing diverse forms of information”

I gotta tell you, that doesn’t help a lot. The study of “being”? I don’t really know what that is. I looked up ontology and got this for a definition:

In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality.

Which wasn’t any help.

All of which suggests to me that I’m reading the wrong things.

book reviews, Christianity

Book Review: “Beyond Prison Walls”

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Not a recent book, but definitely a good one if you can find it.

This will be somewhat of a short review, due to time—both things to do and time lapse from when I read this book.

It was at least six months ago that Lynda pulled Beyond Prison Walls by G. Frank Allee off our bookshelves. We were looking for books to read and get rid of (donate or sell), and this looked like a good candidate.

It is the story of Frank Novak. Published in 1960, it tells how Novak, an immigrant from Bohemia who fell in with the wrong crowd and found himself in prison. It was there that God got ahold of his heart. He was transformed and became a prison chaplain with a national reputation.

I sure hadn’t heard of him, but his story is amazing. The book is short, only 96 pages. Mr. Allee has done a good job telling Novak’s story. The writing is clear and precise.  One leaves the book quite impressed with Novak and what he was able to accomplish with the power of God behind him.

I rate the book 5-stars. After reading it, we hate to give it up. We would like for our grandchildren to read it. We’ll see. Today I will put it in the donation pile, but maybe the grandkids will be here before it gets taken someplace.