Last week I put the finishing touches on Acts Of Faith: Examples From The Great Cloud Of Witnesses“. That’s not to say it’s perfect, but I think it’s in good shape. I’m pleased with it as it is. On Thursday, I think it was, I formatted the book for print, completing that in a few hours.
As reported in my last post, I set about trying to make a cover for it, and failed miserably. But fortunately I had the earlier cover for it and was able to take that, make a few modifications, and I had a more acceptable cover. People I showed it to thought it was acceptable. On Saturday I set about making the cover wrap for the print book. Here’s what I came up with, still subject to a little tweaking.
Here’s the print book cover. I’m not claiming it’s great, but I think it’s acceptable. It also starts a theme that I can use for future Bible studies if I publish them.
Yesterday I uploaded all this to Amazon for the print book. For the third straight book the files I uploaded, both book interior and the cover, met Amazon’s technical specifications and they said I could order the proof copy. I did so, and it should arrive Thursday or Friday. By that time I’ll have the print cover changed with any tweaks needed. I e-mailed the basic cover to my critique group, Scribblers and Scribes of Bella Vista, and will show them the full wrap when we meet on Wednesday.
So, yesterday I also began the work on the e-books. This is the opposite of my normal order. Usually I do the e-books, which I find easier, first, then do the harder print book. Since I’m under a tight deadline for having the print book available I didn’t want to delay that even a day, so I changed up my normal routine. I finished the Kindle version interior yesterday. The cover is, I think, all ready. Later today, after I complete a few chores and errands, I’ll upload the e-book. As soon as it’s approved I’ll publish it. That could be later today or, more likely, tomorrow. Then it will be on to the Smashwords edition.
It’s kind of exciting, but also kind of scary. I’ll write about that in a future post.
I used to do goals posts regularly. I’ll do it this month and see what comes of it.
One thing I’ve been doing in the evening is going through old posts on this blog and adding categories to them. My son helped me set up my website in June 2011. Part of that was creating this blog. I already had a blog over at BlogSpot, titled “An Arrow Through the Air”. He did the work of porting all those posts over to this blog.
I intended, at first, to run both blogs. This one would be my writing blog; that one would be for more personal stuff. I did that for a while, but soon saw the pressures of life wouldn’t allow me to do both. So, I abandoned AATTA and concentrated on this blog. Eventually I renamed this one to be An Arrow Through The Air. The old one still exists. Every now and then I make a minor post there just to keep the account open.
A few months back I went to the back pages of this blog, I forget why. I noticed that all those posts from the old blog came over but none of them had categories. The all show up as “Uncategorized”. That’s not a major problem, but…oh, wait, I remember now. I was trying to find a post I did back in 2008 on a certain subject, went to that category, and didn’t find the post. That’s when I learned none of the categories had stayed with the posts as they ported over.
So, slowly, as I have a night in front of the TV where I can’t really do anything else, I’ve been going back through the old posts and adding categories. It’s actually a tedious job but I feel that it needs to be done. As of last night I had completed all the posts for 2008. Looks like I have two and a half years still to go.
One thing I noticed was that in 2008 I made a monthly post about my goals for the month—writing goals mostly—and then an end-of-the-month post showing how well I’d done. That was almost a journal, of sorts. It made me think I ought to do that occasionally. So, here’s my first goals post in a long time. Perhaps on Sept. 30 I’ll come back and make a post of how I did.
Blog on a regular Monday and Friday schedule. I’ve done fairly well at that this year, and I’d like to continue it.
Complete publishing tasks for and publish all versions of Documenting America: Making The Constitution. I’m close. The covers are the big holdup.
Complete publishing tasks for and publish all versions of Acts Of Faith: Examples from the Great Cloud of Witnesses. I’m almost through with edits, but I can see this happening.
Write a short story in my Sharon Williams Fonseca series. I have a sheet or two of notes of what I’m going to do next, if I can only find them.
Critique 2-3 poems at the Absolute Write Forums. I’d like to keep my foot in poetry somehow. Maybe this is the way.
Attend writers groups on the 11th and the 18th.
Complete reading three items and begin two or three more. As of this morning I’m halfway through two books (each around 260-280 pages) and a third through a 60 page article. I should easily finish all these with no problem. I don’t know what I want to read next, but I’ll start searching my stacks before lone.
Prepare my first newsletter for release about Oct 15. And figure out how to make it happen.
That’s enough, I think. See you all on the 30th with a report.
I finished writing Documenting America: Making The Constitution Edition in mid-June. I let it sit a little, then began the editing process. The editing took a while as I didn’t go overly fast. Plus, in late June I finally decided I should write and publish my Bible study, Acts Of Faith, and so pulled off DA for a while. I meant to have it published in August. Alas, with only nine days left in the month, I think that’s unlikely to happen.
But where do I stand with it? I have completed all passes of edits. On Wednesday I ran Chapter 5 through our critique group, and have a few comments to go over and perhaps make changes. I’ll do that today. The next step will be the cover, which I’ll do myself using G.I.M.P. I already have the series theme, so all I have to do is change the title and use a new center image, which I already have picked out. I may need to load G.I.M.P. onto this computer. Doing all that is a tomorrow task.
That cover work, of course, is for the e-book cover. Before I can do the print book cover I have to format the print book so I know the thickness. The interior formatting will be the next step. I might do the e-book formattings (one for Kindle, one for Smashwords) on Sunday, or it might slip to Monday. At that point I may upload the e-book to the platforms, thus getting it published in August. Then I’ll tackle the print book formatting. That always takes longer, and I’ll have to dedicate a day or two to that. I hope I get it done before the end of the month so that I can order a proof copy.
So, when will the next Documenting America be published, you ask? With any luck and sufficient diligence on my part, before the end of August for the e-book, and before September 15 for the print book. Stay tuned. I’ll announce it here. I’m working simultaneously on the leader’s guide to AOF, so we’ll have to see how the time goes.
Here’s what I looked out on from my chair on the porch.
Or, rather, back in my chair, at my computer, with my books and tools around me, ready to write—or in the week, mainly edit.
My wife and I were away for a little over a week. This was scheduled, then changed. Our son-in-law was to go on a mission trip to Mexico and we were to go to Big Spring, Texas, and help our daughter with the kids. The mission trip was canceled, a fairly last minute thing, due to not having the minimum number of people necessary to make it happen. They decided to get away for a few days instead and asked us to join them. We agreed, with the time commitment being a little shorter than the mission trip would have been.
Fishing wasn’t what I most wanted to do.
The trip was to Ruidoso area in New Mexico. I had never heard of this resort area, up in the mountains. South of Albuquerque, west of Roswell, it’s pretty high up. We had a rental house at elevation 6950 feet. It’s monsoon season, and we had rains all but one day. It didn’t really slow us down at all. Daytime temperatures were 75 to 85 when it wasn’t raining, nighttime lows were 57 to 62. Very pleasant.
We had fun at the Flying J Ranch.
The wife and I did very little planning for this trip. We were supposed to drive to Texas on Friday August 2 then drive with them to New Mexico, a five hour drive, on Saturday August 3. But at the last minute we left the afternoon of Thursday Aug 1, intending to pull up at their door after midnight. A wrong turn in Wichita Falls means we didn’t get in until 3 in the morning. Alas.
Ah, yes, jail the outsiders.
The trip was nice and relaxing. Our rental house was just the right size for us. Richard took his older boys fishing a couple of days. I’m not into fishing so didn’t join them. I wanted to hike. I went on four of them all together. One on Sunday in the neighborhood with grandson Ezra, 1.57 miles. One Monday at Grindstone Lake with my daughter, her two youngest, and my wife, 2.45 miles. One Tuesday at a Federal recreation area, with most of the family, 1.56 miles. One Wednesday (the day we were leaving to
Elijah panning for gold at the Flying J Ranch.
come home), up a hill near our house with the two oldest grandsons, 1.25 miles without a trail. And a different one back at that recreation area, 1.61 miles. None of them were overly strenuous, but had uphill segments where I had to stop on occasion.
The house with the red roof is the one we rented, as seen from the nearby hill we hiked up on Wednesday.
On Sunday we went to a church, not knowing it was next to one of our denominational campgrounds and that they were just finishing a week of family camp. So we attended a camp meeting type service. We then drove up to a ski area to ride the gondolas, but they had closed due to rain. I’m not a fan of mountain roads, but we did okay.
Plenty of deer came by our cabin, this one right up to be fed.
When not engaged with grandkids, I did a little editing in my completed books, did some reading (as described in my last post), though I found the reading hard going, too intellectual, I suppose, for reading in somewhat distracted conditions. Still, I enjoyed cool mornings or evenings on the porch, coffee and book or e-reader at hand, soaking in both knowledge and clean, mountain air.
I was on the hike too, but took the photo.
Ruidoso is a place I would like to go back to. We found out what was available in the Smokey Bear Ranger District, specifically the Cedar Creek Recreational Area, which included camping, picnicking, biking, and hiking. Several longer trails are available which I would like to hike. Perhaps we’ll go back some day, and make some more memories.
The Carpenters had a major hit with their song “Rainy Days and Monday“, the lyrics saying that they “always get me down.” As I look out The Dungeon window, through an opening in my computer desk, through the vertical blind slats, through the glass and the screen, I see a cloudy day. When I awoke at 6:30 a.m., a gentle rain was falling. The rain has mostly ended now.
Exactly what I see out The Dungeon windows as I type at my computer.
Yet, I’m not depressed by the dark day. Nor am I depressed by this Monday, or any Monday. Being retired helps with that, but I was never one to rue the end of the weekend and start of the workweek. And I do have my work to do. Monday through Friday I work on our stock trading business. Since nowadays I’m mainly trading for income rather than wealth building, it’s less intensive than it used to be.
But seeing as how I mostly liked my engineering career, and was enjoying the work I did those last few years of that, Mondays were never a drudgery. Nor were the weekends necessarily better than the workweeks. So much work to do at home in just a few hours, I never felt like I was on top of things.
Now, that all has changed. I spend a lot of time at the computer between stock trading and writing and promoting my writing, but I’m not chained to it. Any day I can go outside for an hour of yard work. Any day I can work on de-cluttering. I’m able to exercise on the elliptical (strategically placed in The Dungeon) several times, as I do most weekdays and some on the weekends. Any day I can go outside and walk. Any time my mind gets weary I can take a break, perhaps go to the sunroom and read.
So, I sit at my computer, look through the desk and the slats, and am encouraged. This morning, after my Bible reading and prayer time, rather than write I decided to update my writing income and expense spreadsheet. I had last done this in early to mid-May, so I wasn’t too far behind. My mileage is entered; my inventory purchases are entered both in expenses and on the inventory sheet; my sales amounts are entered. I have an exact picture of where I am profit and loss wise. And, since the spreadsheet sums everything and auto-fills lines for Schedule C, may taxes due next April are mostly calculated—so long as the IRS doesn’t change the form.
I have a few more writing related business tasks to do, which I’ll do as soon as I finish this blog post. Tomorrow I’ll do the same thing with the stock trading. That is mostly up to date on a spreadsheet, but I need to transfer it to my income tax spreadsheet. That will only take 30 minutes, and I’ll be way ahead of where I typically am come January.
So, time to get back to other work. I have two books—one finished, one nearly so—that are begging for my attention. I hope everyone will be able to find today productive and enjoyable.
Dateline: July 29, 2019, for posting on August 5, 2019
It’s not too early to be thinking about a cover. I’m thinking simple, establishing a theme for what may be a series. Not sure what would go in the whit box.
I’ve talked about this several times before, but never fully. I’m talking about the Bible study I’ve been writing since finishing Documenting America: Making The Constitution Edition in mid-June. Back on June 28 I posted about my writing choices. That post indicated that I had written a couple of chapters of this study, that it felt good, and that I had decided that would be my next book to write.
The first writing of it was on June 25, 2019. This past Tuesday, July 30, I completed the first draft, coming in at 35,574 words in a little over a month. That’s pretty fast. I’m wondering if, considering how fast it came together, if it’s any good.
But it’s not as if I started from scratch on June 25th. No, I had thought about this for a long time. I’d say it was maybe two or three years ago that the idea first came to me. I re-read Hebrews Chapter 11, the faith heroes chapter, and, as always, was inspired by it. Then I read Hebrews 12:1, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses….” The idea came to me: a Bible study where a Bible example of faith and a Christian example of faith were together in each lesson.
I’m responsible for choosing the curriculum for study in our adult Life Group (a.k.a. Sunday school). I try to stay a few months ahead. I had curriculum planned out to near the end of September 2019 (this was back in late fall 2018, I think). What to do after a long, partial Easter study and a video-based Psalm 119 study? I had a couple of Bible studies in mind, things that had been brewing in the gray cells for some time, Acts Of Faith being one of them. I developed an outline, deciding it would be a viable study. So I penciled it in on our teaching schedule.
Then I thought, this would be a better study if it were in book form, not something my co-teacher and I had to develop our own notes for. So sometime early this year, maybe in January, I listed it as one of my possible writing works. As the year went on, I was more and more impressed that this was indeed what we should teach later this year, and that I should do my best to have it ready in book form if at all possible.
So, when Documenting America was done, as I posted a little more than a month ago, I shifted right to this. The writing wasn’t laborious at all. It came together easily, I’m sure in part because I had brainstormed it so much. Still, the relatively short time to write it surprised me. I wrote that I hoped to have it written by August 1, and I achieved that. I suspect maybe three or four weeks to edit, followed by two weeks to publish, and I’ll be done with it at least two weeks before we start the study, which right now is targeted for September 26th.
Preparing and teaching a Bible study is one thing. Publishing one is another. If you’re teaching in a class, discussion often takes over, and your notes go out the window. You prepared six hours for a 30 to 60 minute discussion, so you’re essentially over-prepared. At least that’s the plan. But publishing it means it has to all be out there. Make a mistake and the theologians or professional practitioners of the faith could be all over you. You have to get it right. Opinions are okay, but not mistakes.
Thus, I reached out to two ministers in our congregation about the viability of the study. Feeling like I needed more, I reached out to a retired pastor I know from an on-line writing group and got his input. The consensus was that I should proceed, that I wasn’t making any grave errors, and that possibly people would find themselves challenged by the study.
And now it’s written. It consists of seventeen chapters. If taught to a class, each would be a week’s study. If studied individually, I suspect it’s a two-week read. I originally programmed fourteen chapters. Then I thought, if this was taught around Christmastime, I needed some Christmas story chapters. So I added three of those, giving me seventeen chapters in the finished product. I know, I know, they say people nowadays don’t like studies that last that long. Six weeks, eight weeks is about all you should do. Well, I wrote what I wrote. If a teacher and class want a shorter study, they can pick and choose among the chapters.
Each chapter begins a Bible story that illustrates faith, saying how faith is shown by some act. Chapter 1 concerns Noah and the building of the ark, showing how he was acting out his faith all along. The second part of each chapter is a story of someone in the Christian era who also acted on faith. As best I could I tried to get the Bible example of faith and the Christian example of faith to make sense together. I’m not sure I always achieved that, but I think I’m close. Noah is paired with Martin Luther. Both of these men have sort of the same story. At least, I see many similarities.
I changed the Bible story in the second chapter when I heard a sermon on the radio and thought, oh, wow, what a great story of faith that is. I never saw that before. I didn’t want to lengthen the book, however, so one pair of stories was gone. I found another Christian example of faith and shuffled some around.
What’s next? As I said, I work on editing this into final form, and I see if I can write a leader’s guide for it, trying to have both ready by the end of August. Will I get it done? We shall see. And, of course, I’ll report back here on what progress I make.
In my last post, I told about the de cluttering effort my wife and I are in. I spoke specifically about the multiple stamp collections I’m dealing with, as well as a few other de-cluttering activities.
The stock book I worked on. I still have a few stragglers to add to it (which fell out before my work commenced), plus perhaps some re-distribution.
This weekend, while de-cluttering is still high on the priority list, so is what I call simply “getting things done.” It began on Friday, where I worked in The Dungeon for a good part of the day, doing my normal writing and stock trading tasks. In the evening I finally finished putting loose stamps into that stock book I mentioned in the last post, and on Saturday I gathered all the stamps in one place, while on Saturday and Sunday I put them all in a larger box and into their designated place in the storeroom. Check one item off the to-do list.
Our newer minivan was overdue for servicing. I finally called on that on Friday afternoon, learned they had appointments on Saturday, and took an early one. I learned of a sensor that’s gone bad; it will be replaced later this week under warranty. I also took that van to a nearby body shop for an estimate on fixing the rear tailgate after the fender-bender I caused in June. Ah, me. Much money to be spend fixing that small folly.
Friday and Saturday remained productive for the whole days. Let’s see what I checked off the list.
Elliptical and walking for Friday and Saturday.
Work on Acts of Faith each day.
Work on Documenting America: Making The Constitution Edition each day.
Clean up in the front yard, along with weekend weeding and deadfall pick up in the back yard on Saturday.
Seeing about accommodations for a trip we will soon be taking.
Making a haircut appointment. (I hate using the phone for things like that and always put off making such appointments, so when I do it it feels like a major accomplishment.)
Helping the wife make an omelet Saturday noon.
Household budgeting on Friday; balancing the checkbook on Saturday; catch up on trading accounting on Saturday.
Dusting the high corners near the ceilings.
Preparing to teach Life Group on Sunday.
Working on organizing the stamp collections, in place for better storage or, perhaps, selling within a couple of years.
I found time each day to just sit and read in the sunroom, and nap there one day.
I could probably add a few more things to the list, but I’d be getting into minutia if I did. Suffice to say the weekend was full, productive, enjoyable, and, if you can believe it, restful. Yes, I had time to watch TV (while working on the stamps and crossword puzzles), to sit in the sunroom and read, to get full nights’ sleep, and to gather with God’s people in worship and study on Sunday.
Whether every weekend will be so enjoyable and productive remains to be seen. This one was, and I thank God for it.
This is less than half of the total volume of stamp collections I’m dealing with.
About a year ago Lynda and I came to the realization that we had to begin decluttering. Maybe that realization came longer ago than that, but it wasn’t strong enough to begin taking actions toward making it happen.
Then, in May of this year, when we had to move a bunch of stuff to make way for workers to do a certain task, we saw the stuff being moved was the fruit of over-accumulation and un-noticed hanging on. De-cluttering was suddenly real. We couldn’t just talk about it and think that no longer accumulating meant we were de-cluttering. We had to actually get rid of stuff.
The stamp boxes Dad made. When the collection goes these will stay, and be repurposed.
So, since then, we’ve actually been getting rid of some stuff. Perhaps not fast enough and not enough, but we are actually getting rid of stuff. We put out an old exercise bike for a special trash pick-up this week. It’s a bike that worked but which we never used as we have a better one. Wednesday I took a load of electronic items to the County solid waste center. I also took the old microwave that died back in April. That felt good.
About two weeks ago I started tackling the stamp collection. Or rather, collections, for I have three here. I’ve written before about how stamp collecting was a big part of our growing up. From the time I was 8, for the next ten years barely a day went by that we didn’t work on stamps. Our albums grew large. Dad built stamp boxes out of old TV cabinets from Uncle Kenny’s shop. Before long these overflowed, as did our large Harris Citation albums.
I continued collecting into adulthood, but not in a very organized way. We bought the new stamps as they came out and “sort of” filed them. We bought used stamps from dealers and put them in albums. We saved all stamps that came into the house. We soaked stamps off paper and put them in shoe boxes. In short, we did everything we had done when I was growing up.
Mom used to sit by the hour and bundle stamps by the hundreds, which she used for trading with dealers for stamps we needed.
We couldn’t get our kids interested in it. I eventually lost interest when the pull of career and other interests came on. Two periods of overseas living, with the stamps in storage in the USA and us wondering if they would survive their boxed exile, helped to lessen the desire. By the mid-1990s the collection was in boxes, in closets or the garage, unseen and untouched.
Then, when Dad died in 1997 we had all the stamps in his house to deal with. I was the one designated by the will to handle the collections, so we packed them into our van and brought them to Arkansas, to rest beside their cousins in other boxes. Then, in 2001, my brother made a visit here and brought his stamp collection with him, asking me to sell it when I sold the others.
The stock book I worked on last night. I still have a few stragglers to add to it (which fell out before my work commenced), plus perhaps some re-distribution.
We’ve known since then that the collections would some day be sold, but sitting down to organize everything seemed to be so big a job that I didn’t want to devote the time to it. Every now and then I did some internet searches about selling stamps, but that was it as far as actually working on them. The stamps continued to sit. I decided there was no point in trying to interest the grandchildren it stamp collecting.
Fast forward now to May of this year. Stamps were pulled from different places. I realized the time had come to do something. The first task was to bring them all together. I did this, and found the work massive. But slowly I’ve been doing more on it. Over the last two weeks I:
Separated the catalogues and how-to books from the 1960s out and put them in a separate pile. I think it’s unlikely any dealer or individual who might buy them (if, indeed, I find there’s any market for stamp collections, which I’m questioning).
Separated out what are really nothing but recyclable materials, such as sheets of cardboard, old envelopes, plastic bins from old cookie boxes used for sorting stamps, etc. I have a pile of these that I’ll get rid of before long.
Putting all the sheets of new stamps together and then into a mint-sheet notebook or a small box. I got that done last week, realized the notebook was bulging and something else was needed. On Wednesday I came up with a better solution and completed that on Thursday.
Organizing a stock book of duplicates. I’m not sure why, some years ago, I put this book together. But now it’s over-stuffed and bulging. Yet, it had empty pages. Yesterday I tackled it and found that the bulging was due to a poor distribution of stamps in the book. Yesterday afternoon and evening I put all my time into reworking that book, and found the stamps all fit with only minor bulging—and I still have some empty space in it. I may be able to eliminate that bulging if I spend all my time this evening on it.
So, where does this leave me? I should have all the stamps organized and stored in one place by this time next week, maybe sooner. I’ll discard/place for recycling those things that are no longer needed. I’ll check with one person who I think might want my brother’s collection. Then, I’ll break off to do some other things. I have two books in progress that I’m doing a little on simultaneously, but a little more concentrated effort and I’ll be able to finish and publish them.
It was easy to accumulate over 45 years of adulthood and 43 years of marriage. De-cluttering, which really means de-accumulating, is proving hard. I’m sure I’ll shed a few tears when the stamps leave my possession, not to storage, but for the last time. At that time I’ll tell myself “Better with someone else than put in my coffin with me.”
This post marks the 1,200th post on this blog. I guess that’s somewhat of a mini-milestone. That’s not actually how many blog posts I’ve written, however.
I hope someday The Dungeon will be a neater place than this. The best I can say it was messier on Saturday before I cleaned up a bit.
I started blogging in December 2007 on the Blogger [a.k.a. blogspot] platform, naming that blog “An Arrow Through the Air”, a phrase used by John Wesley that I really liked. I posted there until June 2011 when, with the help of my son, I set up this website with a blog. I ported over from AATTA all the posts there, however many it was at the time.
I kept blogging at both places for a while. This one was to be about my writing life, the other more general or personal in subject. It wasn’t terribly long that I discovered keeping up two blogs and writing and working full time didn’t make sense and wasn’t really achievable for me. So I stopped posting at AATTA and focused on this blog. I never did port over here the posts I added at AATTA after the original porting. So, I have some number of posts there that are, technically speaking, in addition to the 1,200 here. How many? I ought to go over there and count, but will do that at another time.
Eventually I realized I could use that name here too, and renamed this blog “An Arrow Through the Air”. That was sometime last year, or maybe it was the year before.
That gets us down to today. As I look through the blinds on The Dungeon windows, I see a cloudy day outside. We are right on the edge of the remnants of Hurricane Barry, with a 50 percent chance of showers this morning. It’s 7:46 a.m. and my first cup of coffee is almost finished. I’ve been at the computer since 6:50 a.m., right after I finished scripture reading (currently in Proverbs) and prayer. After checking book sales (none) and a writing website I follow, I typed edits in three chapters in Documenting America: Making The Constitution Edition. I’ll now shift to writing the eleventh chapter (out of seventeen) in the Bible study I’m writing, Acts of Faith—after I tend to my stock trading duties, that is. I guess breakfast will be in there somewhere.
The amount of wild blueberries in the woods across from our house is massive. It’s no where near being fully picked, no where near all being ripe. And, blackberry season is about to begin.
The blackberry bushes in the area still have both ripe and ripening berries on them, but I’m all picked out for this year. I got enough to make several cobblers, and freeze close to two quarts. I’ve done my free food gathering for this year. Time to think about some inside projects, some decluttering tasks and some home repairs to hire done.
This morning I woke about 6:15 a.m. and was able to say the prayer I’ve recently tried to make a morning theme, “I will awaken the dawn.” [Psalm 57:8] Looking forward to a full and rewarding day.
I love a library, be it large or small, new or old, plain or fancy. Little in life is better than finding stacks of books. Any time I can I go to a library. Any more I don’t check out a lot of books, but I still enjoy browsing, pulling them from the shelf, sitting and reading for a while until my allotted time is up. Or, sometimes I just pull out a magazine I enjoy and read that.
An online library is just as good—almost. The selection is typically better, if of books that are older. Reading is still possible, though perhaps not quite as enjoyable as getting out and reading from paper in my hands.
While I’m pleased to have a number of C.S. Lewis books, I don’t have enough. May more purchases be in my future?
This week I had need of a library. I’m writing a Bible study. That’s my latest work-in-progress. Have I talked about that on the blog before? I’ll have to check to see if I did and, if not, schedule a post to describe the project. Briefly, it’s titled Acts Of Faith, and each chapter has a biblical story about someone who did something on faith and the difference that made in a life or in the world. The second part of each chapter talks about a Christian from after the Bible period who also did an act of faith that made a difference.
The chapter I was to write was about the conversions of Zacchaeus and C.S. Lewis. Zacchaeus’ was fairly easy. I knew Lewis’ would be easy because I had read about it years ago in his book Surprised By Joy. How long ago? Maybe forty years? Long enough ago to know exactly what I was looking for but not so long that I had the book wrong. So, I go to my shelf where I keep my C.S. Lewis books and…no copy of Surprised By Joy is present.
No problem. It must be in the storeroom where I have a bookcase of literary books. Nope, not there either. No problem. It must be upstairs in one of two places where we keep shorter, inspirational books. Nope, not there either. No problem. We have a built-in bookcase in the living room. I wouldn’t expect this book to be there, but it must be. Nope, not there either. That meant it had to be in a box in the storeroom. Finding it there would be an impossibly time-consuming task.
But then I thought, that was so long ago, perhaps I borrowed the book from someone or from a library. Yes, that must be it. That would mean I could check it out from a library here. I wasn’t planning on being close to one anytime soon, but I could go if needed. I checked on line card catalogs of my closest two libraries. Nope, they didn’t have it. The book is new enough to be in copyright so I knew I wouldn’t find it in an on-line library. Nothing to do but buy a copy. Through the miracle of e-books I could have a copy in hand in only minutes.
I went to two different online retail locations and found Surprised By Joy. Both had it as an e-book, but at a ridiculously high price. A book by a famous author can command a good price. I wasn’t willing to pay that, not right away at least. Let me look one more time in my library.
Yes, my library. You see, we have way too many books in our house, maybe as many as 3,000. I need to get rid of some, but find that hard to do. For years I figured I’d read them in retirement. But retirement is here and I’m too busy writing to make a dent in the number of too-be-read books in the house. Yes, if I read two or three a month and then get rid of them, at some point I’ll see that dent being made. Until then, we have our own library.
I did have a copy of “Surprised By Joy” after all. I just needed to do a better job of looking.
I went back to the shelf that I checked first, the one where I thought the book should be. There were a number of C.S. Lewis books, which I saw earlier when I looked. Two of them I haven’t read, have barely opened. One, titled The Timeless Writings of C.S. Lewis, is a collection of his theological works pulled together by his estate. The other, The Beloved Works of C.S. Lewis, had four of his books, again collected and published by his estate. I looked closer at it, and the first book in this book was…Surprised By Joy.
Wow, I didn’t realize I had it! Pulled it from the shelf, spent about an hour reading in the places I remembered, and I had my information and quotes for the chapter. Another hour and I had the rest of the chapter written. An exorbitant price for an e-book avoided, progress made on my book.
So, I did find it in a library. It just turned out it was my own library.
