Harmony of the gospels

The Ephraim Factor

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This week I have been writing with the flow, on my Harmony of the Gospels. I completed passage notes for several passages, about one a day and sometimes two. I worked on the events of Tuesday of Holy Week, and pretty much finished them. This led me to the problem of the dinner held in Jesus’ honor at Bethany. Was it six days before the Passover as John said, or was it two days before the Passover at Mark and Matthew say? Or was it two separate dinners with amazingly similar actions, except for the day?

When I wrote the harmony originally I decided on one dinner per John’s timing, and I still agree with this. This, however, I had always planned to discuss in an appendix, which will have significantly more discussion than would the passage notes. So, going with the flow, I wrote the portion of that appendix that goes with dinner. The appendix will be a fair amount larger, and I’ll work on that later. However, writing this appendix required more work than the passage notes, and I’ve spent the last two days reading other commentators for agreeing and disagreeing opinions on this. It’s amazing what I found on Google Books.

Between this writing and Ephraim’s arrival on Thursday I’ve neglected this blog. Yes, Sara and Ephraim drove here from Oklahoma City on Thursday to spend a few days with us. Sara is busy conducting Mary Kay parties, so grandma and grandpa have been baby-sitting. Yes, this blog will wait while Ephraim’s here. He’s down for a nap right now, which has allowed me to finish the writing in the appendix for the present, and write this blog.

Better go proofread what I wrote in the Harmony, then head upstairs to await Ephraim’s wakening.

Harmony of the gospels, Writing

Still Thinking About Writing With the Flow

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Yes, I’m still thinking about that. I wrote my post from yesterday at work, e-mailed it to myself at home, and posted it in the early evening. After that, I got to work on the passage notes and completed one passage. That still gave me time to read a literary agent’s blog, and achieve my reading goals for the night. Oh, and I got caught up on my personal finance budgets and on the checkbook. So I would call it a successful evening, if only there were more left in the checkbook and the budget balanced.

Tonight I decided to continue with the passage notes in the Harmony of the Gospels. I’m at the place where Jesus warned his disciples, and the crowd, to beware of the teachers of the law and the Pharisees (Mark 12:38-40, Matthew 23:1-12, and Luke 20:45-47). I originally worked on this 2 October 2001, and appear to have completed it in one evening. Now, however, as I was writing the passage notes “with the flow,” I saw a number of places where my original harmony missed some key information. So I took time to break the passage down into smaller chunks, something I didn’t do before, and reworked the harmony. I’m more pleased with it now, as it is more complete.

Maybe this writing with the flow is better. My mind is still engaged on these passages and on the passage notes. The way I’m writing them is to go back to my hand-written notebooks–three of them–where I wrote out the passages, discussed the similarities and differences, then wrote the harmony. Sometimes I began with chunks too big, and had to go back to the beginning with smaller bites. I should have done that with the passage in question. What I’m doing now is typing those notes I made as I harmonized the four gospels. However, I’m expanding my personal shorthand, and adding a few extra comments I didn’t before–the laziness of writing by hand when you’re used to typing seventy words a minute.

But I find I’m adding quite a bit more to the passage notes. After I reread my old notes, and the harmony, and the gospels again, and think some more, more words flow, giving a more complete picture of the process I went through and the nature of the finished product.

So maybe this writing with the flow does work. I’m writing these passage notes kind of fast, yet at the same time adding to them and improving the Harmony. I don’t know how long this inspiration will continue, but I’ll go with it for a while. Maybe I’ll actually finish the project in a couple of years. Since it’s probably non-publishable, no hurry.

I still need to work on the discipline part of writing with the flow, which will involve writing where the flow stops so as to finish a project. I’ll figure it out someday. Otherwise I’ll never get a book published.

Meanwhile, the flow to do my taxes has not yet come.

Writing

Writing With the Flow

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Unluckily or luckily this notion of writing on the Working Classes has in the interim died away in me; and I have altogether lost it for the present. I have got upon Thuycidides, Johannes Müller, the Crusades, and a whole course of objects connected with my Lectures; sufficient to occupy me abundantly till that fatal time come. We will commit my Discourse on the Working Classes once more to the chapter of chances.

In early 1838 Thomas Carlyle wrote these words as the introductory paragraph of a letter to John Stuart Mills. It seems that Carlyle had committed to writing an article about the working classes for Mill’s London and Westminster Review magazine. Carlyle, however, with this letter put off Mill, claiming he didn’t have the notion to write on it at that time, being fully engaged in preparing to give a lecture series that would start April 30, 1838.

I can sympathize with Carlyle. As I wrote yesterday on this blog,”inspiration” suddenly hit me yesterday, and I went back to working on the Harmony of the Gospels, going after the passage notes with great interest. When I worked on some of the passage notes previously (meaning over a year ago) I had some difficulty deciding on a format for them. Should I type the parallel passages in a table or columns? Or should I just refer to the passages and let a reader (including me sometime in the future) pull out a Bible and flip between gospels? I elected to go with typing the parallel passages in a Word table? More work, more paper, more trees killed (or pixels consumed), but more usable passage notes.

As I said yesterday, working on this wasn’t on the radar screen for this month, probably not for the year, but my reading drew me to it. This seems to be the way of my writing life. Reading or teaching or some other of life’s activities gives me a burst of interest, and I (research if necessary and) write. It doesn’t matter if it’s a new project or old project, an outlined project or seat-of-the-pants piece. It doesn’t matter if I have been hot and heavy in the middle of something else. I go with the flow. Wherever the creative waters gush, there I go.

So that puts me at odds with Carlyle. It seems that, while he recognized that he should follow his creative juices, he also knew he had to complete a project to make some money. His lecture series would be quite profitable, and Carlyle at that point in his career still did not have financial success. So somehow he found the inspiration he needed to prepare his lectures. The working classes did not inspire him at that moment, and would not really futher his goals, though they would a year or two later.

When I feel the creative juices flowing in a certain direction, I go there, regardless of what I’m working on at the moment. That’s why I have a dozen writing projects opened, and none finished. In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People was where I was supposed to be spending my time yesterday. That and two articles for Suite 101. Despite the busyness of a Sunday, I had enough time carved out to write a thousand words in FTSP or complete at least one if not two articles for Suite. Yet I went with the flow instead of practicing creative discipline.

On Rachelle Gardner’s blog on Friday I made a comment about that (comments 207 and 208 to Rachelle’s post), claiming I had genre identity disorder (G.I.D.). That may have been a misnomer. Perhaps I should call it Writer Discipline Deficiency. Or maybe Uncontrolled Creative Flow.

Somehow I need to learn to do what Carlyle did: go with the creative flow, yet complete projects started before going on to the next. Get the next idea documented in a notebook or journal, locked down, and carry on where I was before the inspiration hit.

Oh well, tonight, as the time allows, I will be mostly working on passage notes again, trying to get the notes written for at least one passage. If time allows and inspiration calls, I’ll see about a Suite article too. However, what I really should do tonight is get my household budget and financial records up to date (1.5 months behind) and get something done on my income taxes. Unfortunately, inspiration for those two items is lacking.

Harmony of the gospels, Writing

Change of Plans — Inspired?

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The only writing I planned to do this weekend was write a follow-up article on Earth Day for Suite101.com. My article on the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day is doing quite well, page view wise. And it should do better as the day approaches. A figure another follow-up article couldn’t hurt. Beyond that, I planned on finishing the Chuck Colson book.

But my weekend plans went awry. Friday night I got some good reading done, essentially on-pace to finish the book by tonight. Saturday, though, was fully consumed with chores and comings and goings, until the evening left little opportunity to read. Well, I did read. I re-read a chapter in The Shack, the book we are studying in our adult Sunday school class, and prepared to teach it in case the teacher was out today (he was, so I did). And I read a Nazarene missions book that we’ve had for too long (just 94 pages; easy read). Then it was bed time.

This afternoon I had to meet with the trustees at church to talk again about our parking lot rehab project. We had some money unexpectedly come our way, and have the opportunity to redo the lot according to my master plan. Looks like that will happen. But that meeting, and waiting for it to start, took a good chunk of the afternoon. No time for reading.

But the thing that really changed my plans was reading yesterday morning and today in the gospels. As I usually do this time of year, I began reading again the stories of Jesus’ passion, beginning with the triumphal entry. But I decided to read it in my Harmony of the Gospels. The part I read this morning, Jesus’ ministry and encounters early in the week, led me to realize I may have been off in a couple of things. Plus, my mind seemed really engaged in the subject, and I thought this might be a good time to get some passage notes written.

So this afternoon and this evening I took time to work on some passage notes. I did this for the passages that are titled, in my study Bible, Question About Paying Taxes, About the Resurrection, and The Greatest Commandment. My mind was sharp, and focused. The words of the Harmony seemed to jump out of the page as I read. This is usually a sign that I’m reading the right thing for my current state of mind. So I got to work on the passage notes.

Perhaps I should briefly describe these. They are the notes that I wrote in my notebook as I harmonized the four gospels. I would first write out the text for each gospel covering that passage, in very short pieces (usually a sentence, sometimes two). I would then write a few notes about the differences and similarities in the text; what appeared to be conflicts and what appeared to be simple differences in wording. Then I would state some basis for harmonizing the text, say “Use Mark for the basic text, work in the extra information in Matthew and the word difference in Luke”, or something like that. Then I wrote the harmonized text in the notebook.

So I went to the notebook, found the part about paying taxes to Caesar, and began. I should also say that I’ve tried working on several of the passage notes before. I had little success, for whatever reason. But today I had good success. I took my handwritten notes and began typing. I expanded my private shorthand to full words and grammar. I added a few things that came to mind now. Most importantly, I found a few places where I could make my harmony better, and more faithful to the original text. I also found a few places where I did not adequately state the basis for my decision. I added that to the passage note.

This was not even on the radar screen when I set March goals. Consequently, I’m not sure what this will do to my goals. I may need to lay something else aside, or spend more time on writing than I anticipate having. Well, it seems that I need to write where my mind is going, not force it to write something that it is not interested in at that moment. So I’ll see what tomorrow brings, be it a Suite article, a little more on my novel, editing my article for BiblioBuffet, or even another passage note.

Engineering

If You Have Nothing to Write About

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Once in one of his letters to a good friend, Cicero wrote, “If you have nothing to say, write a letter about that.” Or, something like that. I don’t feel like pulling up the letter at present.

I know tonight is a night I should write in the blog, but I’m a little without topic write now. Today was a good day, very busy with my silt fence studies. I finally pulled up a blank specification template and actually began writing the specification for silt fence. I found it to be a little more difficult than I expected. When I got to the part of entering what types of silt fence fabric we will accept, I went to the highway department list of accepted products. I found fifteen different fabrics accepted. On our standard drawings we have four listed. So I had a lot of work to do.

I found the highway department’s list terribly out of date. Or maybe full of errors. They were using some products that aren’t really silt fence type fabric. They had one company down as a manufacturer when they are actually a re-seller, not even a value-added re-seller. The products they listed varied as to apparent opening size by 2.8:1, and by permittivity (a measure of flow rate) by 145:1!!!! Clearly, someone wasn’t thinking when they put all these products on the list. Hmmm, one naturally suspects kickbacks in a situation like this.

But as I was trying to view manufacturer’s literature, I found I would have to take a step backwards and actually do some design work before I could specify the darn thing. This is how I should have done it in the first place.

I must digress to say that on March 31st I will be presenting a paper at an erosion control conference in Bentonville (almost walking distance from the new office), the subject being “A Thousand Little Treatment Plants: Process-based Design of Erosion and Sediment Control Practices.” The premise of the paper is that the industry has been treating these things as “best management practices.” As management practices they are art, not science. Hence they don’t get designed. Hence they don’t get detailed and specified correctly. Hence they don’t get selected, installed, or maintained properly.

Well, here I am writing a paper saying the industry isn’t doing the right design work, and I’m trying to write a spec without first doing some design work! Ridiculous. I had done enough study to know that my spec should not allow vastly different types of fabrics in it, and to know what the key properties were that affected the design. But do I chose the small group of fabrics that have a flow rate of 5 to 10 gallons per minute per square foot, or the small group of fabrics that discharge at 100 to 150 gpm/sf? Which is the better basis for silt fence design? I don’t know, but I need to in order to write the spec properly.

Or, should we be specifying two types of silt fence: low flow capacity to maximize sedimentation, and high flow capacity to minimize upstream side ponding area? Perhaps there’s room for both in our specs. And maybe that would give us one more tool in our sediment control toolbox. Of course, our engineers would then have to make intelligent decisions rather than mindlessly put symbols on drawings and ignoring specifications. Wouldn’t that be terrible.

So, that means we have at least four types of silt fence:

  1. Low flow capacity i.e. maximum sedimentation silt fence
  2. High flow capacity i.e. filtration only silt fence
  3. Wire backed silt fence, which I suppose could be either of the two
  4. Belted silt retention fence, which has a different type of fabric and which I’ve never used; it’s on the list to research tomorrow.

I haven’t yet thought of how to integrate all four of those in the specification I’m writing. I suppose I will before long. I want to thing about this low flow/high flow situation. Surely I’m not the first person in the world to have looked at these fabrics and thought of how their properties affects their performance on the job site, am I? Someone out there has done some work on this silt fencing, and has made a decision on these different fabrics. It wasn’t our highway department, obviously, but someone must have.

Or maybe not. Maybe I’m breaking some new ground here. I can see reasons to apply both types of silt fence. Of course, until I sit down tomorrow and do those calculations and figure how these flow rates apply to the situation on the ground, I may be worrying about nothing. Somehow, though, I don’t think I am. I think I’ve stumbled upon something important, and will do something that will improve the industry. Or at least CEI’s part of this.

Well, for having nothing to write about when I started, I wrote quite a bit. Not of much interest for those readers who tune in ever day to see what I’ve written about my writing career, but it’s something of interest to me at the moment, and that’s what this blog’s all about. Carlyle and Emerson can wait for other posts.

Engineering, freelance writing, poetry

A Freelance Success

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Good evening, all you faithful readers. I’m just back from writers guild, where I shared my long poem “A Woodland Acre” from my poetry book Father Daughter Day. I’m going through that book four pages at a time (four pages is our limit). Last week this stopped me in the middle of the poem. This week, however, two of our members were gone, and two who were there were not there last week. So they had me read it all from the beginning. Good reviews.

Tonight I had an e-mail from the editor at BiblioBuffet, and on-line magazine featuring reading and books. One of my February freelance submittals was an article titled, “When the Vehicle Will Be Worthy of the Spirit,” about the beginning of Carlyle and Emerson’s correspondence. They are going to publish it in their guest column section, probably a month or so from now. The pay is small, but there is pay. I don’t know what the exposure will be, but it can’t hurt. It’s possible that, after a few guest columns, I could become a regular columnist at an increased pay. Once the article goes up I’ll post a link on Arrow. I worked hard on that article, and to have it accepted is gratifying.

Every small writing success puts me on the upward track of the roller coaster. Or is it the downward track (the metaphor being reversed of the real life experience)? The one that is more pleasurable. There are enough rejections in writing to cause misery and despair that you need to latch on to the few successes and ride the wind with them. Hmmm, was that enough metaphors to mix?

So I’m happy tonight. I’ll probably read twenty pages in the Coulson book, four pages in an alumni mag, and who knows what else. A couple of articles for Suite 101 are turning over in the gray cells.

Oh, today was also good because I finished my paper for my March 31st presentation, only one day behind the deadline. Also I finished a work related article on erosion and sediment control at construction sites that I’ll probably submit tomorrow. It’s not a bad article, somewhat of a rebuttal of an article a year ago in that mag. I suspect there’s no pay involved, but it’s another credit. Oh, and I had a lunch meeting with a woman I met at the Dallas conference. She is with a business right here in the area, and it looks as if she’ll have some work for CEI. Not right away, but it would be nice to get enough business to justify the cost of the trip.

So, all in all a good day. I’ll take ’em any chance I can.

goals

March Goals

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Okay, I’m doing this on the fly. I haven’t thought much about it, since I’ve been so heavy with work related stuff the last two weeks.

1. Blog 12 or more times. This seems a comfortable pace. I’d like to bump this up to about 16 posts a month, but will wait to make that a goal.

2. Write and post 10 articles at Suite101.com. I think I can do this.

3. Write 1,000 words on In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. Almost made it in February; might as well try it in March.

4. Work on a new Bible study, about the sacraments. I may have an outline somewhere. I’ll be teaching it in about two months. Time to get to work.

5. Make three freelance submissions. This is pretty minimal, but I’m working a lot on work stuff still, and will be making a presentation on the 31st and two or three brown bags during the week. I find the time needed to research freelance markets and actually make the submittals tedious, and for some reason if I’m heavy into work stuff, including taking stuff home, I can’t concentrate on freelance. Of course, a couple of the work things I’m working on could make good freelance articles about engineering. Hmmm.

6. Read 40 pages in writer helps, not including blogs. That’s forty solid pages, books or magazines (not including ads).

That’s it for now. As I said this is on the fly and off the cuff, little thought.

goals

The February Report

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Oops, I didn’t mean to let this blog sit since last Thursday. It was a busy weekend, though.

Here’s my report on February 2010, how I did relative to the goals I set.

1. Blog 12 times or more. >> Blogged 13 times, so met this goal.

2. Write and publish at least 8 articles at Suite101.com. >> Wrote and published 10 articles at Suite 101, so exceeded this goal

3. Consider applying for a feature writer position at Suite101; more on that in a post later today. >> That was kind of a measly goal. “Consider”? Well, I have a kind of measly result. I applied, was one of three candidates, then withdrew my application in a fit of pique at life in general. So I’m going to consider this goal met.

4. Complete an article I’m writing for BiblioBuffet.com and submit it. Ran it through critique group last night, so it’s down to final editing. >> I completed it and submitted it. I heard back from the editor yesterday: She’ll make a decision by Tuesday night. She took some time off in February was the reason for the delay.

5. Make at least three freelance submittals (including BiblioBuffet). >> Made three submittal, exactly on goal

6. Write at least 1000 words in In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. >> Almost; wrote 860 words. Although I didn’t make it, it felt good to be writing on it again.

7. Read at least 50 pages in a book about writing better. I have four or five at my disposal right now. >> I did this, but in writing magazines, not in books.

Okay, not a bad month relative to goals. Now I need to work us some March goals. Stay tuned.

Engineering, Writing

My Mind is Still Full

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As often happens after a long conference, the realities of work and life don’t allow for as much translation of mind fullness to practical results. As I wrote last Sunday, I returned from the IECA conference with a full mind. So many things to do at work about erosion control. And, from my continued reading in Chuck Colson’s How Now Shall We Live with many things to do and think about with my spiritual life.

But the after-conference realities of work hit me this week. I began by organizing the stuff I brought back from the conference: business cards, magazines, copies of technical papers, manufacturer’s materials. That lasted 15 minutes before I was summoned to a meeting involving possible warranty work on two subdivisions, one I worked on and one I didn’t. That lasted 90 minutes and required follow-ups with e-mails and several long discussions. It culminated in a 2 1/2 hour meeting today with the City of Rogers. They claim we did some things wrong in the design, but we don’t think so. The meeting went well.

Then on Tuesday there as an hour usurped to attend a webinar about the new MUTCD manual and regulations (traffic signage, striping, and signalization). Then there was the project in Lone Tree, CO that one of our young engineers designed, which was given to me to review because the City’s stormwater regulations were tricky and others who might have been able to review it were unavailable. That took close to eight hours between a detailed review of the drainage report and then understanding some difficult City standard details (items that go on construction drawings). Oh, yes, also the third review of a flood study in Rogers, of a lake dammed up on a creek.

In the two reviews, I found much needing to be changed. I struggled with the reviews, for fear that the large number of comments I had to give would crush the spirit of these two young engineers. But both took it well, and seemed pleased with the time I took to explain to them what the basis of my comments was. For the Lone Tree project, the misinterpretation of the City’s details might have been disastrous if I hadn’t reviewed it.

All this work, including bringing some things home tonight, is cutting into my writing time. Even tonight I brought some papers home, and an erosion magazine, to finish re-reading an important article and begin crafting a rebuttal for it. I may never turn the rebuttal into a publishable article, but I’ll enjoy writing it. I also made some more notes for the paper I’m going to give March 31 at the Muddy Waters Blues conference in Bentonville. I’m supposed to have my PowerPoint presentation turned in on Monday, but no way will I be ready. I might–I say might–have the paper written by then, but I can’t pull a PowerPoint together until I know what I’m going to say.

Plus, at work they have blocked blogspot, so I can’t even access An Arrow Through the Air from there. Nor can I access many of the writing blogs I read. So I’ll have to do almost all my blog work at home now, in crowded evenings and on weekends. That has put a cramp in my writing other things. I intended to work an hour or so on an article for Suite101, preparing to post it tomorrow. But after cooking supper and doing some dishes and adding the checkbook and working on that work stuff, it’s already 10:10 and I’m exhausted. Yet the end is not yet. I wanted to read twenty pages tonight in Colson, and I have a stack of junk mail to go through. So Suite will have to wait till tomorrow, if then.

America, Writing

The Flattery Continues

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Well, that short piece (real short piece, had to be under 50 words) I wrote back in 2004 for American Profile magazine continues to have legs. I wrote about this before. Yesterday, on a whim I decided to check for it again, so I searched for the phrases “ethics before law” and “law before gain”.

On the former I got over 4,500 Google hits. However, these reduced to just three pages upon clicking through them. The latter had 567 hits, which reduced to seven unique ones upon clicking through. A good number of these were to my quote, or rather to my quote unattributed.

One of those is a discussion on a Yahoo message board (second reply, discussed more several posts down, and the bad language is not my fault). Interesting that this was quoted in a discussion on Islam and whether Moslems can be good citizens.

So the flattery continues, sort of. I seem to have crafted a good phrase. I thought it was good at the time of writing; the legs prove it is.

Now, to be a successful, published writer, I just have to duplicate the quality of this a few tens of thousands of times. Piece of cake.

Author | Engineer