Just got back from a little mini-vacation to visit my wife’s grandparents in notoriously flat Lubbock, Texas. It was an odd trip, but not a horrible way to spend two vacation days with my family. Also, I learned some good travelling tips for enjoying the monotony of the Texas panhandle–or any other less than scenic drive that lasts more than seven hours.
Portable DVD players are your friend. If you don’t own one (we don’t), you can probably borrow one from a friend or relative (we did).
Stop often. A fifteen minute delay to stretch your legs and help the boy pee (again) will do much to ease the driving tension. And what would you do if you arrived at a hotel an hour earlier anyway?
Play games like the Alphabet Game, or if that’s too hard (it was), you can’t go wrong with I Spy. It lasted us from near Midland to near San Angelo.
Rest stops are really fun places to stop. And, um, rest.
The price of gas is easier to swallow if you treat yourself with a chocolate milk shake after every fillup. (And you’ll notice, “Awesome! Milkshakes are cheaper than gas!”)
That’s a comment that stuck with me. Because it’s such a tricky thing. See, I’m a big fan of Keats:
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
If something is true, it will also be beautiful. Something that is true and stinky, still has a stinky kind of beauty. Sound crazy? Have you ever had limberger cheese? Or anchovies? They are truly delightful–and their stench is part of their beauty.
It is stench for its own sake that we need to be careful about.
For example, culling through my own Twitter comments this weekend, I found one that horrified me. Kevin Hendricks was bemoaning the fact that so many writers don’t follow the guidelines we editors send them. “Why?!” he asked.
I responded, “Because they are idiots.”
Ouch. What was I thinking? That isn’t the kind of stinky beauty that tastes good on crackers. In fact, there’s nothing beautiful about that comment at all.
But there is a kind of beauty in my ability to delete stupid, ugly twitter comments like that. So that’s what I did.
Which reminds me about something I just read on CultureSmith. More and more people are getting into the twitter thing, using services like twirl (the application that made Twitter work for me), facebook, twitpic, snurl or tinyurl, and twitterfeed.
Christians have to wonder what it looks like to be the church on twitter. In short, What Would Jesus Tweet? Or would he Twitter at all?
Personally, I think he would. Twitter may have a stinky kind of beauty. But it’s still a beauty that’s got lots of room for truth. As long as I can delete my own stupid comments from time to time.
Several weeks ago, a reader asked me a serious of questions about how to break into editing. I would hardly say that I’ve “broken into” editing, except maybe as a thief in the night, rattling the windows of traditional publishing and occassionally finding one unlocked.
Interesting site I just learned about from Josh Cody and ChurchMarketingSucks.com, a site run partially by my friend, Kevin Hendricks. (Kevin is a new writers for TheHighCalling.org, but his first article is still in the cue.)
The site is called TagCrowd, and it generates tag clouds automatically based on the text you are tagging.
For example, here is the auto-generated tag cloud for the entire text of my series on the blog tour (still in progress).
Just after the dawn of blogs in 2002, a secret cooperative of techie pastors and Bible scholars went into hiding to produce a new translation for the twenty-first century.
This is day two of the High Calling blog tour. During this tour, I’ve been talking about a side of editing most people don’t think about—an editor’s role in helping to unify the vision for a publication or a publisher.
Most often, that kind of work takes place on the level of sentences and paragraphs. I ask whether a particular idea or clause or phrase or word effectively communicates the vision I’ve been called to defend. But sometimes it happens at the philosophical level. Sometimes I get to step back and think about overall strategy. How do we teach people the value of…
Yesterday we had some great comments, observations, reviews, and even audacious questions. Like this one from Eve Nielsen.
On April 23 - April 25, we will be leading a blog tour of our new site, TheHighCalling.org. Comment on this page below if you are interested in participating. Each post on the blog tour should…
· Review the site’s new functionality. Be kind, but honest. And above all be specific. What works well? Why? · Review the site’s content. Find some article or interview or story that strikes a chord and discuss it. (Feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of the article on TheHighCalling.org that links readers to your blog.) · Embed sample audio from the site. Just paste the code right into the “html view” of a post. See below for more information on this.
Link to the site. If you are willing, we’d appreciate a link directly to the membership page at http://www.thehighcalling.org/MyHighCalling/Register.asp. Like this: become a member of TheHighCalling.org.
Click here for the code to embed our audio player right into your blog: embedhighcallingaudio.txt. Then just paste the code into the HTML edit view of your blog. (But ignore the title links.) It will look like this:
It’s Randy Ingermanson, and he’s the featured author this month for the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy blog tour. Specifically, the tour is focusing on his book Double Vision.
You can find more great links to this book by going to Bethany House directly. For now, I’m going to tease readers with his great first sentence:
Keryn Wills was in the shower when she figured out how to kill Josh Trenton.
A million years ago when I wrote that 
