I may get some business cards printed up. Why? Because there have been a few instances where I wanted to give people my contact info for something writey-related and I had to resort to ye olde fashionede quill and parchment. It feels far less professional than handing over a decently designed business card. So here … Making the Call
Brett McCracken’s Hipster Christianity attempts to document the fusion of modern western Christianity with the hipster subculture. It’s mostly a descriptive book with a bit of prescriptive advice at the end that might ruffle some feathers, but for the most part McCracken -– a writer for spiritual hipster publication Relevant magazine –- offers germane insight … Book Review: Hipster Christianity
Invisible Creature started a series of posts on packaging design, then and now. Their first target is a box of Trix. It’s the case that packaging has gotten a lot more cluttered the past few decades. Empty space in design is seen as wasted real estate for marketing or information. Our eyes aren’t able to … Your Writing Is Terrible: Put Your Pen Down
Being the father of an almost-five year old and a book dweeb, I naturally enjoy reading her books with her — at least, as much as an adult can enjoy that sort of thing. The ones that are didactic are fairly innocuous in their delivery; they promote good manners, cooperation, learning, imagination, inventiveness (some of … Collectivist Kids’ Books
I received my copy of Hipster Christianity that I won from Mike Duran. When I unzipped the FedEx box, that one part from Handel’s Messiah echoed somewhere from the side of my house. You may recall that I won one of his handmade crosses a few months ago. Didn’t hear any Handel when the package … I Heard Jesus Smoked Cloves
On a non-literary note, I did some tidying up on the site, most noticeably in the graphics department. It’s 8-bit time! After listening to some Anamanaguchi I redid the “jd” logo in the corner, jiggered the icons (and the content) on the About page — and made all the images one sprite file. I also … Wizard Needs Food…Badly
I’ve informally made sure to keep this writey blog Christian-theology-free — and sometimes I skirt too close to the edge — but I’m not afraid to post in that area of interest if it has something to do with the engrossing use of language (I have a Venn diagram benignly hovering in my head). Enter … The Confession of Chalcedon
A longtime friend of mine, Seth W, wrote an e-book on killing your blog, a minimalist diatribe to encourage us to spend more time doing things rather than writing about them. This is coming from someone who has been blogging for nearly a decade and runs the Internet’s biggest metal sites (and who is singlehandedly … Kill Your Friends
Not so much a book as it is a compilation of essays and lectures, Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian encompasses, presumably, his reasoning for Christianity as a religious truth. I say “presumably” because I know Russell to have been a noted and influential philosopher, and that Why would follow in the tradition … Book Review: Why I Am Not A Christian
I came across You Write Like, where you can input text that you’ve written, a form of necromancy passes through your hard drive, and you are assigned a literary doppelganger. I input about a half-dozen bodies of text that I’ve done, from stories on here to a some paragraphs from my book. About four times … Your Writing Is Terrible: You Write Like A Dead Person
The other day in the car the family was listening to a song from Anberlin, called “Reclusion”. One of the lines in the chorus goes like this: Sins like skeletons are so very hard to hide. Nice line, but it had me thinking that this could be taken two different ways, which aren’t radically different … English Be Hard: Skeletal Punctuation
The excerpt below is from a book I never published, titled How the Gods Shook or A Season Underneath. “What’s the story?” I asked. “Morning glory!” he said. “My battery is getting worse and worse. We should move to a quieter place. What’s with the cap?” “I’m not allowed to wear one?” Pedaling slowly, he … How the Gods Shook, Excerpt Two
A few years ago I started the official site for Alvin Plantinga, a distinguished professor of philosophy at Notre Dame. I had contacted him about doing a site after reading Warranted Christian Belief (read it all for free here). There were papers and other things floating around the web that weren’t really consolidated into one … Planting(a) Seeds
The excerpt below is from a book I never published, titled How the Gods Shook or A Season Underneath. “Afternoon, Bite Size,” she breathed in her smooth contralto. “What’s up with you and Cecil?” I asked, pointing my chin towards 5th. “We were talking.” “I could see that.” “Then why’d you ask?” Her blue eyes … How the Gods Shook, Excerpt One
Matt’s been my friends for more than a decade now, and we were in a band together so I got to witness the words firsthand. At the time I wasn’t too much attune to good writing that much, but in the last few years I’ve been recollecting and piecing together lyrics and things I’ve read … Other People Write: Matt Clifford
I’ve been searching for ways to get the second draft of my book knocked out. Usually it’s “when I find time”, and this still holds true, but I will be finding more time in the next few months to actually pound this thing into submission. With that, I think I will be posting excerpts of … How the Gods Book
Earlier this month Rachelle Gardner gathered a lot of responses from authors about the one-sentence book pitch contest. I mean, she’s a literary agent that encourages comments her blog, so of course authors are going to flock in droves to get themselves noticed. She could post about the off-color of her pee in the morning … Gods In One Sentence
I issued a challenge earlier in the week for writers to write a poem or short story about or set in the summertime, without using a list of certain words. That was kind of a big risk because I have almost no readership and having no responses would make me look sillier than I already … Your Writing Is Terrible: Summer Poetry Finished
With the summer months upon the northern hemisphere, some fiction writers and bloggers will attend to the most favored of all seasons (except if you’re already somewhere hot…then it’s just annoying). Unfortunately, because of the common vocabulary bank tied to the summer experience, after a few dozen stories the flow and bounce of words will … Your Writing Is Terrible: Summer Poetry
I got a new bike over Memorial Day weekend: a steel frame Trek 520. It’s actually very old, but it’s new to me — and it’s my first road bike. I was using a mountain bike heft to my bus stop, which was certainly workable but not ideal in suburban/urban terrain. It was also a … Memorial Day 2010 Bike Ride