A new book review of mine is up at National Catholic Register:

It’s called Learning to Love With the Saints by Jean M. Heimann.

Here’s a pull-quote from the review:

What this book demonstrates so poignantly is how ineffective the spiritual formation turned out to be for many kids growing up Catholic in the ’50s and ’60s. Parents who depended upon parish catechetics, the Catholic school system and a family life of traditional devotional practices discovered to their dismay that it often wasn’t enough. The sexual revolution hit the post-Vatican II Catholic Church with a broadside for which it was totally unprepared, and the resulting confusion is still negatively impacting the Church today.

Failure to effectively explain the Church’s teachings and explicitly contrast them with the practices of the world, over-emphasis on mere catechesis without leading children to true conversion of heart, and assuming that an unshakable Catholic faith can be absorbed by mere osmosis — these are the things Catholic parents today must avoid if they hope their children’s faith will be strong enough to survive immersion in the messy world outside the cloister of our homes and parishes. [I recommend this book] as a cautionary tale that, by God’s grace, has a happy ending.

Here’s the URL of the review (just in case the link above is broken or goes astray):

http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/returning-to-the-faith-with-the-help-of-the-saints

Enjoy!

Just a quick bit of news: I put together a standalone edition of one of the novelettes from Standing Figures. It is now available at amazon as an ebook:

It’s a 15,000 word piece — it would be about 50 pages long if printed in book form. An entertaining, quick read! Check it out! (Just click the picture and it will go to the amazon page.)

Startling Figures, volume 1 — is available at amazon.com in paperback and Kindle e-book! It’s a collection of stories of the paranormal.

Enter your email address in the box below and you’ll automatically receive updates about Startling Figures, volume 2 and other cool stuff!

I found this review on amazon.com and it is AWESOME. It’s an interactive review. First, you fill in the blanks, Mad Lib style:

Then you put your words into the numerically marked blanks in the template:

Thank you, “Jen” from amazon.com!!

Of course, I had to play. Here’s my Dan Brown Mad Lib, with artistic license:

ROBERT LANGDON, #67

Late one night in March, Robert Langdon finds himself drunkenly running through the streets of Copenhagen having recently been contacted by Professor Antonin Balustrade of the Daan Hofbren Academie de Hoog. Balustrade has contacted Langdon to decipher clues discovered in Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans.

Before he has a chance to fully devote his attention to the task at hand, a fanatic from the United Way attacks Langdon and his host, revealing a conspiracy to violently end community mosquito abatement programs. Although Langdon has fallen victim to this same plot twist numerous times and by the same formulaic plot and characters, he once again naively follows a new sidekick who will ultimately betray Langdon and/or turn out to be the last descendent of Rube Goldberg.

In the process of saving everyone from pesticide poisoning, Langdon visits Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Nairobi, and Decatur, IL and views and comments verbosely on approximately 67 pieces of fabulous art, including La Mozzarella (a world-famous sculpture by Paulo Boyardee), Sashimi (a well-known woodcut by Japanese Budo Warrior Artist and Haiku Master Tempura Maguro), and Bruce’s Innards (an avant garde interactive art installation by Australian chef and artist Mack Wannacaster, in which patrons walk into the mouth of a life-size Great White Shark and travel the route taken by a typical seal, finally emerging on all fours from the installation’s anus. Langdon finds and pontificates knowingly upon many arcane stomach artifacts, such as a monocle worn by 9th century Antipope Hippodrome VIII at his first antipapal mass in 936, and the brass tuning peg of a 1613 lute played by Antonio Vivaldi.

Astute readers and Dan Brown detractors will point out that monocles didn’t exist in the 9th century, that the 9th century in fact refers to the years beginning with 8, not 9, and that Antonio Vivaldi wasn’t born until 1678, but Dan Brown’s fans will not care about any of this, insisting that dazzling displays of ignorance don’t matter because IT’S JUST FICTION, PEOPLE!!!

In less than 4 hours, Langdon manages to solve 72 riddles, be nearly killed by a hydrocephalic one-eyed hypochondriac Zen Buddhist horticulturist, and mentions his Mickey Mouse watch at least 189 times. Meanwhile, the reader has seen pretty much every plot twist or surprise thrown his/her way. And at no point does Langdon ever relieve himself, but readers of the book frequently find themselves on their knees in front of the toilet. In the end, Langdon returns to Harvard knowing that symbols are truly something that will make a talentless hack a lot of money.

Have fun! Post your responses in the comments! Jen’s review is here.

Seth Godin does it again in this short article, “The Simple Power of One A Day:”

There are at least 200 working days a year. If you commit to doing a simple marketing item just once each day, at the end of the year you’ve built a mountain. Here are some things you might try (don’t do them all, just one of these once a day would change things for you):

• Send a handwritten and personal thank you note to a customer
• Write a blog post about how someone is using your product or service
• Research and post a short article about how something in your industry works
• Introduce one colleague to another in a significant way that benefits both of them
• Read the first three chapters of a business or other how-to book
• Record a video that teaches your customers how to do something
• Teach at least one of your employees a new skill
• Go for a ten minute walk and come back with at least five written ideas on how to improve what you offer the world
• Change something on your website and record how it changes interactions
• Help a non-profit in a signficant way (make a fundraising call, do outreach)
• Write or substiantially edit a Wikipedia article
• Find out something you didn’t know about one of your employees or customers or co-workers

Enough molehills is all you need to have a mountain.

He’s speaking of business and marketing, but the concept applies to any endeavor in life:

Are you working on a writing project? Write just one page a day (250 words or so) and in 200 working days you’ll have a 200 page manuscript.

Are you trying to declutter your home of extra gunk? Discard just one thing a day and in 200 working days you’ll have 200 fewer needless items.

Are you trying to save money for a small purchase? Set aside just one dollar a day and in 200 days you’ll have $200 to spend.

You get the idea.

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” And it ends when you add all those millions of single steps together.

I am late to every party! I recently “discovered” flickr. I mean, I knew about it and everything, but I had spent zero time on it and certainly had never uploaded anything. But I came across this thing called “sketchnoting” (via Mike Rohde, Austin Kleon, Sunni Brown, and others) and I went to Mike Rohde’s flickr group. What a fun site! I uploaded 2 of my own sketchnotes and started my own photostream with these photos:

These were notes I took at a weekend conference in 2004, before I even knew there was such a thing as sketchnoting (or “visual notetaking”):

This summer I read Isaac Asimov’s classic I, Robot.

Mike Rohde’s sketchnoting book is called The Sketchnote Handbook: The Illustrated Guide to Visual Notetaking. Sunni Brown’s book is called The Doodle Revolution.

When I was close to finalizing the manuscript for Startling Figures, I used my daughter’s iPad and a drawing app to finger paint a few (bad) sketches. I emailed them to Tom, the cover designer, to give him an idea of what I was looking for in the cover:

image A

image B

image C

image D

I also put together a mock-up cover:

Awful, right?

Tom has not read any of the stories in the book. All he’s read is the back cover copy and this quote from Flannery O’Connor, which I use for the epigraph:

to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind

you draw large and startling figures

Tom is a creative director at an ad agency, and a talented graphic designer and artist. Here’s what he came up with:

Need I say more?

Unless you have actual design, photography, and / or artistic skill, access to professional graphic design and image creation tools, and so on, don’t design your own book cover. Leave that to the professionals.

Thanks, Tom!

Just for fun, take this poll:

Startling Figures is almost ready to publish. I got the cover, spine, and back cover mock-up from the designer and I uploaded a “final” manuscript to CreateSpace.

The book looks very good on the document review screen, but here’s the reason for today’s writing tip, and the reason the word “final” is in quotes above:

When I read the manuscript out loud, I found a punctuation error in the very first sentence! This is after reading it countless times myself and having several beta readers go through it. It amazed me that I didn’t catch the error until I read a facsimile of the formatted document out loud.

Reading your work aloud forces you to slow down and enables you to catch “sour notes,” awkward phrases, and other writing blunders that the brain skips over when reading silently. (Another reason I was able to catch errors in the formatted, pre-publication mock-up may be that Times New Roman–the font I used to compose the stories–is very compact, but Garamond–the typeface I chose for the book–is much more open.)

Other errors I found:

Toward the bottom of the screenshot, at the left margin:

There are so many “wounds” in this paragraph, they’re stacked three deep!

The word “and” is missing from one of the sentences below:

Try reading this out loud:

John stepped toward Yvette with a sheepish smile. “What do you think, honey?”

I can’t even say “sheepish smile” once, slowly, let alone five times fast! I forgot to get a screenshot of “sheepish smile,” but here’s how I changed it:

I finished my third read-aloud last night — even then I was making corrections! It’s time consuming and your voice gets tired, but it’s worth doing to find problems now rather than at the first public reading of your work.

If you’d like to receive a quick email from me when the book is published, go ahead and fill out the little form below: