New Directions and New Experiments

 As I am writing this, I have been extremely busy.  In addition to submitting a lot of job applications recently - I discovered a tool that is helping to enhance my marketability, so that makes me excited - I have also been engaged in some writing projects, and I am prepping the 2026 "Blog Book" to be print-ready by December.  What is becoming an increasing pain in the butt with writing though is the editing - my goodness!  And, I wanted to actually sound off on that before I continue.

I have a touch-screen laptop, and I think I have cussed out that thing more in the past two weeks than even a sailor with the most colorful vocabulary could attempt.  It's not so much the laptop itself though as it is the programs on it, and by those, I mean Microsoft Word - my goodness!  I always want my stuff to look as good as possible, especially if I am going to create a bound and printed volume of it.  So, naturally I do the spelling/grammar check utilizing the tool bar at the top of my Word document.  The problem with Word is that it tags everything as a misspelling - foreign language words, proper names, intended slang words, and local colloquialisms.  In a huge document like the "Blog Book," you have about 500 pages, and in each of them this stupid Word program will find 500 supposed "misspelled" words that end up being proper names or foreign words.  So, out of the thousands they apparently flag, perhaps less than 50 in a document that size are actual spelling errors. But, in order to find the actual errors, you have to click through everything else to get to them, and that can cause issues too - you can accidentally click a correction on something that technically doesn't need it, and then it makes a sentence sound more ridiculous.  Then, if that wasn't bad enough, the damn things keep multiplying because Word takes its sweet time loading the document.  That makes the spell-check in Word seem like an endless hamster wheel, and it can get frustrating after a while.  So, with the "Blog Book," which I only print for my own shelf anyway, I am not going to be as concerned about that.  The "select-copy-cut-paste process of getting a blog article into a working document is challenging enough without that crap.  So, to anyone who reads any of the 12 volumes of blog books I have one day, forgive any typos and spacing.  I had always been taught that a period after a sentence should be followed by two spaces when you start the next sentence, so that is what I have done.  Now, come to find out, that was wrong, and therefore now when I edit a large document, there are a ton of punctuation corrections that pop up. I gave up on those too.  For actual marketable books, that is one thing.  But, for something that is for your own records, I could care less.  So, the "Blog Book" will be published as is in December, and if a person who reads it in the future gets concerned about an occasional typo, oh well - if they believe enough in my work, they can have it re-published themselves at that point.  Anyway, it also made me want to string Bill Gates up by his cojones in an Everglades forest and let the alligators eat him alive - I believe in the dignity of personhood as much as the next faithful Catholic Christian, but let's face facts.  Bill Gates is a pervert, a pedophile, and he's an antichrist wannabe who thinks he has the authority to tell individual normal people what they should and should not eat or do - I say screw him.  Bill Gates is not God, and if anything, I believe he may be possessed by a demonic principality, but that is a whole other discussion.  That being vented, let's move on.

I have made some of my first forays into creative fiction, and it has produced two books.  One of them is a bit of autobiographical fiction built around myself and my Filipina fiancée,  and the other is the completion of a Catholic apocalyptic story I started 25 years ago.  The first will not be available to the general public, but the second is already listed on Amazon and is available there if anyone wants to take a look.  The cover art is what I wanted to share here, as I designed it myself with a piece of my own artwork. So, I will share that here now:

The book went off to publication a few days ago, and I should be getting my proof copy of it this coming week.  As mentioned, if you are interested, please feel free to take a look on Amazon, and you should find it easily. Anyone who buys one is doing me a great service, and I thank you in advance for your support. 

The other book, as I said, I am not comfortable with mass-releasing, but I was able to create a beautiful piece of cover art for that which I fell in love with, and I will show the picture to you now:

There is just an unspoken and profound aesthetic about this picture that also creates an amazing theme to the story itself, and I liked this so much I printed one off as a picture.  And again, believe it or not, I created this myself.  One of the things that Fr. Norris Clarke talks about in his book The One and the Many (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001) is what are called the "Transcendental Properties of Being."  What Fr. Clarke means by that terminology is that these are the basic properties that belong to all beings as beings, and there are three main ones - truth, beauty, and goodness.  Fr. Clarke adds a fourth - unity - which speaks of the indivisibility of the individual that sets it apart from others (as John F. Crosby would term this, one's incommunicable attributes.  The point where those intersect tends to make the incommunicable then what is called a universal, meaning it is shared by a group of others the particular individual belongs to, and those universals together are what craft what Pentecostal theologian Kenneth Archer, in his book A Pentecostal Hermeneutic (Cleveland, TN: CPT Press, 2009) as Central Narrative Convictions, or CNCs, a concept he borrowed from Brian J Walsh and J Richard Middleton, The Transforming Vision (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1984).  The main factor some of these great scholars leave out (not all) is that the reason for those transcendental properties to be found within each of us is God's literal creation of the universe, and of humanity as being truly "in his image" and given dominion over everything else.  Although the Fall noted in Genesis 3 corrupted it on some levels, the basic blueprint is still there - God gave mankind an appreciation for truth, beauty, and goodness as a reflection of him, who is the full expression of them all.  I would add a fifth transcendent property, which is also a virtue - love.  Love is a sort of catalyst that makes the others more meaningful, and while the truest expression of that love is God himself, it is closely followed by the love a man and a woman share for each other, and in a relationship of pure, unvarnished love, the partners begin to embody those other properties in a way that they compliment each other.  So, when I see a picture like that, it reminds me of how beautiful God's creation really is, and its penultimate expression is in the love a man and woman have on a special level with each other.  That is what my own story talks about too.  Of course, we live in a fallen world, and even transcendental properties can be seen through a distorted lens - this is where we have another element, supernatural grace.  This grace, called by some "sanctifying grace," is what refines the rough edges of the natural order, and it does it in three ways - it heals, it elevates, and it perfects. When a man and woman become one in their love through a covenantal, sacramental process, I believe an element of supernatural grace binds them closer, and they begin to complete each other as they are made more as one every day.  Love then is nurtured, but supernatural grace sustains that nourishment, and the more a couple rely upon that, the stronger the bond between them comes.  And, when you are in a long-distance relationship where you are a half-world apart, it is the ultimate test of how strong that love can grow, and when a couple in that sort of situation finally do come together, it is even more special.  And, all of that to say this is what a picture like that means.  The picture itself is rich in a lot of other symbolism too, but that is for another time. 

I also cannot stress enough the integral part writing brings to the imagination and intellect.  In writing fictional stories these past couple of weeks that more or less reflected a part of me, I feel different.  The creativity of the human mind is a canvas for the transcendental properties God endowed every human being with, and even the most sinful, tortured soul can at times produce a thing of beauty.  Good example of that is the late jazz trumpet legend Chet Baker.  Chet Baker was perhaps one of the most amazing musicians of his time, but personally the guy was a huge mess - years of drugs, messing around with other things he shouldn't have been into, and the weakness of his own will did the guy in.  But, when you listen to Chet's music, you also can hear his soul talking - there is an authenticity, and it's beautifully expressed, in which one can appreciate Chet Baker's talent while at the same time not being as impressed with his personal choices.  

We are all sinners, and if we don't fully accept and welcome God's supernatural grace to work in us, the end will not be good - those without grace (the ultimate expression being Christ's Passion and Resurrection themselves) are doomed to a grim eternity.  I have reiterated many times that God is not the one who sends people to hell - that was not his intention.  Rather, an individual chooses hell by rejecting God's grace.  I am not in a place to judge Chet Baker's soul (when he passed away, I was still a junior in high school), and for all we know maybe he had one of those "deathbed conversions" before he breathed his last.  We can pray that he did, but because we don't know, and given the tragic mess of his life, I have to concede the inevitability that Chet Baker has been lost for eternity now. It is a true tragedy, because he was such a talented man and is considered a legend now.   But, even a tragic mess like Chet Baker still had the very attributes God gave all humanity - truth, beauty, and goodness.  And, in his own way, Chet had those tucked into his recorded work in many places, which is why we don't have to reject his work due to the mess his personal life was.  The fact is though, had Chet given that over to God, it would have been enhanced in an even greater way - Chet would have done the same thing then that the multitalented Christian artist Phil Driscoll did. These are rambling thoughts I know, but it still is a truth that truth, beauty, and goodness exist around us - the work of grace to refine them, however, is the ultimate goal for a person who truly follows Christ.

Well, I have said enough for today, but will see you again at some point in the future, so take care until next time.