Mike Crowl's Blog, page 11

Out into the world The Counterfeit Queen goes

 In my last post on this (not-used-as-much-as-it-once-was) blog, I wrote about the long journey of writing The Counterfeit Queen. 

Two or three weeks ago I finished it, in the sense that I'd gone through the entire draft and rewritten and edited and cut and pasted and did all the other things you do to a new-born novel before you send it out into the world. Well, when I say I finished it, I now had before me a draft that was pretty much done. 

A friend had recently read my three earlier fantasies,...

Five years on: Progress

 For something like five years I've been writing the next book in the Grimhilderness series. I've put it away, taken it out again, abandoned it, rescued it, and so on. I've had long stretches when I did nothing at all on it. 

It hasn't helped that my usual collaborator didn't like the basic idea of the book from the start, and consequently I haven't had her ideas and editorial overview for the first time since we worked together on Grimhilda! (the musical version) back in 2010-12. I'm having to d...

Bringing the reader up to speed

One of my niggles that turns up again and again in cop shows on TV - the CSI type of thing - is when the detectives stand around in their office and spout exposition. I don't mean one of them telling the others what's happened, but four or more of them each telling each other what they already know. They're only doing this so the viewer knows as well.  

Character A knows exactly how much to say before character B takes over. Character B then gracefully gives in to character C who somehow knows wh...

Odd English Words

 I've always loved odd words, and English is not only full of them now, but always has been. Sadly, a lot of the really fun-sounding words have gone into the mists of time. I used to get a regular email from World Wide Words, which the writer and etymologist, Michael Quinion, produced. Week after week, he and hundreds of his readers would add to our knowledge of the language by discussing new and old and crazy English words. Quinion no longer produces the regular emails/columns, but they're all ...

Dictating text...to a computer

For some time now I've been typing up old handwritten notebooks onto the computer so that I can have a digital record of them, and clear out some more stuff from the house. These were mostly notes about my ongoing work of being a disciple of Jesus Christ, a process that not only doesn't happen as soon as you become a believer but goes on until the day you die - and maybe into eternity. Who knows?

There were also other notes amongst the spiritual stuff; sometimes these supplement material in my ot...

Re-reading A Suitable Boy

After nearly three decades I'm re-reading A Suitable Boy, that vast (1500 pages almost) and detailed book of life in India not long after the Partition of India by the British. 

It's full of stories, all interconnected, and of people from all walks of life. In the following quote, a politician, L N Argawal, has just been questioned in Parliament about a the recent shooting of several Muslim rioters: a mob of some thousand were planning to attack the foundations of a new Hindu temple that was bein...

Applying the Word

Dale Ralph Davis is one of my most read commentators, whether it's in his series stretching from Judges to Kings, or in his writings on the Psalms, or his books on other matters. I've probably read each of his books that I own two or three times. 

I was going back through an old diary this morning, and found this quotation from his commentary on 2 Kings, The Power and the Fury, page 205. As always, Davis is able to find ways to apply God's Word to our contemporary situation:

We might call ourselve...

Follow the science?

Next time we hear 'follow the science' or its like, it might be worth thinking about this statement:

"Science is a passionate search for always newer ways to conceive the world. Its strength lies not in the certainties it reaches but in radical awareness of the vastness of our ignorance. This awareness allows us to keep questioning our knowledge and thus to continue learning. Therefore the scientific quest for knowledge is not nourished by certainty, it is nourished by a lack of certainty."Carlo ...

The Law of Human Nature

This is another post of quotes from books I've read recently. These two occur early in C S Lewis' Mere
Christianity, which I've certainly read a couple of times, if not more. It isn't always an easy book, and you wonder, when the first sections were broadcast as talks, how the listeners were able to keep up. Plainly they did, and the enthusiasm for the talks was such that they were very quickly published in the form of three separate pamphlets, and then into a single book. This book remains one ...

The commonsense of ordinary people

A few weeks back I finished reading Jason Riley's biography of Thomas Sowell, entitled Maverick. It's a great book, and full of quotable things that are especially relevant to our current times. I'm going to go back through my Kindle highlights over the next period of time, and add some of the highlights to this blog. Here's the first:

His early struggles to make a life for himself meant “daily contact with people who were neither well-educated nor particularly genteel, but who had practical wisd...