Study Guide

 I’m about to give everyone a third very good reason to read or reread the Love in Andauk series. 

If you haven’t noticed, the first ebook in that series, Everything Old, is currently free.  It’s also free if it’s already on your bookshelf.  That’s a great deal, and the first reason.  The second reason is the More Love in Anduak series currently in the works.  Though this series is standalone, being familiar with some of the people who show up as minor characters can only make it better.

This exclusive study guide will be reason number three.  No, I’m not calling it exclusive to sound cool.  It is only available here on the internet.  The characters in these books meet to discuss serious faith and life issues and occasionally veer onto more entertaining sidetracks.  The following questions are pulled from and/or inspired by those discussions.  They can be fodder for you and your friends when your book club meets to talk about all the things you loved (and maybe that one thing you didn’t love) about Everything Old, Into the Fire, By Its Cover, and What Goes Around.

1) St. John Vianny is said to have heard Confessions up to 16 hours a day.  What is one thing you’d be willing to do for 16 hours just one day?  You are not allowed to say sleep unless you are less than six months old.

2) One character liked a picture of a Saint depicted with a giant eagle shielding him from a thunderstorm because he never lets bad weather keep him from jogging.  How could a giant eagle be useful in your life, other than for pretending to be Gandalf?

3) Some Saints have fairly outrageous legends attached to them.  Characters discuss some moral truths that are still present in those stories even when the details may have been embellished.  Is there a story from your life (or perhaps a family member’s) that has been exaggerated over time into something of a legend?

4) How Sacramentals are different from superstitions was discussed at one meeting.  If you invented a superstition, just for fun, what would you say is bad luck?

5) Characters joked about how to handle a vision from God regarding a future spouse if that person hadn’t seen the same vision.  If God sent you a vision, what would spark your sense of humor?

6) Can you name a difficult or simply mundane task that could be made joyful by remembering how it serves God?  Can you name an already joyful task that could be made more joyful?

7) There is some discussion of detachment and greed.  Are there any material goods you don’t understand why anyone wants in the first place?

8) Which book in the series is your favorite?  I don’t remember what page that was on, but I’m pretty sure someone said something about that.

Not a Circus Act

I can’t juggle.  I’ve tried because it looks fun.  I have tossed a few balls in the air, then reached and grabbed helplessly as they fell to the ground and sometimes hit me on the way.  But this isn’t about my lack of coordination.  It’s about figurative juggling and how much harder it is to tell if I’m any good at it when I’m not accidentally pelting myself with anything. 

I feel as though I’m reaching and grabbing as I switch my time and effort between various projects, constantly tossing one thing up in the air to work on something else.

Book 2 in the More Love in Andauk series has a complete draft.  Most of it still needs to be typed.  If I don’t feel like typing, I can toss that up to work on my first book of puzzles.  All my playtesters agree it’s good but too difficult.  They don’t agree on which puzzles are the difficult ones.  Sometimes I don’t feel like trying to guess which puzzle to edit because they all seem super easy to me.  I already know the answers.  If I get frustrated, I can toss that up to work on Volume II.

I had so much fun inventing romantic comedy themed puzzles, I had to make two.  If fighting with Word to stop making automatic “corrections” to my designs doesn’t sound fun at the moment, there’s always some chore around the house that needs to be done.  Mowing the lawn has never sounded more fun than anything, but sometimes I have to snatch that ball out of the air just to keep it from hitting me. 

Annoying reminders from the HOA aside, it’s not clear to me if I’m doing a good job at my figurative juggling.  Sometimes it’s great because I’m always making progress on something.  Other times it’s not so great because I seem to always be distracted by something else.

A good juggler ends by catching everything, right?  I’ve never been to a show where a juggler throws all the balls at his audience.  I do want to throw everything at my audience.  I want to get all my projects to a state fit to share, which means my metaphor just died a horrible death.  I’ll focus on keeping the other projects alive, no matter how much time they spend in the air.

Sloth Denies Winter

The title got my attention, too. It’s not my title. More on that in a moment.

I recently blew my own mind. Or maybe I lost it. I don’t know yet how excited I should be about something I’m already very excited about. It started with that title.

Sloth Denies Winter is an escape game from Board Catholic. I played through it with my family a few months ago. First the good. We all really enjoyed the game. The puzzles were done well. They had just the right amount of difficulty where they are solvable but need some thought. I definitely recommend checking it out.

When I said the good was first, I implied there was also something not good. The problem is that it made me want to make an escape game, too. I can’t stop thinking about how much fun I’d have creating puzzles. But that’s not what I do. I write fiction, mostly romantic fiction. I’ve been trying and failing to get the idea out of my head. And then it hit me… I could combine a bunch of things I love. I could make a Catholic romantic comedy escape room puzzle game in a book!

Don’t decide if I’m nuts yet. Just think about it. It wouldn’t be a full novel, only a short story with puzzles scattered throughout that have clues in the story on how to solve them. I love this idea so much I wish someone would make a Catholic romantic comedy escape room puzzle game in a book for me to read and solve. That’s part of the reason I have to do it. The other part is that I think it’ll be just as much fun to write and design. The only not fun part will be figuring out what to call it because that word salad I’m tossing around won’t even fit on the cover.

Yes, I am aware that I just released the first book in a four-book series. I am not abandoning that project and hopefully not delaying it either. One blessing in life is that the more energy you bring to a project, the faster it goes. Generally. If I can keep the enthusiasm up, I should be able to make progress on both fronts and have a new book and a Catholic romantic comedy escape room puzzle game in a book before the end of the year. I’m not promising a catchy title though.

That's Not Funny

I sat down to brainstorm a post for this month, and my brain failed to storm.  It drizzled out some of the least entertaining ideas I’ve ever had.  Here are a few of the topics I’m not going to use to try to make readers laugh.

1) A poem about my notebook.  Bad poetry can be mildly amusing in a groaning, if-you-like-puns sort of way.  The words mildly, groaning and puns should have stopped me.  I kept trying to imagine a poem that didn’t reveal what it was about until the end.  All the words used to describe a notebook (cover, pages, lines) are pretty obvious.  I thought about turning it into a metaphorical container for a story.  No one has ever laughed while picturing a box.  Also, I still don’t like poetry.

2) Digging up a tree stump.  I had an idea to compare and contrast writing a book with a project in my backyard.  Both are things I’ve been tempted to give up.  One requires mental stamina while the other is physical.  One brings me joy when I finally finish.  One frustrates me by refusing to budge no matter how many times I hit it with a shovel.  It had a snake by it one day and a gross spider another day and a cable tangled in the roots every day that I don’t think will electrocute me and won’t scurry away when I scream at it.  No one is allowed to find humor in any of that.

3) IRS form 2210.  I know someone somewhere just cringed reading that.  Look it up.  It’s possible to summon a sadistic laugh by picturing that really annoying guy you know trying to fill it out.  But that’s an ugly laugh.  I’m not encouraging it.  And no one is allowed to laugh at why I’m currently very familiar with that form.  Or how many times I started over. 

4) Advice for writers.  I’ve given tongue-in-cheek advice for fun.  I thought about offering a few tips that have actually helped me.  I couldn’t figure out how to do that in a light-hearted, non-big-headed way.  Also, I am not qualified to give advice because I considered trying to entertain people with a tax form.

5) A list.  I thought I could simply make a list of funny things.  What funny things?  Exactly.  That’s why I’m not doing this one either.

6) The bad stuff that wasn’t published.  I have a collection of projects that never saw the light of day, mostly abandoned faster than that tree stump I still intend to outwit.  I think I could find a few interesting paragraphs to share if I spent several hours reading through old papers.  I might spend as many hours sneezing at the dust I kicked up doing that.  Also, I don’t want to do that.

7) It did occur to me that I could write about how I never know what to write about.  That at least would be novel since I haven’t mentioned it before.  Maybe I’ll do that next month.

Three Missions

The official release of Evelyn’s Granddaughter is set for April 11!  I’d be more excited if I wasn’t trying to slip in a very minor change before the buzzer.

There was already one last-minute change.  It had to do with those problematic names again.  Someone from the first Love in Andauk series has a baby in this new book.  I couldn’t decide what to name him.  He got at least three different names in early drafts of the book.  Somehow, he still had two of those names in a copy several of my proofreaders read.  I was disappointed when I discovered the mistake, mostly because it makes me worry there are others.  I’d really like to release a book with no mistakes.

I was paying particularly close attention to the names when I reread the book for what I thought was the last time.  I have a basic outline for the rest of the series.  I’ve written some of the first draft of book 2.  I used a guy from book 3 in one scene and realized that he might be the only one missing from book 1.  There are (or will be) four books that need eight main characters.  Seven of those got at least a very brief mention in the first book.  It bugs me that I left someone out.  I need to find a way to add that name, and I only have a few days for this mission.

And here’s a mission for readers, if anyone would like to accept it.  Try to guess which of the minor characters will be promoted to main characters in the future books.  Maybe even how they will be paired.  I’ll give you some hints.  Remember how I struggle to name characters.  Remember that sometimes I deliberately avoid naming characters who don’t need names.  If you come to a place where you think, why did the author take the trouble to give a name to this random guy about whom we know nothing else?  That might be a sign he’s going to show up again later.

What’s the third mission?  I need to write a blog post before March is over.  That’s going to be a hard one.  I hope I can manage it.

The Velvet Starfish

Once upon a time, there was a velvet starfish. This is a true story. How can it be a true story about something that doesn’t exist? Don’t worry, it’s not the main character.

A writer was trying to design a cover for one of her books. She gathered some items relevant to the story… a paper house, a pair of shiny black turtles, a strip of lace and some flowers. She arranged those things in a myriad of ways on several different backgrounds, taking pictures of everything. Then she took those pictures to her computer to see what she could learn.

She learned that it takes some people more than forty years to consistently take pictures that are not blurry. She learned that the lace was too narrow to frame the title of the book. She learned that the turtles no longer looked like turtles when flattened to two dimensions. They looked like black blobs. She also learned that the burgundy velvet made the nicest background, great color and texture.

The writer took many more pictures – with her new knowledge and without the turtles – on the best background. She tried to create a cover from one of those pictures. One attempt was unbalanced. She saved that and started over. One attempt was washed out. She saved that and started over. One attempt appeared to have a house floating on top of a flower and was just super weird. She saved that and started over.

Whenever it became clear that a cover was going bad, she saved it before she started over because this wasn’t her first cover. She had learned through years of experience that some good might be mixed in with the bad. She might eventually look back at previous attempts and realize that the effect on cover11 worked better with the higher contrast image on cover23.

Enlarging the lace had solved one problem. But the writer had been so focused on getting the title right that she hadn’t paid enough attention to the picture. Once her attention shifted, she noticed that there were some odd wrinkles in the velvet. The wrinkles met in the middle to form a shape that bore an uncanny resemblance to a velvet starfish. The writer did not want to explain to anyone why there was a velvet starfish on her cover. She saved that one and started over.

The writer gathered her supplies again. She paused to knock her head against the wall a few times, then snapped another big batch of pictures. She tested the new pictures behind the prepared title layer. None of the new pictures came close to working. Somehow, the flowers were sideways in several, carpet was sticking out in a few, at least one was blurry, and the writer could only conclude that she hadn’t actually been <i>trying</i> to take good pictures. Rather than another round of photography, she started sifting through the images from the beginning.

Those black blobs that were supposed to be turtles were still black blobs. A few images might work if they could be magically zoomed out. The house floating on a flower was so weird it could almost pass for intentionally unconventional. Except almost. Finally, she did find one image with decent composition. Composition was even a good, arty word. The writer believed she was onto something. She pasted on the title layer, added a cool effect. Yes. It was beginning to look like a real cover possibility. And then she saw it. The velvet starfish was back. In her desperation, the writer had let that annoying velvet starfish creep back onto the cover. Argh. She saved that and started over.

Here we go again.

I finished typing up the rough draft for my next book. While I’m working on the editing, I’ll need to imagine and then execute a nice cover for it. I’ve already begun brainstorming. Since this series will be sort of a sequel series to Love in Anduak, I think I should pull some element from those covers. They each have an oval around the title with a background image. I’m thinking I should do something like that only not like that for the next series. Maybe change the shape of that title card.

I have a book that needs a cover and so far my idea is… wait for it… rectangle.

This is not going to be hard. All I need to do is turn “rectangle” into a beautiful cover.

I have had a few thoughts on that. Notice that the oval on the previous covers has a rough border. I was going for fancy, a fancy border. I don’t remember how I got the rough border I ended up with so I probably couldn’t redo it anyway. But I’d like to try a border on the rectangle that’s also like that but not exactly like that, one that’s actually fancy.

Now my idea for the new cover is… rectangle with a border I’ve proven I don’t know how to make.

I am definitely on the right track. I’m imagining something that looks like lace around the edge. I have some lace. If I can figure out how to take a picture that doesn’t look like a picture (it should look like something drawn) and doesn’t have anything weird showing through it (because lace has holes), I’ll have a nice place to put the title of the book. Then I’ll only need an image for the background.

I’m thinking the background should be colorful but somehow blurred so the title is the focus. The background should be a recognizable picture but only when someone is trying to look at it. It should naturally fade into the background because it’s a background. I only need to think of something I want in the picture. And there we have it. The cover will be a bright but muted picture of something undetermined with a title printed on a fancy but impossible rectangle. It’s practically done already.