Enjoying a time of transition after a long period of frustration and near stall-out.

Production on Borrowed Life went wonderfully.  Finishing up the edit now with a few things to tweak and polish up.  I’m proud of the work that everyone did.

Next up is finishing a draft of my novel, Magehatten.  If that thing ever sells I’m sure I’ll need a new title…

Then it’s throwing myself into my dream project; writing, producing and directing MOTG.

I have a busy year or two ahead, I think.

Stay tuned.

-SHC

Kate and I are spending the weekend with my parents.  Home is always a little odd, but often refreshing.

I managed to get some work done while here, like starting the script for MOTG, and it is flowing rather nicely.

Now I’m hoping Orlando can pull ahead of the Lakers’ 16 point lead before this game is over.  It doesn’t look good…

So I’m kind of annoyed with Apple for dropping a new lineup of Macbook Pro’s, including a new variant of mine that is several hundred dollars cheaper, two weeks after I bought mine.  It’s fine, that was the value of mine at the time that I bought it and it’s a very powerful machine… but still.  Thanks for putting something up on the website for those of us who don’t keep up with the annual Apple Conference or whatever.

Otherwise, this is a wonderful machine.

Sorry if this post is a little cranky- I’m nursing a headache and I’m very tired.  I am supposing that I got dehydrated, and that combined with paint fumes while I worked on a friend’s bathroom this afternoon.

I am trying to decide what ideas to turn into short stories for an anthology I am writing.  I will ultimately sell it through Amazon’s Kindle marketplace, as well as through my blog.  I don’t know for how much but in an age where delivery is digital and you can print the thing yourself if you like, I imagine it will be cheap.  I may investigate having hard copies made, but I imagine the audience I am looking for is web-savvy enough that they either have a Kindle, have the Kindle App for their iTouch or iPhone or they don’t mind reading it online.  The irony here is, of course, that I despise reading stories and books online.

John August priced his short story, The Variant (which is excellent, and worth buying) at .99 for a thirty-ish page piece.  I can’t imagine pushing much further than that, depending on how long the collection turns up.  But 99 cents a short story seems fitting, so probably something like $3 for the book.

All three stories are linked together by the themes of time travel and love/faithfulness.  I don’t know what I’m going to title the collection yet, but I am leaning towards calling it Timeless, which would have it share the title of one of the stories.

Time to go get some Chick-Fil-A and relax.

SHC

Today I made a second pass on an outline.  I’m pretty happy with it.  If I get to do it, it will be 45 minutes long, which is probably 25-30 minutes longer than Sacrament.

It would also be ridiculous.  There are three pretty big action sequences in it, all space sci-fi in nature.  It hinges on a concept that I don’t think I have seen before, which is even more exciting.

But, under all that is a nice little story about marriage, which is what I really wanted to do.  The project is called Timeless.

Now that I’ve got it out of my system, though, it’s time to revamp Sacrament and keep getting ready for production for it in August.

Today in class we tackled Romans 9 and 10 – two passages seemingly at odds with one another.  In 9, Paul argues for God’s sovereignty – an argument for election.  In 10, there is an argument for choice.  If you are a Christian, I don’t have to tell you the strife that these two concepts have caused believers through the centuries.

But for Paul it didn’t seem to matter at all.  Paul had room for God’s ability to deal with both truths simultaneously.  But, we western philosophers like to break everything down and compartmentalize it term by term.

I find an easier way to think about it not in the disciplines of theology of philosophy but from the realm of physics.

When Einstein died, he was working on something of a “theory of everything”.  Theoretical physicists have run with the idea over the decades since and have developed some of it out further.  We’ve since run into the current big idea, string theory.  But we don’t have all the answers yet, of course.  We have a lot of good ideas and a lot of impressive math and that’s made a lot of progress- but there are plenty of equations without numbers at the end.  But, because of all the math providing evidence for these unanswered ideas, we know that there’s probably something there, even if we don’t have the math for it yet.

Scripture is full of a lot of good theological math supporting both election and choice.  I think our mistake is in approaching them as two different equations for a single truth.  Indeed, that they are both tied into whatever-it-is that happens at salvation, and that we have the theological math to support that God employs both, we should then be directed to the notion that God, being a God of order and unity, is employing them as part of a unified operation – one we simply don’t have the math for.

I suggest plugging Deut2929 at the end of that equation.