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Work in Progress Notebook: The Keep-Everything-in-One-Place Manuscript Organizer

Work in Progress Notebook: The Keep-Everything-In-One-Place Manuscript Organizer. - Jeannie Ruesch After being interested in this notebook for some time, I have purchased and examined the electronic version that Jeannie Ruesch sells on her website. It's a 110-page Microsoft Word document with pre-made fields, and contains many different types of worksheets a writer can use for writing down and organizing their thoughts and tracking their novel's practical progress toward publication. If you know how (or learn how) to manipulate tables in a Word document, you can copy and duplicate the worksheets as many times as you want. You can also modify the worksheets if you want to by changing the text or format of the tables.
It's designed for viewing and using on a computer screen, not on paper; Ruesch sells a separate version of the document designed for printing and filling in with handwriting.

Two caveats:
These writing worksheets are designed with some sort of novel in mind. If you're writing another type of book, this notebook would not be very helpful.

Like many writing worksheets I've seen, some of the various writing worksheets in this notebook were evidently designed to create some sort of mainstream fiction involving characters in our world; you will see that in the character profile worksheets, which have fields like "Education/IQ," "Financial Status," and "Marital Status." If you're writing something that might not fit that category (such as science fiction or fantasy), you might have to modify the character profiles to fit your needs.</blockquote
Tortured for Christ - Richard Wurmbrand Reading this book, how did I react? Honestly, with envy. The Underground Church members' persecution forces them to stay in their Lord's protecting arms all the time with all possible distractions, worldly interests, taken away. Their devotion to Him is enormous.

The copyright says this book was published in 1967 or 1969. I wonder what the state of Christianity in Russia and former Soviet states is now, since it probably doesn't have to stay underground.
Rinehart Editions - The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Northanger Abbey - Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen I checked out this collection at my library for an abridged version of The Mysteries of Udolpho (which I had been warned is unnecessarily long), but the text given here is excessively abridged, to the point that the reader can't know everything important that happens in The Mysteries of Udolpho and at some points won't understand what's going on. Not recommended.
Paradise Lost - John      Leonard, John Milton A couple of observations:

As far as I noticed, the Holy Spirit does not appear in Paradise Lost. When the Persons of the Trinity appear, it is only God the Father and God the Son. The reason for that is obvious enough to Bible readers: the more mysterious nature of the Holy Spirit. It is simply impossible to depict the Holy Spirit as a character in a literary work, because unlike with the Father or the Son, the Bible does not give us the kind of information needed to form a literary characterization. Milton must have conceded this, and avoided trying.

Milton posits that the pagan gods or idolatrous concepts described in the Old Testament--such as Beelzebub (Baal; "lord of the flies/dung heap"), Moloch (fire god requiring child sacrifice), mammon (money, materialism), and Belial--are inspired by actual individual demons corresponding to those characteristics described in the OT. That could be true, but not necessarily. The idols in the Bible could be inspired by demons other than Satan, or they could all be inspired by Satan himself. There is no way to be sure.

The High Tide of American Conservatism: Davis, Coolidge, and the 1924 Election - Garland S. Tucker III Other reviewers have observed that this book is written by an amateur historian with little or no writing experience, and is somewhat poorly edited. This is true, although the editing isn't that bad.

Still, this is a valuable contribution to 1920s history and essential reading if you're not familiar with John W. Davis.

Essentially, Davis was a Jeffersonian Democrat stalwart who believed in maximum individual freedom and minimal government interference. This made him, politically, similar or identical to Calvin Coolidge in every important way except on tariffs (Davis opposed them while Coolidge and the Republicans supported them). Therefore, the 1924 presidential campaign was between two conservative candidates, and Davis lost mainly because Coolidge was extremely popular personally and politically; the American people had no interest in replacing Coolidge. After Franklin Roosevelt became president and began the New Deal, Davis opposed the New Deal strenuously and continually (for which the Roosevelt administration considered him its enemy). His public statements against New Deal government intervention are brilliant, leaving no doubt that Davis is a now-forgotten conservative champion.

As the author hints a few times, Davis was one of those Democrats who would probably be a conservative Republican today and certainly would find no place in the modern Democrat party.

Observations about the author: He lets the story of Davis and the 1924 election tell itself, and says nothing about his own political beliefs until the afterword (and then only in relative generalizations about the size of government); but besides that his admiration for both Davis and Coolidge makes his political beliefs obvious enough, his tone hints at his likely orientation within the ideological spectrum of the Republican party. Tucker (a)speaks approvingly of limited government; (b)is comfortable with Wall Street and big business; (c)displays a strongly moral viewpoint by explicitly saying the excessive speculation that caused the 1929 crash was simple greed and it happens in the final stages of every bull market (which, being an investment banker, I guess he's in a position to observe). I conclude that Tucker is Jeffersonian but no libertarian; he probably comes from the strain of conservative thought that used to be called Whiggism (basically the predecessor of the Republicans before the Civil War) and later converged with the old Jeffersonian element of the Democrats to form modern conservatism.
Dandelion Wine - Ray Bradbury Dandelion Wine is a collection of related vignettes that support and periodically return to one plot thread, or a short novel interrupted by many related vignettes. The entire book, including the vignettes but especially the main plot thread (twelve-year-old Douglas Spalding's coming of age in Green Town (based on Waukegan, Illinois) in summer 1925) is strikingly melancholy.

About the writing style: there may be better examples I haven't read, but among writers I've read, Ray Bradbury uses the technique of writing through word association most extensively; and although Dandelion Wine is only the third Bradbury work I've read, it is the best example of Bradbury's word association technique.
Goodbye to All That - Robert Graves The strength of Robert Graves' autobiography is that it provides sharp and illuminating observations on: the culture of the British school system and students in the early twentieth century; the behavior and attitudes of British regular military officers (as opposed to both enlistees and reservists) near the frontline during World War I; and, especially, trench warfare. The book is an excellent resource for understanding what life in the trenches--during battle attacks and between attacks--was like. Trench warfare is fascinating, if miserable.

The weakness: Graves's writing is very, very emotionally restrained. At no time does he let the reader have a glimpse of his soul. It's hard not to conclude that Graves was simply a cool, distant intellectual.

The reader can figure out early on that Graves had no special sympathy for either England or Germany in the war, and the most likely reason is obvious. Graves had one German parent and many German relatives, and spent substantial time in Germany in his youth. This, in addition to his joining the British Army for self-interested reasons, prevented strong nationalistic feelings in him toward either country.

Except for its extensive descriptions of trench warfare life, I consider this book ultimately a failure, due to two problems. One is Graves's emotional restraint. He eventually makes it clear that he has been psychologically damaged by the trench warfare, using the word "neurasthenia" frequently to describe his mental condition during leave and relating that he suffered from shell shock for years after the war. Therefore, the restraint must be excused, I guess; Graves did what he could do. Nevertheless, the reader can't see much of Graves's soul at any time.

The other problem is inexcusable. If you read reviews of this book or read other biographical information on Graves, you will know he left England circa 1929 and moved to Spain permanently, feeling very bitter toward England. We can figure out that the bitterness must have been due to the stupidity of the entire war, the stupidity and arrogance of the English military leaders, and the naivete and ignorance of patriotic English civilians; but apparently there was something else that made Graves angry and bitter. Unfortunately, Graves does not explain what that was, does not even give enough clues for us to guess. The only reason at all that we know his angry departure was due to anything other than World War I is the first paragraph of the prologue (written in 1957), which says:
I partly wrote, partly dictated, this book twenty-eight years ago during a complicated domestic crisis, and with very little time for revision. It was my bitter leave-taking of England where I had recently broke a good many conventions; quarreled with, or been disowned by, most of my friends; been grilled by the police on suspicion of attempted murder; and ceased to care what anyone thought of me.


That's honestly all he says about whatever drove him out of England, as though it couldn't be important or interesting. He says absolutely nothing about his later career as an important classicist writer, either. I suppose he wanted to relate only the history of his youth and his career as a soldier during World War I. This book should be called a "memoir," because it's much too incomplete to be an "autobiography."

lantamyra

lantamyra - Susan Waterwyk Lantamyra is a charming and cheerful fantasy story heavy on certain New Age elements and teenage romance. Spoilers ahead.

Lenora, a native of the planet Lantamyra, has been stranded in Dragonwood, California for forty years due to an accident, and has successfully posed as an eccentric Earthling. She unexpectedly gets an opportunity to go home, and her Earth-born granddaughter Tylya (the protagonist) insists on coming along. When they leave for Lantamyra using a lost device that Tylya has recovered for Lenora, Tylya's faithful boyfriend Josh, unwilling to lose Tylya, joins them without permission. The rest of the plot is about Tylya and Josh's existence on Lantamyra; how they choose to live and how they interact with the two races of people: Lantamyran humans, and the aristocratic dragons who rule.

Zen-Existentialism: The Spiritual Decline of the West

Zen-Existentialism: The Spiritual Decline of the West - Lit-Sen Chang Zen-Existentialism, by Lit-Sen Chang, was ultimately disappointing. I learned of it from a reference in the chapter on Buddhism in the book Kingdom of the Cults; the reference suggested that Zen-Existentialism would explain a connection, or certain similarities, between Zen and existentialism. (Note that I didn't say "Zen Buddhism"; that's because Chang indicates in Zen-Existentialism that Zen is so different from Buddhism as to be arguably a different belief system.)

Although you can tease out those connections or similarities through close enough reading, the book largely fails, due to inadequate discussion of existentialism. As Lit-Sen Chang was an ardent Zen practitioner before accepting Jesus Christ, he intimately knew the Zen worldview and teachings, and spends half the book explaining them and comparing them to Christianity. This is certainly a good book from which to hear a Buddhist-turned-Christian explain Buddhism and especially Zen (which, again, he claims is different from Buddhism).

That works well enough, but the second half of the book is basically a tract for Christianity. It has much less to say about existentialism (and how it's similar to Zen) than about Zen (earlier in the book). That is unfortunate, because that's what I read the book to find out; and Jesus Christ is already my Lord, so I didn't particularly need to read a tract.

In Search of Anti-Semitism

In Search of Anti-Semitism - William F. Buckley This book, written by the late William F. Buckley circa 1992, purports to evaluate whether the accusations of anti-Semitism against the conservative writers Pat Buchanan and the late Joe Sobran, and the conservative publication Dartmouth Review, are fair and true. It largely fails, because it provides very little insight into the personalities of Buchanan and Sobran, providing very little personal background on them and apparently assuming the reader is already very familiar with both of them. I'm reasonably familiar with Buchanan but not familiar with Sobran: he left National Review magazine some years before I started reading it, and all I know of him is that he was a paleoconservative. The book is also clearly aimed at people who probably read not only NR but the other political and current events magazines the book mentions (such as Commentary and New Republic).

So, the book tries to answer its question (whether the people in question are genuinely anti-Semitic) mostly by analyzing what happened (the alleged anti-Semitic statements they made and the responses from other writers) rather than analyzing the people and what they believe (which is what I expected). There would be much less to say if the book mainly analyzed the people, but the controversy is fairly boring and the answers are relatively simple. (Sobran, Buckley says, was often annoyed at Israel's lobbying influence on the United States, so is Buchanan, who also has a long history of making obnoxious anti-Semitic-sounding comments. But Buckley insists Sobran--his friend and colleague at NR--was no racist. And Buchanan? Buckley spends little time actually explaining Buchanan's beliefs except to call him "mischievious" and too insensitive to Jewish sensibilities. I was disappointed by that, as Buchanan has been ubiquitous in conservative media at least since I was a teenager and I did want to figure out whether he is a bigot of some sort. The answer one can tease out from Buckley's analysis seems to be "no," but he offers no more constructive explanation of Buchanan's somewhat puzzling opinions. Therefore, I don't recommend this book.
The Everlasting Man - G.K. Chesterton It's difficult for me to review The Everlasting Man adequately, largely for two reasons.

One is that G.K. Chesterton, being both a philosopher and a man of letters, here speaks in a style both rambling and strongly reminiscent of a lecture (or series of lectures). It's not patronizing, but the most important ideas Chesterton means to communicate can easily become buried. Ask me what the book is about, and from remembering the description I saw before I read it, I can tell you it's supposed to be a study of history and anthropology working under the assumption that the Bible is true and Jesus Christ is who He said He is; but press me to tell you what the book is about based on what I actually read in it, and I 'll probably have to say..."lots of things." C.S. Lewis is easier to follow.

The other is that Chesterton (also a Catholic par excellence) draws very extensively on Catholic philosophy for his interpretation of history and anthropology. I'm mostly ignorant of Catholic doctrine and philosophy, leaving me unable to fully appreciate (meaning "absorb," not "like" or "accept") all the...nuances, probably...of everything he says to illustrate his broader points. But something I picked up that I hadn't really thought of is that there were, according to Chesterton, two kinds of paganism. One was the "diabolism" represented by the Canaanite tribes' worship of their monstrous fire god Molech; the other was a softer idolatry born of the demands of the imagination; it's related to poetry and the need to make it.


I just remembered to mention something else, the real failing of the book. I already knew Chesterton was Eurocentric, having read that in reviews; but Chesterton's displays of cultural and (occasionally) racial arrogance are more blatant than I expected. He makes it clear that he considers everything outside European civilization the province of ignorant savages. That was enough to roll my eyes at (and I'm a conservative), but after he stepped below that by making some reference to "niggers" (he might not have been referring to Africans--I forget), I felt embarrassed for him while simultaneously appreciating the rest of what he has to teach. It doesn't help that later in the book, he takes a gratuitous cheap shot at Americans.

It's a book I should read again in the near future.
He Chose the Nails - Max Lucado I like Max Lucado's books, but I can never claim they're deep, only encouraging. Every single time I read one of Lucado's books, I soon forget what it said, and need to read it again. He Chose the Nails is no exception.
The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge - Calvin Coolidge I have been an admirer of Calvin Coolidge (as was President Reagan) for several years, and have not found anything negative to say about him. (No, poor schoolchildren, not that he took so many naps during his presidency. The excessive sleep wasn't due to laziness or any other failing, you know--there was a valid and understandable reason.) So it pains me to say that I was disappointed by his autobiography. I think it just wasn't in his nature to speak candidly about any of his personal or interpersonal matters. And he discusses various events or times in his life but doesn't really have anything special to say about them (such as the duties and daily life of the POTUS, which he describes at length, and how he was nominated to be Warren Harding's vice-president) and probably mentions them only because he feels obligated to. Worse, Coolidge has relatively little to say even about certain issues and events in his life and career that biographers later deemed very significant. His accounts of his youth, college education, work as a country lawyer, and career as a civic service-minded local politician in Massachusetts generally follow a pattern of "this happened, then that happened, then I did this, then I did that; this happened, and I did this in response," and sometimes the descriptions of events are so abstracted and so perfunctory that discussing them was almost pointless.

The account of Coolidge's career as a Massachusetts state legislator and then governor is interesting enough, but I picked up only a few new and/or unexpected details.
One concerns how Coolidge handled the Boston Police Strike of 1919. His famous statement "There is no right to strike against the public safety, by any body, any time, any where" apparently was not said in any public address, but written in a letter replying to AFL leader Samuel Gompers, who had telegraphed Coolidge to request that Coolidge fire the Boston police commissioner and reinstate the police officers who had been fired for illegally attempting to form an AFL-affiliated union. (According to Massachusetts law, the governor--not the mayor of Boston--appointed the Boston police commissioner; and Coolidge states that the Boston police had all agreed not to form a collective bargaining union. That's why the strike was illegal.) The other is that as a state legislator, Coolidge was apparently considered something of a liberal by others in his own party.

The chapters on Coolidge's presidency are the real disappointment. This period of Coolidge's life and career is, of course, what anyone would be most interested in; but Coolidge is still so reserved that you don't learn anything you could learn from a later third-party biography.
Regarding what was probably the defining event of his presidency--the death of his younger son Calvin Jr.--he has at most a page of words. He manages to illuminate his reaction well enough, strongly hinting that Calvin Jr.'s death took away any pleasure he derived from being POTUS; but he says absolutely nothing to indicate any emotional suffering he went through afterward (even though Calvin Jr died in summer 1924, when Calvin Sr. was running for his own term as president, which means the death overshadowed his entire elected term in office).

The other thing I hoped to learn about which Coolidge does not mention at all is why he and his vice president, Charles Dawes, didn't get along. Other biographies explain the events well enough to make it clear that Dawes was the one at fault--he insulted Coolidge personally, refusing to attend cabinet meetings, and insulted the entire United States Senate collectively. (Besides that, Coolidge stresses in this autobiography that he took pains to avoid making enemies, by refusing to insult people or hold grudges; so it's unlikely that he bears much fault for the feud with Dawes.) But they never explain what Dawes's problem was, and even if they did, I would still want to know Coolidge's viewpoint. So I am disappointed that he completely passed the issue over, not even mentioning his vice-president by name. I suppose Coolidge avoided discussing Dawes simply because he had nothing good to say about him and believed in the rule 'if you can't say anything nice, say nothing.'

Cousy

Cousy - Bill Reynolds This is not a particularly good biography, just an okay one. It will tell you who Bob Cousy is, what he did, what his basketball life was like, and what he did retiring as a player in 1963, but...something is lacking. Although author Bill Reynolds states that he interviewed Cousy extensively (between 2002 and 2003), the book absolutely feels based on secondary sources (it does use them, the notes say) and feels as though it only scratches the surface of Cousy's life and career.

One reason I feel unsatisfied is that about seven years ago, I read a book called The Killer Instinct, a book Cousy himself co-wrote in 1975 and which Bill Reynolds uses as a secondary source (and discusses in chapter 11 of Cousy). The Killer Instinct is Cousy's account of the psychological and moral problems his obsession with winning (driven by a fear of failure) caused him--extreme emotional reactions to losing games as a player, and temptations to cheat (by committing NCAA recruiting violations) as a college coach. It's a brooding book; it's also a more satisfying book, being more personal. If it were still in print, I'd recommend it instead of Cousy (or at least in addition to it) if you want a biography with more depth.

Often, Cousy simply runs out of interesting things to say about its nominal subject, and settles for telling tangential stories about the Celtics dynasty teams and even about the young NBA.
Lilith - George MacDonald A review proper will be forthcoming. In the meantime, here are my raw notes taken during reading.

[June 2012] So far, this fantasy story is self-consciously impressionistic--the narrator tends to give vague and mysterious descriptions of what he sees, and repeatedly apologizes to the reader for being unable to describe them more adequately due to their strangeness.

7/19/2012

I've never read a book quite like this. It's bizarre...

7/22/2012
...possibly the most bizarre book I've ever read as an adult. Imaginative and mysterious.

8/4/2012

Almost finished. Much of this novel's content, especially in the last chapters, is essentially poetry. It starts to feel very much like a C.S. Lewis fictional work (most specifically, Perelandra); it should, because Lewis considered George MacDonald a spiritual mentor, even depicting MacDonald as his guide in the spiritual world in The Great Divorce. I have felt tempted to compare Lilith to The Great Divorce, but the plot isn't similar enough.

8/12/12
On top of everything else, this book will add some very obscure words to your vocabulary, including eidolon, chrysoprase, and cenotaph.

Good quotations from Lilith:

"Never a sound awoke; the darkness was one with the silence, and the silence was the terror."

"Thou shalt die out of death into life."

"The darkness knows neither the light nor itself..."

"So much was ours ere ever the first sun rose upon our freedom: what must not the eternal day bring with it!"

"See every little flower straighten its stalk, lift up its neck, and with outstretched head stand expectant: something more than the sun, greater than the light, is coming, is coming—none the less surely coming that it is long upon the road! What matters to-day, or to-morrow, or ten thousand years to Life himself, to Love himself! He is coming, is coming, and the necks of all humanity are stretched out to see him come! Every morning will they thus outstretch themselves, every evening will they droop and wait—until he comes.—Is this but an air-drawn vision? When he comes, will he indeed find them watching thus?"

"Man dreams and desires; God broods and wills and quickens."

"When a man dreams his own dream, he is the sport of his dream; when Another gives it him, that Other is able to fulfil it."


Greater than the Sum - Christopher L. Bennett This Star Trek original novel typifies what frequent readers of novels based on science fiction TV programs with large fanbases disparagingly describe using a certain very vulgar seven-letter word starting with F.

It's poorly written, questionable in its depictions of some of the Star Trek characters' personalities, doesn't always bother with strong characterization, and endlessly shows off the author's knowledge of continuity from the various Star Trek series. When the book began expatiating the author's particular religious viewpoints, I threw it across the room in exasperation--the first time I have rejected a book in that manner.

When I was young, you could have induced me to read anything if you claimed it was about the Borg. (Star Dreck writers knew that, and a few of the more cynical ones weren't above inserting bogus hints of Borg involvement to capture readers' attention.) A residue of that obsession remains; that's why I started reading the book.) Fortunately, I'm not a Borg-obsessed Trekkie kid anymore, and can find better books to read than this drivel. I do not recommend it.