Tag Archives: religion

Review me…

Posted on by

Retribution: Chasing Hearts and Minds has been out there in the wild for a little over a week now. I know from a few private messages and from the retailer’s weekly reports that a few copies are floating around. The individual feedback has been overwhelmingly positive – and trust me I never get tired of hearing good things about myself so I thank all of you who have taken the time to drop me a note. I do, however, have one small favor to ask of those of you who have already purchased your own copy (and those of you who plan to purchase your copy in the future).

It would be incredibly helpful for me if you’d go back to your retailer’s page and leave a review. I’d never presume to tell you what kind of feedback to give – either positive or negative – but as I’ve learned the hard way, when it comes to selling ebooks, nothing gets a no-name work noticed like good reviews and ratings. In addition to total sales numbers, reviews are a big part of the secret algorithms the big retailers use to decide what moves up the rankings, what gets featured, and what doesn’t.

Retribution will probably never make it to Amazon’s top ten in ebooks > sci-fi > dystopian, but if someone were to happen across it using a key word search, a few reviews could really help make the difference between picking up their own copy and moving on to the next alternative.

To pick up your own copy or leave a review, all you need to do is follow one of these helpful links:

Once you’re there, I’m sure you can figure out what to do without any more prodding from me. Now go forth and say great things!

Retribution…

Posted on by

Retribution - CoverGod watched His creation evolve since long before the written word. He watched even as the first vertebrate flopped out of the sea. He watched long before that. He had great expectations for this new world. This was the one He hoped would finally get it right.

Even though Man was created in His image, they possessed a particularly irksome ability to veer wildly off script. It didn’t help that God’s one-time right hand spent every waking moment for eons finding new and exciting ways to tempt them away from their pre-ordained course.

Once upon a time, a bit of flooding, razing a few misbehaving cities, a smiting here and there, and the occasional miracle had been enough to keep the masses on the straight and narrow. In an age of endless entertainment and short attention spans, even an omniscient and almighty God was apt to have trouble getting His point across.

Retribution: Chasing Hearts and Minds is the story of what happens when the Old Testament God clashes head-to-head with the modern world.

My virgin effort at fiction in a short story format is available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

Roadmap…

Posted on by

So, we’ve got the cover, we’ve got the narrative, and we’ve got the sales blurb. That means it’s time to race over to Amazon and get this thing published, right? Well, the answer there is more of a “sort of” than a yes or no. I’m not ready to pull the trigger today, but as always I have a roadmap laid out in my head of what I think the way ahead looks like for Retribution.

Sometime between tonight and Friday I’m going to load it onto my Kindle and read the thing from cover to cover one last time. I’ve discovered through a lot of trial and error that just because you think you followed all the formatting rules for e-readers, there’s a pretty good chance that you screwed something up. Unfortunately that mostly shows once you have things loaded onto the actual device itself. Yet another of the minor pitfalls and annoyances of self publishing that in the end will be worth the trouble. Fixing those will be the main event for this weekend.

Sunday, if all goes according to plan, is going to be the great day of reckoning. That’s when I’ll sit down in the morning and start uploading the final product to the retailers. I’m going to work primarily through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but also fall in on Smashwords to get access to their own storefront as well as take advantage of their “special relationship” with Apple’s iBooks. By the time everyone’s long weekend is ending, Retribution: Chasing Heart’s and Minds should be going live. That’s the roadmap, anyway. How close that comes to reality remains to be seen.

The traditional Sunday…

Posted on by

Sunday morning blogging was a lot easier when I could just trot a few old posts out of the archive, gin up a few snarky comments about them, and then go on about the day. Now that I have to dream up something new and theoretically interesting to say, I find myself really reaching for ideas. This morning felt like it could really go one of two ways. I could write the standard “Happy Easter” post and go along to get along or I could pen a more natural feeling skeptics post. Both of them felt like enough of a lie to be not worth writing down.

Sure, Easter is the high holiday of Christianity and being raised in the faith, I know enough about it to articulate the salient points. Since I haven’t been inside a church for anything other than weddings or funerals in the better part of 20 years, that post felt like something of a farce. If I’m a bad Christian, I’m an even worse atheist because at heart, I want to believe that there is some greater power in the universe. Now whether that power is the God of the Israelites or Vishnu or Zeus or the flying spaghetti monster, I don’t feel particularly well equipped to decide. I’ll leave that discussion to the theologians. I’ll find the answer to those question far sooner than I want them anyway.

For the faithful, I’ll wish you a happy Easter this morning. For the rest, I’ll wish you a good Sunday. As for me, I’ll mark this Sunday in the traditional way – writing, doing laundry, and whipping up some barbecue chicken.

It will be…

Posted on by

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally built up a sufficient head of steam that I feel comfortable saying a few words about a current work in progress. As I’m writing, it feels like a short story in waiting. As of last night it’s 2904 words and will most likely offend those with deep religious convictions. Being an offensive douche wasn’t really where this all started out (and it’s still not my intent), but any time you so much as touch on Christianity and are anything but strictly differential to the Almighty, there’s a certain subset of the population who will get their knickers in a twist. That’s ok. They’re entitled. As I’ve said before, opinions are like certain anatomical orifices – everybody’s got one and needs to use it often.

The fun (and admittedly frustrating) part of this whole effort is that after tinkering around for a couple of weeks, I actually have no idea where it’s going, how it will end, or what the point of the whole exercise is. There’s no outline. No concept map. Every day I sit down, re-read what I wrote the day before, and then have a little exercise in free writing. I’d like to bring the draft in around 10,000 words, but I’d be happy with anything from 8,000 to 12,000. Really, the plan is to just keep plugging away until it feels like something close enough to done to justify pasting it with the “first draft” label and chunking it over into my version of the editorial process. I’m not bold enough to even suggest a date when that might happen, though. It’s just going to take as long as it takes.

I’m not going to sit here on a sunday morning with a few thousand words on the page and guess whether it will be good or bad. At best, I can promise that it will be. That may not sound like much, but for a guy who’s been taking about trying his hand at fiction since high school, it’s a pretty big deal.

The God of Happy Accidents…

Posted on by

There’s something that’s been bugging me for the last few days. It’s one of those things that most don’t consider a topic for polite company and I’ve swung from one side to the other debating whether this was the right place to even bring it up… or whether I should bring it up at all or just let it be one of those questions that agitates me quietly forever in the back of my head. Since I use this site as a platform for pretty much every other flavor of Buddycontroversy, I don’t suppose religion should be more off limits here than any other topic has been in the past.

It won’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows me that I’m not exactly what you’d call religious. I’m not sure I can even get away with describing myself as “spiritual,” as many people seem to prefer these days. It’s not exactly that I’m anti-religion, but I’ve never quite been able to accept faith as the ultimate evidence of things not seen. I’ve always liked my evidence to be something a little more corporeal. Despite that, I’ve always had a healthy level of curiosity about world religions and have a tendency to pay attention when they are discussed academically.

This past weekend I heard a theologian argue that we can’t really blame God when something bad happens. In the next breath, this same panel member argued that we should praise God for all the good things that we enjoy in the world. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where my train of thought came off the rails. It seems to me that if we’re going to worship an all knowing, all powerful deity that is responsible for every good thing that happens, the very nature of an omnipotent God demands that He also be responsible for bad things when they happen. To think otherwise suggests a divine duality – one god responsible for all good things and another responsible for only bad things. That’s a pretty problematic concept to tinker with when the world’s major religious groups are pretty well established as monotheistic enterprises.

After writing that last paragraph, someone is sure to argue that I just don’t like religion in general or Christianity in particular. Because I know my own mind, I can say that’s not exactly true. I’m fine with religion and with Christianity (as long as they’re not being forced on anyone at the point of a sword)… what chaps my ass is hypocrisy. If someone of faith had the stones to go on national television and simply say “sometimes God just lets bad shit happen” I think I’d be fine with it, but to absolve your particular deity from responsibility because it doesn’t fit with the traditional narrative that God is Good requires a level of mental gymnastics that I’m not comfortable carrying out.

Although I’m not a theologian by any stretch of the imagination, it seems to be that if there is a God and He is, in fact, all powerful and all knowing, then we’re doing Him a disservice by only giving Him accolades for the happy accidents of life. Sorry, but if He wants the credit when things are going well, He’s going to have to share in the blame when it’s gone to hell in a handbag, even if it’s only because free will was His idea in the first place. How’s that for a controversial stance?

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

1. Asking for volunteers. Send out the email as many times as you want, but no way, no how am I volunteering for a “special project” without first getting the skinny on what I’ll actually be doing. It’s not personal, but over the last decade I’ve learned that sticking your hand up and asking for a surprise almost never ends well.

2. Gay marriage. If you’re against gay marriage, then by all means, voice your dissent by not having or participating in one. But in since it’s 2012 and not 1612, could we all just stop for a minute and try not to inflict our own brands of puritan morality on everyone else in the room. If you’re going to call yourself conservative, then act like a conservative and tell the government to butt out of all aspects of our collective personal lives and not just the parts or actions that you personally agree with. That makes you a hypocrite, not a conservative.

3. Underwear bombs. If your God teaches you that filling your drawers with C4 and lighting the fuse is a guaranteed all access pass to all the best parts of the hereafter, you’re doing religion wrong. I’m serious, damnit. Why on earth are you praying to a supreme being that wants you to blow your own naughty bits off? Those 72 virgins aren’t much good to you when Mr. Happy gets vaporized. Asshats.

Burnt…

Posted on by

I’m not a particularly pious man. I don’t think I can remember the last time I was in a church that didn’t involve a wedding or a funeral. I don’t think that makes me a bad person and I still think of myself, nominally, as a Christian. At least that’s how I was raised. Even if I were a hard core, mainstream Christian I can’t imagine a scenario where someone burning a Bible would result in me and my closest friends taking to the street and demanding execution for the guys who lit the flame. As a matter of principle, I’m opposed to book burning in whatever form it takes. Destroying knowledge is never good for the upward swing of humanity. Still, I think it’s time for our Afghan friends to take a deep breath and think for a minute before they decided this is an issue worth dying and killing for. I’m not a theologian or anything, but I’m pretty sure that God or Allah, or whoever you’re busy praying to doesn’t actually live between the covers of the Bible or Koran. At the end of the day it’s just a book – a collection of highly processed pieces of dead trees. You can no more destroy a system of beliefs contained in a copy of one of these books than you can destroy Kellogs by setting fire to the box of Corn Flakes I have sitting on top of my refrigerator.

Was it a mistake? Maybe. Was it stupid? Absolutely. Is it worth killing over? Yeah, not to much. I guess I just don’t have the mindset to be an extremist. Some things are worth fighting and dying for… To my way of thinking, though, anything I can buy from Amazon and have shipped to my house overnight doesn’t qualify for that level of importance.

Election 2011…

Posted on by

As you know from time to time I like to look at the searches and keywords that bring people to my humble home on the internet. OK, so technically I obsess over that kind of thing on a pretty much daily basis, but that’s beside the point. I was looking at my analytics this morning (yes, I check every morning before I go to work, now stop smirking). I think yesterday gave me my new all-time favorite search term: did jeffery tharp win the election-2011. For some reason, this blog returns to top two spots on Google for that group of words all crammed together in the search box. Other than that, there’s not much record of Jeffrey Tharp running for anything in 2011, except a dead link to a local news program in Indianapolis.

If I did run for election in 2011, there’s almost no chance that I would have won. Setting aside the whole telegenics issue for the moment, it’s way too likely that at some point during the campaign I would come unglued and tell some well-meaning, but stupid constituent that they were simply too dumb to vote. I’d have been overcome by compulsive honesty and told a group of concerned citizens that the worst possible thing the government could do for them was try to create jobs out of thin air and deficit spending. I wouldn’t have kissed babies or pandered to old people and I’d have walked off stage at the debate when someone tried to drag religion into the discussion, because believing in Jesus or Jehova or Vishnu or the Supreme Order of Jedi Knights makes you any better at administering the levers of government than the guy next to you who believes in something else.

I wouldn’t have made campaign promises I knew I couldn’t keep. Nope. I’m not going to lower your taxes. We have bills to pay. And no, I’m not going to increase your benefits, because guess what, we have bills to pay. We got twenty years of good times and now we’re getting the lean. That’s how the economy works, people. It’s a cycle. 10 years from now when we’re somewhere north of Dow 20,000 you’re going to forget all about The Great Recession. If four cable news networks weren’t cramming the economy down your throat and telling you how bad it is out there every night, would you know there was a problem? I sure wouldn’t judging only by the number of cars parked at the local shopping mall or the number of flat screen TVs rolling out the door at Best Buy.

That’s my long way of saying that I don’t think there’s much of a chance a guy named Jeffrey Tharp got elected in 2011… But if he did, I hope he’s got the guts to call it the way he sees it and not the way that’s going to make a great quote for the local newspaper.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

Yeah, I know it’s a day early this week, but after not griping and complaining last week, I was feeling a little edgy. As always, in no particular order, here’s what annoys Jeff this week:

Christmas Carols. There, I said it. I don’t like them. I’ll grudgingly accept them in the week or two before Christmas, but at any time before that, they make me want to punt kittens. Singing them in October? Well, those people are just a special kind of crazy.

Salad. Since January, I’ve been eating salad almost exclusively for lunch, and you know what? I hate salad. There aren’t enough dressings, croutons, cheese, or varieties of chopped meat available to make them appetizing anymore. Sure, real food will probably end up putting me on the fast track to an early death, but that sounds infinitely better than the slow lingering death I’m suffering from boredom and general lack of tastiness.

The five day work week. Who’s the unmitigated jackass that decided 5:2 was a good work to non-work ratio? Don’t take that the wrong way, because I’m still deliriously happy to be bringing home a paycheck and to be doing it in Maryland, but all things considered there are plenty of other things I’d like to spend some time doing.

Proselytizers. I get it, you found Jesus, or Vishnu, or Buddha, or, Zoroaster and you’re really excited about that. Good on you. As a rule, other random people aren’t nearly as interested as you think they are in your discovery. Believe me when I say I have my own notions about what’s what in the hereafter and let’s leave it at that, shall we? That would be fantastic.