Finished Reading “Heretics”

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  "G. K. Chesterton, the "Prince of Paradox," is at his witty best in this collection of twenty essays and articles from the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on  "heretics" - those who pride themselves on their superiority to Christian views - Chesterton appraises prominent figures who fall into that category from the literary and art worlds... those who hold incomplete and inadequate views about "life, the universe, and everything." He is, in short, criticizing all that host of non-Christian views of reality, as he demonstrated in his follow-up book Orthodoxy. The book is both an easy read and a difficult read. But he manages to demonstrate, among other things, that our new 21st century heresies are really not new because he himself deals with most of them." (Goodreads)

NaNoWriMo report 2

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  • Current Word Count 5912
  • Words per Day to Finish on Time 1575
  • Total Words Remaining 44088
This is breaking me out of the academic mold.  I am so accustomed to writing academic papers that (in an overly simplistic way) merely address a topic and reflect in some manner on that which is reported.  Novel writing is something else!

My latest experience is thus: I have direction I would like to go, create the scene and draw out the action in my mind.  After pouring myself out, I have an entire paragraph!  Boo.  Now, I set it down, come back and look again at that paragraph, which has now become an outline in and of itself.  I am fleshing out and am causing to happen through characters and dialogue.  I've even seen characters leap onto the page I had not planned!

For example, I could say there was an assassination attempt on the King; or I could describe an afternoon on the playground where a group of children through their imagination make a play of the news regarding the King, as they try to understand it.  I liken this to when I was six or seven years old and the principle of our school came in and asked us, "what is 'Watergate?'"  Can you imagine how a child answers that question?

Right now, my biggest hurdle is making my main character suffer because when he has suffered, he must suffer some more.  And then some more. 

It does not make sense now, but it will.  Oh, it will.

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