Almost late for the dance

I’ve heard/read about the National Novel Writing Month in the past. In fact I’ve seen several of the novels written during previous years on Amazon.

While I’m just hearing/seeing things about this years “competition” I think I’m going to join in this year. I’ve started two novels in the past and neither of them made it much further than 1 chapter. I think I got too caught up in the plot development to really write much of anything.

Either way, the goal for the NaNoWrMo is to write one 175-page novel (at least 50,000) words. There’s a Write-A-Thon on Nov 15th, but Laurie and I will be at a marriage retreat that weekend – so I guess I’ll have to schedule mine another time.

Hopefully this time around I can be spurred on to bring a novel to completion and see it published (self-published if nothing else). I’ll keep you all posted either here or on Twitter.

Now with 5 days before the competition begins – what in the world should I write about?! 🙂

Book review :: Through the Storm

I finished reading Lynne Spears book, “Through the Storm” a couple weeks ago. I posted a review of it on Facebook, but got busy and forgot to post one here.

While “celebrity autobiographies” aren’t something I’d normally pick up and read for myself, I did find myself enjoying the book and I kept coming back to it to continue reading Lynne’s story.

As I read it, I did feel like the book and the stories it contains do tend to jump around a bit but it was a good easy read and I finished it rather quickly.

One quote in particular stood out to me in beginning of the book and stuck with me throughout. Spears tells the story of her father giving respect to a man that she didn’t exactly think deserved it – but her father responded, “He’s had a hard life.” He then continued with his point that when we take the time to understand where people have come from we’ll have a much better understanding of them and be able to extend grace and mercy a lot easier.

Thought that was a great explanation of this book.

When you understand where Lynne and her family (including her 2 celebrity girls) are coming from you naturally get a better picture of how they got to where they are.

As someone else pointed out on Facebook, Lynn’s “father was an alcoholic, she killed a little boy with her car and her mother was a straight-up Londoner.”

You don’t get these background stories in reading the tabloid headlines. You don’t see how faith has impacted Spear’s family (and or hasn’t impacted some of the family).

These background stories go beyond the tabloid headlines, beyond the paparazzi (which you can quickly tell Spears has absolutely no love for), and beyond the basic surface story we hear so many times.

Throughout the book Spears often spends time explaining her mindset while things around her occurred — especially in relation to the careers of her two celebrity daughters. Sometimes she admits the decisions were not the best and other times she still holds to the decisions. Like anyone’s story, it will be up to the reader to cast (or withhold) their own judgement.

Overall, I was glad I had the chance to read it. I’ll be passing my copy along to my mom next time I see her. And I hope that if nothing else, it helps me extend grace to others a lot quicker as well.

For added insight, take a moment to read why Thomas Nelson decided to publish this book.

The beauty of Twitter

Here’s one of those great articles I wish I had written. From @jontangerine… (HT to @stealingsand)

I like Twitter because…

It reminds me is that human beings are still tribal. As an example, if you check your own address book, or think about your family and friends, they probably number no more than two hundred people. We may have more in the book, but it’s rare for our intimates to be greater than two hundred people. Our networks are geographically dispersed these days. Even if your network is mostly in one location, people are so busy living that it can be difficult to stay in touch. Twitter is a facsimile of living and working in proximity for me, and provides something unique, too

Jon touches on a few things he’d like to see on twitter. I’d ditto those as well and add that I’d like to see easy ways to track physical locations as well. There are other social networks that will track your location. BrightKite will even alert you when other users or friends are in your area. A very cool feature indeed. But there’s not a good BrightKite app for Blackberry yet, so that’s a bit of a bummer for me and will probably keep me from switching anytime soon.

I also find this line from Jon’s article interesting, “but it’s rare for our intimates to be greater than two hundred people.”

I think that’s true in so many arenas of life. I only follow 66 people on twitter (and leave the SMS/txt message updates off for all but maybe 5 people) and while I have over 300 “friends” on facebook I really only keep up with/track half of them (if that). But of course it is nice when something catches my eye from those other 150ers and I can get updates on them as well.

I also see the 200 people limit playing out in churches/workplaces and more. It’s really hard to get to know more than 200 people or so in any regular setting. Even if there are 15,000 people in a room, do you really know more than 200 of them? Can you know more than 200 and build real relationships with them?

I think that’s what I love about online communities like Twitter. I know 10xs more about folks like @Jess_Hays and @sgalloway since they joined Twitter than I ever learned about them just seeing them for a couple hours on Sunday morning. The same goes for folks who constantly fill out surveys on Myspace. I learned tons of things about folks in my tribe thanks to them taking some time to be intentionally open.

What about you? What makes Twitter beautiful for you? Do you agree that it’s rare to have intimate relationships with more than 200 people? Do you think that number is much higher or less?

re: Tribal faith

Listening to Rob Bell share some great thoughts and ideas on Tribes (taken from Phil 3).

A great thought ::

“Sometimes when some people say ‘the gospel’ they’re really talking about tribal identity masquerading as the gospel… and Jesus is bigger than any tribe.”

“Beware of dem dawgs!”

Don’t let the tribe come between you and The Gospel or Jesus.