Tag: a personal note

So I’m a Bigot

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Various people, whose opinions I don’t respect, tell me I’m “a bigot.” This is because I continue to hold the core beliefs I’ve held for my entire life, and have not changed over to brand-new beliefs sponsored by servants of Satan.

They are particularly offended by my belief that homosexuality is a grave sin. It angers them that my belief is based on the words of the Bible, when really my beliefs ought to be  based on their words.

That the wrongfulness of homosexuality has been universally held to by the human race, for thousands of years, offends them. To them,  all of humanity has been dead wrong since the beginning of time, and only set right in the last few years… by them.

I will not change until the Bible changes. They hate that.

To me, the most disturbing aspect of this debauched, immoral age of ours is the ease with which so many people discard their core beliefs and adopt new ones diametrically opposed to the old. What makes them do that? It looks like all Satan’s servants have to do is to repeat their message over and over again, as loud as they can, and, presto–it becomes a widely held opinion, even among people old enough to know better.

You’d think, with all this going for them, Satan’s servants wouldn’t even notice a nobody like me–let alone bother to pour out their wrath on him.

But, see, if they let us nobodies get away with remaining steadfast in our loyalty to God’s Word, there’s no telling what we might get up to next. We might pooh-pooh Global Warming! We might question the government’s right to tax us any which way they please.

Nobodies of the world, unite!

The bad guys are afraid of us. I don’t know why, but they really are afraid of us.

‘The Palace’ is Out (and so is our old bed)

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

The sixth book of my Bell Mountain series, The Palace, has been published and is now on sale. You can order it here (just click “Books”), or find it on amazon.com and order it there. The Palace has only been in print for a matter of hours, and is awaiting its first Customer Review.

My book launch on Tim Wildmon’s American Family Association internet TV show is still on for Monday morning, March 24, at 11:15 a.m. Eastern Time.

Note: The Palace is not yet available in Kindle format, but it will be, soon. I admit the beautifully produced, durable paperback edition will cost you slightly more than you’d have to pay to see The Great Gatsby with a hip-hop sound track. But then you can read the book again for free.

On a personal note, my wife ordered us a new mattress and box springs, which were delivered this morning. Every 37 years, like clockwork, we replace our bed.

This mattress is at least twice as high as the old one. If you fall out of this bed, you’re gonna need a parachute.

The Lost Hour

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Every year they do this to us. In order to get Daylight Savings Time started, they make us turn the clocks ahead one hour on Saturday night. This causes us to lose an hour of our Sunday.

It’s difficult to see what use this is. As DST has gobbled up more and more of the calendar, Standard Time is is only in force for about a third of the year. How can it be “standard” if non-standard is actually the standard for two-thirds of the time?

But no government can go wrong by teaching its people to jump through hoops. Aren’t you surprised they’ve been content, so far, to go back and forth between Standard Time and Daylight Savings? They could always think up more.

Let’s see… Set your clocks back another hour, if your state voted for the President, and ahead another hour if it didn’t… Pick the calendar date out of a revolving drum (“And tomorrow’s date, my fellow Americans, will be September 17, 1957!”)… Or just go back and forth every other week instead of twice a year. The possibilities are endless.

What? This is a stupid post, what do I think I’m talking about?

Well, what do you want from a guy who went to bed an hour after bedtime?

A Coming Attraction

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Book No. 6 of my Bell Mountain series, The Palace, has been sent to the printer and should be finished in a week or two.

Reminder: You can pre-order the book from The Chalcedon Foundation, by phoning them at 209-736-4365209-736-4365 and speaking to Jill at “Orders”. You can all pre-order the book at Chalcedon Store Site.

To help launch the book, I will be a guest on Tim Wildmon’s American Family Assn. online TV show, tentatively scheduled for Monday, March 24. Don’t miss it! If the book becomes a best-seller, I can hire someone with a really good voice to speak for me from now on.

The Palace features the usual mix of adventure, wonder, war and treachery, redemption, and overall excitement: believe me, you don’t want to miss the Battle of the Brickbats.

I’ll have more details for you as I get them. Stay tuned.

A Lesson in Prayer–From a Mouse

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Which is better–to make one or two really long prayers every day, or to make a lot of really short ones?

Personally, I think both will serve, depending on the needs of the moment. Much is said in favor of long prayers. I agree with it. But I have something to say in favor of a lot of little prayers.

I used to have a pet mouse named Sleepy. I’ve had many pet mice, but Sleepy was unusually affectionate, and the bond between us was especially close.

Sometimes I would take her out of her cage, lie down on the living room floor, and turn her loose to see what she would do. (No, we didn’t have cats then!) She would venture a few feet away, then come skittering back to me as fast as she could. Sniff, sniff, pet, pet. Then she’d explore a few feet farther, and come running back again. She’d go a little farther each time until she reached the end of the room, and always come back.

I have no idea what a grown human being looks like to a mouse. Really, it’s impossible to imagine. But my mouse must have loved and trusted what she saw in me, because she showed it by her actions.

We could do very much worse than to run back to God for a few moments, many times a day.

My Next Book

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Sometime very soon–in fact, I can’t imagine what’s holding it up–the sixth book in my Bell Mountain series, The Palace, will go on sale. It’s action-packed, I promise you. And editing has started on #7, The Glass Bridge.

But at the forefront of my mind is #8, which is nowhere near having a title. What it has, so far, is a lot of plot problems to solve and a number of tantalizing scenes that have bubbled up in my imagination. I can hardly wait to start writing them. Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can tell you about them without spoiling the preceding two books. You’ll just have to use your imagination.

Beyond #8 I cannot yet see anything. I pray the ideas will keep coming: they are gifts from God.

I wonder if I’ll be called to go back into Obann’s past–maybe all the way back to the story of King Ozias and his reign. Maybe back to the wreckage left after the destruction of Obann’s Empire. Then again, maybe Book #9 will take me some years into Obann’s future. I’ll just have to wait and see what the Lord gives me.

Meanwhile, I’m eager for reader feedback, either here on the blog or as Customer Reviews on amazon.com. Sometimes writing a novel is like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean.

 

‘Bell Mountain’ Paperback on Sale

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I just noticed the price of Bell Mountain in paperback has been cut down from $14 to $7. I have no idea how long the sale will last, so… get it cheap while you can!

Tell your friends, tell your family.

I don’t know how to promote the book, so, please–help me out if you can.

Miss Marple Comes to Life

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Let me take a day off gender choices and phony Global Warming.

It’s hard for an actor to play a well-established, popular, beloved fictional character and bring that character to life on the screen. Christopher Reeve did it with Superman. Both Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett succeeded in “becoming” Sherlock Holmes. David Suchet is Hercule Poirot.

And if you haven’t yet seen those TV movies from the 1980s starring Joan Hickson as Miss Marple–well, you’ve missed something wonderful. But you can find most of them on youtube, free of charge, or rent them from amazon.com for instant viewing for a very small fee.

Agatha Christie herself wanted Hickson to play Miss Marple someday–although when she told the actress that, in person, Hickson was only in her 40s and some decades away from Miss Marple’s age. Christie’s instinctive choice was right on the money, though.

No one can play Miss Marple like Joan Hickson! Anybody else, nice try, but no cigar.

Imagine–a detective who’s not a cop, not a private eye, but just a little old lady who has lived in a village all her life and has, in the words of one of her acquaintances, “a mind like a bacon-slicer.” She hunts down murderers, but she can’t defend herself physically and she can’t run away, nor does she carry a gun. It must always be born in mind that any murderer who got wise to Miss Marple could very easily bump her off.

If you can watch one of these films without thinking, at the end, that, if only you could tell your troubles to Miss Marple, she’d know what to do… well, then, the performance just didn’t speak to you.

Note: Patty and I did watch one of the Miss Marple movies made after Hickson’s death, and it just didn’t come up to snuff–not even close.

Once you’ve seen the real deal, nothing else will do.

Spring is Coming!

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Yes, we have almost two feet of snow on the ground, and enormous piles of snow everywhere you look–but Spring is in the air, big-time.

We have throngs of birds, all singing and calling at once, including a big bunch of robins. The trees are budding like mad. Like Helki the Rod, I always listen to what the birds and the trees are telling us. It might snow some more, but I think we’ve seen the end of sub-zero temperatures for now. (Yes, I know it sounds like famous last words.)

So here’s my prediction: an early Spring, probably a little cooler than usual, but burgeoning and busting out all over.

What hath God wrought? I love it!

The Wilderness of ‘Young Adult Fiction’

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I was in Barnes & Noble yesterday, picking up a Valentine’s Day gift for my wife. This freeze-your-butt-off-every-cotton-pickin’-day Global Warming is getting her down. Maybe Hercule Poirot could cheer her up.

Naturally, I paused to look at the offerings in the Young Adults section. As usual, I wish I hadn’t.

For reasons which may be supernatural, for all I know, grown-up authors are frantically churning out books about sexual confusion, social pathologies, self-destructive fads like “cutting” yourself, seasoned with depictions of teens using “magic” to circumvent adult authority and get anything and everything they want. This is what they think youngsters should be reading. Why? All we get is a lot of half-baked twaddle about “you shouldn’t try to hide from kids what the world is like.”

So again we run head-on into the sophomoric credo that whatever is evil, ugly, or painful is “realistic,” and whatever is good, beautiful, or wholesome is just a delusion. This is how stupid people pretend they’re smart.

So what have you got for your children and grandchildren to read? And maybe more to the point, what are their “teachers” and school librarians urging them to read? You’d better look into that–you might get a rather nasty surprise.

There are books out there–and have always been, so far–that offer a positive vision: books that don’t seek to fill the teenage reader’s head with toxic garbage. You ought to be looking for them.

And when you find some, please let me know.