hack writing – Lee Duigon

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I have read some more of Oy, Rodney, but I don’t seem to be any farther along in it. I think gremlins come in and add pages to it when no one’s looking.

Young Lord Jeremy Coldsore, in a desperate attempt to recoup his family fortune, has entered into a scheme with a mysterious stranger to introduce wild marsupials to the Scottish highlands. The koalas don’t like it. Jeremy is still trying to marry Lady Margo Cargo, the richest widow in Scurveyshire, but he will have to hurry because bits of her are falling off.

American adventurer Willis Twombley has discovered proof that he really is Sargon of Akkad. They still don’t believe him.

The vicar is recovering from the conniptions he suffered when he sneaked a peek under the backyard wading pool to see what was making the queer noises. The experience has so disturbed his brain that now he can only speak backwards.

So far no character named “Rodney” has appeared in the story. After some 400 pages, this is annoying. I am beginning to suspect that “Rodney” is either a rabbit or a hamster: author Violet Crepuscular has dropped certain dark hints that it might be so. I’ll be very much put out if he turns out to be nothing at all.

NOTE: I still haven’t found a reproducible picture of the cover art for Oy, Rodney, so for the time being, Lord of the Tube Socks must suffice. We happen to know that Ms. Crepuscular has read this book and approves of it.

People who know me have asked me why I’m spending so much time reading the Bible-based novels of “Abner Doubleday” when I could do something more profitable, like counting chunks of gravel in the driveway.

Well, I do it because I think it’s important.

Over the past hundred years or so, Christians have pretty much surrendered all the arts to the unbelievers. This is ground that ought to be won back for Christ’s Kingdom. And what I have to say about novels, and fantasy novels in particular, goes for movies and TV shows, too.

The problem is that Christian readers, writers, and publishers too often settle for creating stories that merely imitate the secular product–with a bit of prayer or Bible-reading slapped on like decals. They not only imitate the secular product: they imitate it poorly. More often than not, “Christian” entertainment products are cheap knock-offs of the secular originals.

This ought not to be; and writers and editors and publishers who settle for it ought to be held accountable. There is no excuse for making “Christian” synonymous with “second-rate.”

For one thing, it puts off Christians who want to read something, for a change, that’s not a celebration of sin. For another, it fails to win over non-Christian readers: all they know is, they’re reading a novel that isn’t very good.

To market a book as “Christian,” and expect the label to cover a multitude of literary sins, is not unlike offering God, as a sacrifice, sick, aged, or deformed animals out of the flock. God takes strong exception to that! (See Malachi 1: 7-12) “Ye offer polluted bread upon mine altar; and ye say, Wherein have we polluted thee? In that ye say, The table of the Lord is contemptible” (v. 7).

To create an inferior product and then try to fob it off as “Christian,” meaning it doesn’t have to measure up to a novel by an unbeliever, strikes me as practically a sin, if it is done knowingly.

And so, yeah–novels that treat the Bible as a comic book without pictures, and wallow in stupid dialogue and non-stop anachronisms, I do not think are fitting to be served up on the table of the Lord.