Yesterday, at Jamul Intermediate School, in Jamul, California, I spoke to fourth and fifth graders about writing. If you are one of those kids: Hi, kid! Thanks for having me out at your school yesterday! Not that you had a choice! Still, you were very polite, and laughed at all my jokes, and asked intelligent, fun questions, and in general helped me to have an all-around fabulous time. DON’T FORGET THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WRITING! Here’s the... Read more
Hey, if you’ve come to help with my MS Word 7 formatting question, I figured it out! And I did so within a half hour of putting up my “Please help me!” post last night. So then I removed that post. But THEN, apparently, that post went out to my RSS/Feedburner subscribers anyway. And so I’ve learned that some good folks have been showing up here, wanting to help me out — but then, alas, not finding the original post that I’d deleted.... Read more
Every blog post I write appears in three places at more or less the same time: here on my WordPress blog, and on my Christianity.com and Crosswalk.com blogs. Together the three bring me some 40,000 “views” per month. I have no idea how many people that number represents, but I’m guessing I couldn’t fit them into my living room at once. I’ve been blogging for one year now. It’s become one of my two primary creative outlets: I blog, and... Read more
My book, “I’m OK–You’re Not: The Message We’re Sending Nonbelievers, and Why We Should Stop.”, is one of three finalists for a 2008 San Diego Book Award, in the category of Spirituality. (My book “Penguins, Pain and the Whole Shebang” won that award in 2006.) If, on the evening of Saturday, May 17, I attend the SDBA awards ceremony/ schmooze-fest, my 80-year-old father will be with me. To me, this is like saying I’ll be accompanied by Popeye, or that on that night I’ll sprout wings and... Read more
A concert from, and then backstage with The Blind Boys of Alabama. Read more
Okay, they’re not so tough. But on her blog Through My Eyes, Ingrid Moore Curry — Ohioan, music fanatic, snooty people hater, Ving Rhames rebounder, proud member of The Secret Council Of American Negroes — did ask me a few questions in the course of interviewing me as her Writer of the Month for May. It is a mystery to me how, in the course of our short e-chat, I went from talking about the difficult relationship between The Great Commission and The Great... Read more
The post you are looking for is included in HA!, a full-sized collection of five years worth of my best humor. If you are a Kindle owner and a member of Amazon Prime, you can borrow HA! for free, with no due dates. (If you don’t own a Kindle, here’s where to get one. To learn more about Amazon Prime—and to get a one-month free trial—go here. ) As per Amazon’s rules, content included in the Kindle Lending Library program... Read more
Ahh, Monday Morning. The sun is rising, the birds are singing–and I’m bitterly angry at Adam, Mr. Former Mud, who said, “Oh, sure, I’ll take a bite of this exact fruit God commanded me not to eat. I’m sure that when he said, ‘Never, ever eat the fruit off this tree,’ what God really meant was, ‘Never, ever eat too much of the fruit off this tree.’ So yeah, I’ll take a bite! Give it here! What could it hurt?” What could it hurt. Moron!... Read more
I get a fair amount of questions/input around the dynamic of writing in conjunction with God. So I thought I’d burble out a little sumpin’ sumpin’ about that particular phenomenon. First of all, if you’re trying to do any sort of creative work, do you have any choice but to access and stay with the divine within you? All creativity is born of the Great Power, however you personally understand or conceive of that. Being Christian, I say that in... Read more
One of my Big Points in yesterday’s More On How to Make A Living Writing was, “If you’re not pretty much an idea factory, you’re never going to make it anyway.” One of my more consistently perspicacious readers, “SamWrites2,” left a comment to that post. “Hi, John!” he wrote. “You know, I’ve been thinking. I need you. I want to have your baby.” No, wait, wait. Sorry. That wasn’t Sam. That was my Christian minister lesbian friend, Anita. What Sam said was: “Can you expand on your... Read more
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