The Simmering Mind

The Mission Field of Young Adult Fiction (Mike Duran) – Some interesting thoughts here. I like the quote from Mary Weber: “[Teens] want to be entertained and respected that they can find elements of truth and God and honor in a story without needing a [S]cripture or certain Christian vocabulary spelled out.”

Finding Comparable Books (Rachelle Gardner) – How authors can figure out what books to compare theirs to, for proposals. “Do I look for books with the same premise or plot? Same time period? Same writing style? How do I know what to include?  I’m going to make it easy for you…”

Enjoy Your Prayer Life (Michael Reeves) – This is a good one with some really thought-provoking lines, like, “If God was a single, independent person, independence would be the godly thing. That would be how to be like him. But because the Son always depends on the Father, dependence is the nature of Christian godliness.”  And my favorite: “Prayer, then, is enjoying the care of a powerful Father, instead of being left to a frightening loneliness where everything is all down to you.”

The Deep Space of Digital Reading (Paul La Farge) – “The history of reading suggests that what we’re presently experiencing is probably not the end times of human thought. It’s more like an interregnum, or the crouch before a leap.”

Five Signs Your Story Is Sexist (Mythcreants) – I found this article simultaneously thought-provoking and infuriating.  Misogyny is the “unforgivable sin” of fiction now, I think.  Showing a character be sexist in any way (even if it’s realistic to that character/world) makes your book inherently bad because you’re “furthering sexism.”  Some of these points do make sense and are good ways to test whether your story is sexist, but I’m skeptical of the underlying attitude behind a lot of it, that unless your story adheres to certain Rules of Equality (that aren’t even reflective of the real world/society/history in most cases), it’s automatically a sexist piece of literature and a bad influence.  Particularly egregious – to me personally – is this line: “It’s okay if most of the characters you invent are male to start with; what matters is that you change their gender as you develop your story.”