Where’s Randy?

I guess my loyal blog readers are wondering what I’ve been up to all week.

Answer: working on my deck while the weather’s good. Here in the Pacific Northwest, a deck doesn’t last many years unless you maintain it, because of all the rain. So we’ve been working on cleaning our deck during odd moments through most of August. But we’ve also been waiting for a solid week of sunshine to arrive so we could seal it. You don’t want to seal in the moisture right after a rain, and August has been alternately hot and rainy.

Well, that week has finally arrived, so I’ve been pretty much working nonstop outside to get it all done. We have a large deck, probably around 1500 square feet, and there’s quite a long section of railing around one part of it. I’ll try to post a picture of it here when we get it all finished.

Today is going to be hotter than normal, and we’re within a few hours of finishing it up, so I’m going to wait till mid-afternoon to go out and work. Which gives me a few minutes right now to blog.

I’ve been reading through all the comments that my loyal blog readers have left in response to my question about what we’ll be talking about next. There are a couple of clear contenders–MRUs and “voice” are topics of high interest. And there are some questions that I can answer in a paragraph or two.

I have a couple of non-craft items to talk about just for today:

First, some of you might be interested in an article I wrote recently. It’s got rather an odd title, “Jesus and the Numbers” and it’s about the work I’ve done over the past year and a half on probability calculations on the alleged “Jesus Family Tomb.” As some of you know, I’ve become one of the world’s leading experts on this issue, and I was one of the referees assigned to vet the official statistical journal article by the documentary group that started the whole brouhaha. So my article has a few reflections on that whole experience. Marcus Goodyear, one of my loyal blog readers here, was the editor who asked me to write this article. Thanks Marcus!

Second, my friend Sue Brower (senior fiction editor at Zondervan Publishing) has sent me word of something that will be of very high interest to unpublished novelists who are wanting to break into the Christian publishing market (which has been growing very rapidly in recent years). Zondervan, in conjunction with the Mount Hermon Christian Writing Conference, are sponsoring a competition for a novel by an unpublished writer. The winner will receive a $10,000 contract with Zondervan. This sounds like a FABULOUS opportunity. All the details about the contest are on Zondervan’s web site here. Zondervan is a great, great organization. I believe that my two best novels (PREMONITION and RETRIBUTION) are the two that I published with Zondervan.

OK, I have lots to catch up on, because I’ve been letting everything slide all week while I work on that pesky deck. I’m going to play catchup for a few hours, then go hit the deck and hope to get it finished today. Tomorrow, I’ll answer some of the questions that have shorter answers.

See ya then!