A short post

I was planning to post the next part of Who is This God Person Anyway today, but it threatened to turn into something of substance and depth, so I figured it deserved a bit more thought rather than being unleashed on the world as a half finished stream of thoughts, as is my usual blogging technique :) Hopefully it will be worth the wait!

In other news, my website is temporarily offline; I've switched hosts so I can put a proper shop page in and a whole bunch of other stuff that I couldn't before. I always liked the idea of providing DVD-style extra features - as done brilliantly by Jasper Fforde - and if I can cobble together enough material I might do something along those lines too. With any luck, pages of some sort will start appearing over the next week or so, although the full revamp I've been promising it for ages will take a while.

Oh, and for those eagerly anticipating the arrival of Primeval overseas: don't hold your breath. We've had three episodes and I'm getting more apathetic towards it already. Not a good sign after a promising start. When's the next season of Doctor Who due...?

CSFF Blog Tour: Where The Map Has Still Ended

In case it had escaped your notice, I am a bit of a writer. I know that because my name is on the booklist at WhereTheMapEnds, which you should of course look at as a detailed guide to Christian Spec Fic, but is not the main point of this post.

As a writer, I have spent many a happy hour fiddling with the various world building, character creating and story generating gizmos collected on the site. Actually, these are probably more useful to a bored non-writer wasting a few online minutes at work, than to a writer like myself, prone to procrastination, a cure for which is about the only thing absent from Jeff's Tools for Writers section.

If you haven't already, go and have a play. On your way, you might like to take in the following stops on the tour:

Grace Bridges reviews on of Jeff's own works;

Gene Curtis comments on Marcher Lord Press;

Jeff seems to have done interviews left, right and centre;

Nicole and Wayne Thomas Batson got missed from the full list yesterday which is still there if you want more blogs to read!

CSFF Blog Tour: Where the Map Ends

So this month we find ourselves WhereTheMapEnds. I thought we'd been here already on the tour, but, I guess not, huh?

This being day two of the tour, you will of course have all been to the site already.

What do you mean you've been too busy reading blogs? Tsk. Look, go there now. Clicky clicky. But don't forget to come back.... Oh, too late, they've gone. Oh well, at least with all that extra traffic, Jeff will be inspired to get those long awaited forums going. Won't you? I mean, look at the queue to get on there: ;)
Nissa Annakindt
Jim Black
Grace Bridges
Jackie Castle
Valerie Comer
Karri Compton
CSFF Blog Tour
Gene Curtis
D. G. D. Davidson
Chris Deanne
Janey DeMeo
Tessa Edwards
April Erwin
Kameron M. Franklin
Linda Gilmore
Beth Goddard
Marcus Goodyear
Andrea Graham
Todd Michael Greene
Leathel Grody
Katie Hart
Sherrie Hibbs
Sharon Hinck
Christopher Hopper
Jason Joyner
Kait
Karen
K. D. Kragen
Tina Kulesa
Kevin Lucia and The Bookshelf Reviews 2.0 - The Compendium
Rachel Marks
Shannon McNear
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Eve Nielsen
John W. Otte
John Ottinger
Robin Parrish
Rachelle
Cheryl Russel
Hanna Sandvig
Mirtika Schultz
James Somers
Steve Trower
Speculative Faith
Daniel I. Weaver
Timothy Wise

Who is This God Person Anyway? (Fit the Third - Exodus)

Moses said to God, "Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' Then what shall I tell them?"

God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM."

- Exodus 3:13-15

"My name is not important."

- Slatibartfast

And so we are introduced to the architects of the Earth, first in the Bible, and then in Hitch-hikers. And, apart from that, and being suitably mysterious about their names, they have one or two other things in common. Slartibartfast, in the TV series, is every child's image of God: a kindly old gent with long white hair and matching beard. And both, having created the world, then go on to save it.

But first the creation bit, and I think Slarti inadvertently solves one of modern Christianity’s ongoing debates:

“[New Earth is] only half completed I’m afraid – we haven’t even finished
burying the artificial dinosaur skeletons in the crust yet, then we have the
Tertiary and Quaternary Periods of the Cenozoic Era to lay down, and…”

I like the image of God’s creation as a vast building project (Magrathea’s factory floor was a highlight of the so-so movie version for me too) and, well, why not? It’s gotta make as much sense as the more widely accepted theories.

Millions of years later, Slartibartfast returns to Earth and, in the absence of a scarf-wearing, jelly baby-toting saviour, single-handedly (well, Trillian and Arthur help a bit) saves the Universe from the evils of cricket. Sorry, Krikkit.

So there you have it: a creator turned saviour whose name, at least in its original form, we dare not speak.

Finally, to bring us back to the ever-so-tenuous Exodus link (you think that’s tenuous, wait till next week…) here’s Bop Ad, from Life, the Universe and Everything:

[Slartibartfast] was marching out on to the pitch with a terrible purpose in his gait, his hair, beard and robes swept behind him, looking very much as Moses would have looked if Sinai had been a well-cut lawn instead of, as it is more usually represented, a fiery smoking mountain.

Feeling Strangely Bloggy

Yes, it's been a while, but I'm in a bloggy mood today. Maybe someone missed me and started channelling their mental energies at me. Well, whatever, I'm back again now - some minor connection hitches with my shiny new Vista-powered lappie now fixed. (So far, incidentally, I have not gone 'Wow' a single time while using it.)

Oh, and in the process of shifting files onto said new laptop, I mislaid my favourites list, which included a bunch of really interesting stuff I had to blog about. No, really, it did!

So instead I shall mention the highly unlikely event that happened over the weekend: ITV1 showed something good. Obviously startled by the success of Doctor Who, ITV have brought us a new Saturday teatime sf series, Primeval, the basic premise of which is that there are anomalies in time/space through which people can travel, and in the first episode, dinosaurs can stroll into the Forest of Dean. Not sure how many weeks we can watch dinosaurs turn up in unexpected places, but there is a lost-in-the-past-spouse story arc to keep us busy too. The writers have tried to inject a little humour into the proceedings too - witness the boy fighting off a Gorgonopsid with a toy light saber. I look forward to seeing where the series goes from here, anyway. Oh, and there's one of the girls from S Club 7, who drives a Mini Cooper, which is a bonus.

Speaking of Minis on telly, the new series of Life on Mars also just started, so Yoda's small screen debut is just a few weeks away for UK viewers. Unless they cut his scene. Erk.

I think that went quite well. Maybe I shall feel bloggy more often now.