Pleasantly Disturbed Friday

It’s a pleasantly disturbed Friday. Duane Scott is on vacation somewhere or I’d give him credit for inventing this type of blog post.

In addition to The Discipline of Grace by Jerry Bridges (Thursdays) and The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer (Wednesdays), I’m reading a book I can barely stand to put down – Dragonmarch by Ian Curtis. It’s the second volume in his Canticles of Andurun fantasy series, and it is one great story. It is also one big story, big as in epic, and it has dragons and goblins, an array of strange creatures, and humans who fighting the dragons, fighting each other, fighting the goblins. It is a rocking good story, and my review will be up next week.

Two other books I’m working on reviews (and an interview) on are Ursula LaGuin’s new book of poems, Finding My Elegy, and Emily Wierenga’s Chasing Silhouettes.

I had two blog posts this – on various chapters in The Discipline of Grace and The Pursuit of God – that I expected to be easy to write but turned out not to be. Sometimes you have to reach down inside and admit something, or do something, or decide something. Those posts were like that. Of course, those books – both classics – are like that, too.

I’m editing away on the manuscript of A Light Shining, the sequel to Dancing Priest. It’s coming, but the hard part lies ahead. The rewriting part. I did a small preview of the rewriting part – my attempt to try to make sense of all the comments I have to make sense of. The story is going to change, and that character in the preview – who came out of nowhere – is, I think, going to be the instrument to change the story.

Writing is a nutty line of work.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and went to see the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild. She was keen to see it, I was more nonchalant, and I ended up liking it more than she did. It was filmed in Louisiana, way down there in Terrebonne Parish, not too far from where I grew up in suburban New Orleans. As my wife said, “It’s as weird as everything else in southern Louisiana.” I did not feel insulted. Much. And it is an odd movie, the kind that movie critics usually rave about and the rest of the world scratches its head and says, “What?”

I received the news today that one of the sites I write for occasionally will be closing down. More on that after the official announcement next week. It’s the way of the online world, I suppose, sites can come and go, but it still leaves me with a quiet, sad feeling. The contributors are also trying to figure out what to do with the archives.

In September, I’m going to change up the weekly Saturday Good Reads for two or three weeks, just to try something different. More on that later, too.

I'm scheduled to have lunch today with my daughter-in-law and grandsons. they're back from a triumphant tour of Little Rock (their maternal grandmother) and Shreveport (their paternal great-grandmother and assorted aunts, uncles and cousins). In Shreveport, Cameron discovered the wonder of flashlights.

The nice thing about Pleasantly Disturbed Friday is that you don’t have to think about how to end the post with something insightful or memorable.

You can just end it.