Back of the Envelope

I meant to mention it yesterday, but the latest Christian Carnival is up at In the Spirit of Grace. It's apparently carnival number 89. I'd lost count myself. There's lots of good stuff there, so go read it.

I've discovered that a good friend of mine has a blog, Cambridge Picks, so I've added it to the blogroll. I'd tell you her name, but as she doesn't do so in her blog, I think she'd rather remain private. I've further discovered that a lot of the folks in Park Street's Writers' Group also have blogs. I'll link to them once they tell me where their blogs are. I've invited them to take part in the Storyblogging Carnival.

I'm afraid that the folks at Letters from Babylon have stopped blogging. It had been rather slow for a while, but last week they officially shut down the blog. I've been reading their blog, and commenting on it, almost from the beginning. The bloggers were mostly Grad students in Boston when they started, and their blog reflected their experiences as Christians in academia. As I'm an alum from a Boston Grad school, I identified closely with their circumstances. In fact, I knew Tony Jimenez before he started blogging, as we met at college, and I met John Zimmer at a wedding only a couple of months ago. Many of them still go to the same church as I attend, and I'm sure I'll see them around, but I'll miss their writing.

The latest Christian Carnival is up at Digitus, Finger, & Co. Check it out.

It's not the sort of thing I usually link to, but Chris Hallquist of The Uncredible Hallq was kind enough to include me in the Carnival:

Last week ago, I made a post publicizing a new carnival called God or Not, designed to bring theistic and atheistic bloggers together. Also working to this goal is a debate I got from a Christian blogger and an agnostic. To Donald: please consider hosting God or Not, last I checked there's three atheists signed up and only one theist.

I'll also note that I got way more visits from to the Carnival of the Godless than the Christian Carnival. I wonder why.

Anyway, with a personal appeal like that, I had to look into this God or Not Carnival. The website does a decent job of describing the carnival, although there aren't any examples to point to yet, as this upcoming one, on the topic of Sin, will be the inaugural edition. I asked the Evangelical Atheist what sort of posts the carnival was looking for, and he sent me the following information:

At first, the topic was Original Sin, so that may focus your writing a bit. We expanded it to increase the number of submissions. I'm thinking about writing something on plenary indulgences. You can be as broad or specific as you like, as long as it relates substantially to sin.

I've volunteered to host the Carnival in March, and I'd like to encourage other Christian bloggers to take part as well. It should be fascinating discussion.

It took forever, but I finally got through the second revision of the story I was working on. Now I can send it out to my editors, who will hopefully turn it around very quickly, as I only have two weeks left before it's due. The second revision, where I read the story aloud and see how it sounds, is one of the most important revisions I do with a story. The result is way more satisfactory than what I get when I don't do that revision. For an example, compare Eyes in the Shadow, on which I didn't perform the second revision, with A Phoenix in Darkness, on which I did. Now, I like the story in Eyes in the Shadow, but I feel the writing in A Phoenix in Darkness is much betther.

Now that I've got it done, I can get back to the debate, where I haven't responded to Skeptic's latest post for a week, and to my regular blogging. At least until I get my readers' comments back and I need to go back to full writing mode for the third revision.

This week's Christian Carnival is up at Psuedopolymath. I submitted the Great Debate to it. I also submitted it to the Carnival of the Vanities, Multiple Mentality's Items of Interest, and the Carnival of the Godless. Are there any I missed?

After all the work that went into getting the First Anniversary Storyblogging Carnival up and getting the debate going, I'm exhausted. Plus I still have a lot of work to do in order to finish the story I'm trying to write. I think the rest of the week's going to be a bit slow, blogging-wise. But really, given the sheer amount of material that's been posted in the last few days, I think a break is in order.

The latest Christian Carnival is up at Technogypsy.