Finished reading: Assassin’s Quest by Robin Hobb
I cannot express my despair at the end of this book. As soon as I saw where the ending was headed, I didn’t want to keep reading and nearly put the book down. Kudos to the author, I guess, …
Reading
How to Take Smart Notes
Sönke Ahrens
books
versenotes
A few weeks ago, I published Why Does Daniel Go By His Hebrew Name, But His Friends Go By Their Chaldean Names?.
Tonight, I was looking through old Twitter threads (as you do), and found the original: I first tweeted that thought on March 27, 2018. …
I do not enjoy playing sysadmin for VerseNotes. On the other hand, I do enjoy paying very little for my hosting plan. This is a conundrum.
(Context: certbot renew failed. I had to manually restart nginx and re-run. I don’t know why.)
Latest travel saga over. Spent more than two hours on the tarmac in Charlotte waiting for them to figure out a water issue. They even tried power cycling the entire aircraft. Eventually they gave up and loaded on more water and hand sanitizer.
So we …
The current plan for the maintenance problem for the airplane I am in is literally “turn it off and back on again.”
Amazing.
Eventually I will get home. ✈️
Our flight from Dayton back to San Antonio was delayed from 12:30 to 3:30, then 5, then 7. We rebooked and drove to Cincinnati to catch a route through Charlotte instead of our original layover in Dallas.
Our flight to Charlotte left 20 minutes late …
books
Finished reading: Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros.
I went into this book thinking it was more YA fantasy. And it is! A special girl goes to school where her mom is in charge, and she learns she’s even more special than she thought! The small-town …
Finished watching: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024).
Super fun homage to the original. Keaton is surprisingly adept, Catherine O’Hara is just about perfect, and Jenna Ortega continues to do Jenna Ortega things.
Not a perfect movie, but hilarious and …
Book nine of nine is ready to go!
The work doesn’t stop here, but it’s a good milestone on which to end the weekend. Back at it tomorrow.
Book eight of nine is ready to go!
I might actually make it through all of them this weekend. One left… it’s not the longest, but it’s definitely the most difficult.
Book seven of nine is ready to go!
Throughout this editing process, I’ve had a lot of work to do. But this one required almost no updates; for some reason, my penultimate draft was already pretty dang good.
Book number six of nine ready to go!
As always, a bit slower than hoped-for, but other things are getting done today. And now it’s time to be lazy and watch football.
Book number five of nine ready to go!
I’m getting faster as I get into the rhythm of editing. (And yes, obviously, these books are short; book five is 3,200 words without frontmatter or backmatter. But there are a lot of them…)
Book number four of nine ready to go!
My stretch goal is to get them all ready by Monday, but there’s football this afternoon, so I may not quite get there…
versenotes
The Other Nebo
In the rolls of the families that first returned to Judah from Babylon, Nehemiah lists “the men of the other Nebo” (v33) and “the sons of the other Elam” (v34).
The weird part is that there is no first Nebo or first Elam in …
It took more time than I wanted tonight, but book 3 is edited and ready to go. Even has a fun cover image made from a photograph I took in Montserrat, Spain.
Six more books to go in this first batch.
versenotes
Five more chapters tonight; progress meter up from 25.2% to 25.7%.
I’m working on Judges, one of the most frustrating—and yet relatable—books. Every time Israel descends again into apostasy, you want to scream, “Not again!” And then …
Meera and I were talking about the definition of ska on the last trip to the lake, and today I randomly had a brief clip of a Mighty Mighty Bosstones song jump into my head.
I couldn’t quite place it, but I searched my library for likely songs and …
versenotes
“Remember for my good, O my God, all that I have done for this people.” Nehemiah 5:19 ESV
Nehemiah could not have known how spectacularly God would answer his prayer. The good he did is remembered in his own words throughout time and …
Today is the first time I’ve been on top of the leaderboard for any of the Lex.games, however briefly. I’m not signed in so you have to trust me, but I’m the “Undisclosed Strategist” with a time of 26 seconds.
Which will inevitably be beaten, and …
versenotes
That was an exhausting study/writing session, but I’ve completed chapter 300 of 1189 (25.2%).
Only 54 more sessions that hard to go, and I’ll be done!
(Writing. I’ll be done writing. Editing and publishing are another matter.)
Since I now have an actual chapter-count target (1,189), I feel like I should build a Brandon Sanderson-esque completion meter somewhere. But that would entail more procrastination and less writing, and I’m trying to write more.
So I’ll …
versenotes
Things I never noticed: the night of the transfiguration is the first time we see Moses in the Promised Land. He finally made it!
(Via a post on r/Bible this morning)
After a hard weekend of drinking beer at the lakewriting and editing, I’m reasonably confident I have two books ready to go, of the nine whose contents are done.
But every little step makes the next one easier.
Writing an About the Author page is surprisingly challenging. How do you distill yourself into a hundred words that simultaneously introduce you, provide bona fides, amuse the reader, and point them toward your other works?
I’m pretty sure I …