Webnovel or No?

I have a bit of a dilemma. You see, I want to do a webnovel, but I also don’t want to just give away my ideas for free. There are novels that I am working on, one series in particular, that I plan on sending to agents and publishing houses, but I have other ideas that may even work better as serials. Unfortunately, many magazines I have seen don’t publish serials, so the only real way to get a serial published is to do it on the internet, when you control the publishing of it.

So, the question is if there is a purpose for any kind of free content, and if there is any reason it may be a good idea. Personally, I’m okay with one of my stories being produced for free, but I’ve tried that before and ended up with a crappy story, because honestly, it was, and I ran out of ideas because I hadn’t written before putting any of it up.

If I do put a serial online, I plan on writing all or most of the story before I do. Even then, there will be other things that I put up with it. It can’t just be simply posting the story and hoping people will read it. If that’s the case, it needs to be the best darn story that it could possibly be, and that’s not the best thing to count on.

Now, I’m not saying I won’t be trying to make it the best darn story it can possibly be, but with the tools I have at my disposal, there are more things I can do. First of all, I need to make sure that the page I post it on is interesting, not just a simple background offered by whatever blog I use. I need to make sure it’s designed so that people want to actually look at the computer screen long enough to read it. Second, I need to get people to actually want to pay for it. Unfortunately, even if it is the best story people have read, they won’t want to pay for it if they can just go on the website and read it.

My idea is to publish the story and then offer print-on-demand publishing for books in what’s becoming more commonly known as “dead-tree format”. Now, I realize that a lot of people still wouldn’t pay for a book if the story is online, but still, it’s better than nothing.

This wouldn’t be a way to actually get a lot of income, but more for the personal satisfaction of publishing a story and possibly, maybe getting a few dollars from it. I would still write my main projects and send them to major publishers to try to get them into bookstores.

Any ideas on how to make a webnovel work?

I Want to Love

I have heard people say, even from the pulpit, that God does not need us. Either that, or they asked whether or not God needs us, and then say that we cannot know the answer. I find the very desire to ask this question insulting, not just to myself, but to God. If I say that God needs me, or any other person in this world, then I am placing myself on the level of God by making myself indispensible. To say that God needs us is to say that He cannot bear life without us, which gives us power over the world, if not by our action, then by our existence, thus making us gods. While Jesus even quotes the Psalm that says, “I have said you are gods,” (Psalm 82:6) this is not to say that God needs us.

However, to say that God does not need us is to denigrate mankind as being unnecessary. As Man (in the general, “mankind” sense) was made in the image of God, to denigrate Man is to insult the image of God. Insulting the image of God is the same as insulting God. Now, I know that Man is fallen, but we’re talking about the act of making us. Why would God make something He didn’t need? The people who say that God does not need us have answered me as saying that He made the world because he loves us.

Why would you love someone who has not yet been created? If you love someone, doesn’t that mean you need them? I’m not going to go further with saying whether or not God needs us because, as I’ve said, I find the concept insulting. Besides, it’s pointless. Not to say that people don’t, but I have rarely heard anyone talk in a sermon about loving God. Sure, they’ll quote the Scripture about “Love the Lord your God with all your heart,” but will they go further? I’ve heard more about forsaking sin, living righteously and not using instrumental music in worship than actually loving God.

I suffer from general depression. I have had people tell me that is sin, because it means I do not have enough faith in God, and that all I need to do is believe. “Rejoice in the Lord always” (Phil. 4:4) is not a commandment that makes us sin if we break it. It is an exhortation for us to rejoice. Yes, living in depression is often caused by sin, arrogant bitterness in my case, but there are also chemical reasons that cause it. I happen to have those too.

How can I rejoice in someone I don’t understand. I grew up in a church that said spiritual things don’t happen in this world, like miracles. I always heard that God doesn’t talk to us except through the words of the Bible, that His work in the world is finished except through what we do. I have even seen a preacher (not at my church growing up) finish out a sermon by having someone lead the song “God Has No Hands but Our Hands.” What the Flutie Flakes is that supposed to mean? How can the hand of God be made so impotent by people who claim to believe in Him?

People may say they obey God, but obedience does not equal love. It’s like a cliff with a smooth glass face and a slide going down. Obedience is at the bottom, and that’s where the Sea of Righteousness is, with a boat to go out on it, but Love is at the top of the cliff, where you have to slide down to get to obedience. You can get to obedience from love, but you can’t get back up. Likewise, love without obedience is nothing, but that’s not the point of this one. People focus on that point so often, it’s lost what love really means.

What is love? What is hope? I have heard that faith is the simple choice to believe, but I cannot bring myself to do that in the face of so much confusion. I have heard little talk of hope, so I’m not even sure what that means. People define love by saying I Corinthians 13, not quoting it, mind you, but saying the words, “First Corinthians Thirteen.” That is trite and meaningless. It shows that the person does not really understand what the chapter means, or else they would be able to explain it.

If this offends you, think before you respond. Think why it offends you. I am speaking to no one. I am accusing no one. I am judging no one. Yes, I have said people are wrong, but they were ignorant and not stupid. They were ignorant and not willingly disobedient or unloving. Ignorant simply means uninformed, and I am not blaming them, because that’s not my place. Besides, it would not be the loving thing to do, and I have done the exact same thing that I am saying they did, even defining love by the number of a Bible chapter.

I want to love God. I do want that. I don’t know exactly what it means, other than to revel in His glory, search after Him everyday, every moment of every day, to devote my life and my work to Him, whether it’s writing a post about Him or something so mundane as cooking Walmart brand spaghetti for my wife. I still face the arrogance and bitterness that I mentioned earlier, but I want that gone.

This isn’t about whether God needs me or whether God has power in the world. God does have power, and I have seen it work in the fact that I am still alive when I came extremely close to death five years ago, and it doesn’t matter if God needs me or not. He loves me, and I love God. My love is weak and broken, but that’s okay. His is better, and will always be.

What is it all about?

As I write this, I am laying on my belly in my bed at a quarter after three in the morning. Why? Because I can’t sleep. When I got married, I knew my wife was a night owl, so it’s not too much of a surprise that, even though I’m somewhat sleepy, she’s not tired in the least. It doesn’t really bother me, since I know we’ll be working on getting to bed at reasonable hours when we go back to school in a few months.

We had been homeless for a while, until we came to where we’re living in Alabama right now, and even that was more of a temporary shelter than a home. Some friends of ours were going to sell us this single-wide, but with me on SSI and her unable to find work in this rural area, we really need to go back to school and try to at least finish Bachelor’s degrees.

I’ll say right off the bat that I may not ever write another posting of this blog, but I’ll sure try. You see, I’ve had trouble with that before, mostly because my blogs ended up as pretentious rambling about philosophy and things I liked to to think I knew something about. As it is, I’ve had trouble lately trying to reconcile the idea of a loving God with the concept that my life has been as hard as it’s felt.

Coming down with lupus just as I was starting to get my goals in life figured out, and just after I got engaged, was kind of tough to handle. Then, spending the next four and a half years in a forced separation from my fiancée, all the while trying desperately not to lose my mind to the demons playing around in there nearly destroyed me. After that, I went to California, dropped a hundred and forty pounds and nearly broke from the strain of a bunch of other stuff that happened there, and finally wound up homeless with my fiancée, who was my wife by that time. So here I am in Alabama, going back to Arkansas in a week and a half, living on $674 a month for the two of us.

Why would God allow this to happen? I don’t ask why God would do this to me, because I really don’t think that God makes bad stuff happen to us. He does allow it, which some people say is the same thing as doing it to us. God allowed me to get lupus, which is extremely rare in a man, much less a young, white man, but God did not give me lupus. I came to the realization about two weeks ago that my perspective, while getting better, was still dangerously awry, and if I had continued in my educational plan at that time, then I would have practically fled from God.

As it stands, I want to go back with something better in mind. I am going back with something better in mind. My stability may have been shot in fighting for my own sanity, but that’s because my stability was previously based on my own self. He allowed it to happen because my foundation was not on Him. He allowed me to be hurt because I hadn’t been asking Him to keep me from that kind of hurt. I didn’t even care.

I grew up with a very shallow faith, and I still have one. I had always heard that faith meant belief, plain and simple. That’s a flat-out inaccuracy. I won’t call it a lie, because that’s reserved for when the teller knows it’s false. Faith is more than just believing something when you have no other reason to believe it. We’re supposed to be able to give an answer for why we believe, but I’ve heard the answer, “I have faith,” as the answer.

Saying “I have faith,” as an answer to believe is the same as saying, “I believe because I believe, and I believe because I choose to believe.” I have never had a reason to believe in God except for not wanting to go to Hell, which makes no sense if you don’t know why you should believe God is real. Then, I saw some really freaky things that proved to me that there was a spiritual world, and that Hell was real. So therefore, since the world is not tearing itself apart, no matter how chaotic it may seem, there must be something better than Hell.

That’s where I was coming from a while ago, even before I went homeless. I lost just about everything before I came to that realization. It may be surprising to know that I saw those freaky events even before I lost my mind, and the knowledge that there was something more than this world kept me from taking myself out of it.

Some might ask why I’m talking about this for all to see on the Internet, but it’s something that I really believe I need to get out. The problem with all my other blogs was that I always felt that there was something I couldn’t talk about, and that the something was what was actually going on with me. Here, I’m just going to talk about what’s on my mind, like most people who do this sort of thing.

I won’t say I don’t have an agenda with this, however, since I do. As the name says, I’m hunting Heaven. I will continue to have faith in God, but I’m trying to make that more of a complete, healthy faith than just the kind that says, “I believe because I break down into a complete, incomprehensible wreck when I don’t.” Granted, it’s true, but I want it more than that.

Anyway. It’s almost four in the morning, and I need to get this finished so I can get some rest.