Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

There is a time for everything,
    and a season for every activity under the heavens:
    a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to uproot,
    a time to kill and a time to heal,
    a time to tear down and a time to build,
    a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    a time to mourn and a time to dance,
    a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
    a time to search and a time to give up,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,
    a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,
    a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.
What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him.

• Ecclesiastes 3:1-14

“Humans live in time … therefore …attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself and to the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity … In it alone freedom and actuality are offered.
…
“The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time-for the Past is frozen and no longer flows and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.
“Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the Future. Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead.
“… With the present … there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell.”

• C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter XV)

To clear things up, I am well into the Eastern Time Zone in the USA.  I would have to drive hours to reach the Central Time Zone.  That said, I have flown to Chicago and the flight only took half an hour, taking account of the hour time change.  That’s nothing in that the last time that I returned from Beijing to Chicago, I arrived an hour and a half before the plane took off.

No, the three time zones that I am referring to is the present, and the time in which the stuff I am now writing will come out (presently in roughly three weeks, but I have been sick and unable to write daily lately – okay, three weeks ago).

Before I get to the third time, that parenthetical issue is part of my mental stress.  This post should come out on Easter Monday, or the Monday after Easter Sunday.  It has been a long time since I got a day off for Easter Monday since most USA companies recognize Good Friday instead.  So, when I talk about my health issues, I have either added a post into the middle of a full schedule or I am talking about a few weeks ago.  I do that without apology when I am taking a trip.  You do not want to identify to the world that your house is empty, but it is okay to talk about it having been empty three or four weeks ago.  Not that the crooks that may live very close to this house really want old books, crafting supplies, and junk.

But the third time where my thoughts reside is in the near future.  I have written and rewritten a short story scheduled to appear on 20 August for over a month now.  Having been sick and the day-to-day stuff taking priority, I am only a couple of pages into the story.  I got really interested in a story arc about a year ago, and writing ahead to that extent allows me to set the work aside.  Then when it is time to schedule that fictional story, I can read the story as a third party.  Otherwise, I could easily miss a glaring error.  The red and blue lines do not catch everything.

But that adds complexity to the near future writing in that I have three weekly fictional stories, all from the big city of Tracy.  The Babs and Harold stories have only done one crossover episode since Deviled Yeggs wanted Harold to assist with the Feeding Homeless at Tracy (the FHAT) mission.  At this point, I do not think I have the acronym defined on any of the three parallel stories.  The other is more dynamic and crosses over weekly, Stinker’s Sunday school class.  At least one character in the Sunday school class is going to be a part of the Wednesday short story – a story I wrote months ago.

Continuity is important.  Each of these story lines run in parallel time to real time.  The Turtle team visits the Gulf (of Mexico or of America) to get information firsthand of an approaching hurricane.  That is tough in that I write the story in the Spring or even late Winter.  I write humor into the story, but then six months later a real storm hits roughly in the same place with great devastation.  I might avoid some of the jokes if I wrote the story real time.  I might avoid the story altogether.  But it makes no sense to have storm chasers chasing a blizzard in July.  January is more like it.

But as I write one arc six-months ahead, I leave myself notes when new characters have said they wanted to attend Stinker’s Sunday school class.  And I have had to go back to modify some of those stories.  It confuses things even more when a story coming out on Wednesday morning talks about just having come back from church.

For those who are not familiar with continuity in a story line, there are people on movie and television sets whose only job is to make sure that when the actor comes back from a break, he is wearing the same clothing, the scar is in the same place, his hair is tousled in the same way.  I have seen a commercial about an actress who runs after a man on horseback.  The director stops the filming to have her clothing muddied.  Then stops the filming again to throw mud in the actress’ face.  Then they stop filming for lunch.  If this was a real movie, the makeup artists would have to reapply the mud exactly in the same pattern that had been filmed before lunch.

A lack of continuity would have the detective wearing a blue hat and two pens in his pocket and then two seconds later it is a brown hat and only one pen in the pocket, etc.  Where did he change in the process of interviewing a suspect?

So, in maintaining three times in my head, I have made a few little mistakes.  For example, introducing a new character in Stinker’s class before Pink Lady suggests on Wednesday that they should attend.  Sometimes, it gets too complicated and I let it slide, but 99% of the time, I am editing like crazy.

And then for the present, the blog calendar is pretty full.  If current events need to be discussed, I usually end up with three posts in a day.

But these are the problems that I have gotten myself into.  I love what I do, but if you are wondering who on earth a new character is in one of the short stories…  Wait a few days.  I might have missed that error.

And my apologies, I have Lt. Yeggs in charge of all detectives with my St. Patrick’s Day story but that does not happen in the Wednesday morning arc for a few months.  If intrigued, you will find out soon why that happened.

And whether serious writing or having fun, I do it all to God’s Glory.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.