In the lesson this week I watched a talk by Elder David A Bednar titled The Spirit of Revelation. In it he discussed the different forms of revelation to include dreams, visions, messengers, and inspiration. About these forms of revelation he indicated that there are two primary ways they come to us.

The first way is that the revelation is received immediately similar to how a room is completely lit up as soon as we turn the light on. He said that this form of revelation is rare.

The second way revelation is received is more gradual. He compared this way to the gradual increase of light as the sun rises in the morning. He said this form of revelation is more common.

In class we have a project called the becoming project which helps us learn more about a Christ like attribute and to incorporate that attribute into our lives. I chose an attribute that is not in the common list of attributes. Mine is Christs perfect communication with Godhead. He always understood communications from God perfectly and he knew how to pray. I feel a lack of this in my life and so made this my becoming project.

After hearing this talke from Elder Bednar I realized that the real focus of my becoming project was on receiving and understanding immediate revelations. The type he said was rare. I have not and will not abandon my project simply because he says what I seek is rare.

This leads me to question. Why is it rare? Is it rare simply because it is supposed to be? Or is it rare because few people do what is required to get it? I am of the opinion it is that latter question. It requires a lot of time, study, practice, faith, and desire to get to the point where you can receive immediate revelation.

Nephi in the Book of Mormon achieved this before becoming a prophet. This tells me it is not reserved just for prophets. I have had two such incidents in my life with one of them happening a week or two ago. For me, for now, it does seem rare. I believe that I am close to making it be not so rare for me. Close being the operative word here and too me, meaning within a year or two. Possibly months.

Tender Mercies of the Lord

Since it has been a while since I posted to my blog and as way of introduction to what I am going to post I want to explain a little bit first. A couple weeks ago I started two university classes that are part of the Pathway program which is sponsored by BYU-Idaho. It is a one year program at the end of which I plan to matriculate at BYU-Idaho and get one of their four year online degrees.

One of my classes is a religious course. We are studying the first half of the Book of Mormon. One of the assignments this week is called putting it all together and one of the options in there is to post to a blog what I have learned this week. So I am posting to my existing blog.

I was very impressed by what I read in the directed study shared at the Pathway gathering this past Thursday. My group used option 2 titled Tender Mercies of the Lord. When I first read part B it didn't quite make sense and I was thinking that wasn't part of mercy. I reread it and soon understood. It says that tender mercies is described as "personal and individualized blessings, strength, protection, assurance, guidance, deliverance, loving kindness,consolation, support, and spiritual gifts."

When I read strength that is where I become confused as I didn't and still don't see exactly how strength is a tender mercy of the Lord. Of course if Jesus grants me strength then I see how that can be a mercy but I was thinking more of strength beyond what is normal for me.

I never thought of assurance, loving kindness, consolation, and spiritual gifts as being part of the tender mercy of the Lord.

My daughter just turned on her music in her room which is beside me and I got up to tell her to turn it down. Too me, it is a tender mercy that she actually turned it off. I let her know that I was doing my class work. The music she put on would have become a distraction.

I look forward to learning more about the tender mercies of the Lord.

I'm back?

I noticed today that it has been over a year since I posted anything and this blog was meant to be part of my effort to create an online presence for myself before I published my book. Of course, I figured I would have the novel (Dragon Claws Rage) published already, but that hasn't happened yet. I haven't quite given up on the novel but with the effort to get it published have seen and understood things I didn't before. I now begin to see more clearly why many writers say that your first novel usually should not be published. I thought I was already past that step though, since some ten or more years ago I wrote a novel which I never published. I think I was wrong.

I've received favorable feed back from many people. I don't want to write just a good book, but a book people will want to read over and over again. So far Dragon Claws Rage is not that book. It lacks a lot of things, including character depth. Beta readers are not in a hurry to finish it. That tells me a lot. Good chapters do not over come bad ones. Bad ones lose the readers interest and then they never read the other good chapters that come later in the book. Character's without enough difficulties and challenges also don't help.

This past February an idea for a new story came to me. I find it interesting that I spent three months planning before I started writing this novel. One of the things that held me back was the nagging issue of character depth. Then I realized I actually had three or four characters that were very well developed from my youth when I played with action figures and ones that I began using again when my children were young. And so I overlaid these personalities over the main characters and now there is more to them than just some individual stats. Progress is much slower with this novel and I think it is because I don't have everything planned out yet. Maybe I shouldn't have started it yet.

We'll see if I am more consistent this time around. It may be time to retire this blog and/or start a new one when I am ready to be more committed to it. And it could well be that I am talking to cyber air since this blog has been inactive so long.

I Started Learning To Sail

For many years I've had a desire to learn to sail. Until a couple weeks ago it was only a desire. On 22 May 2012, I went sailing with a friend in a race and enjoyed i so much I looked for other opportunities to sail and found them. I went sailing on the 24th and the 26th and the 30th. The people I've been sailing with have been helpful and patient with me as I learn the terminology and how to sail and have been teaching me a lot.

I go to the Washington Sailing Marina which is near the National Airport and sail from there. I'm hoping to meet many people who enjoy sailing and be welcomed to go with them as one of their crew until I have my own boat (probably will be years before that happens) so that I can go out whenever I want.

I'm still trying to figure out just what about sailing has me so mesmerized that I'm consumed with seeking out opportunities to get on a sail boat and help sail it. I like learning about sailing and how different angles affect the speed and motion of the boat and the challenge of figuring it out so that I understand it better.

Dragons

Dragons have fascinated me for a long time. I've especially enjoyed the dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey and also those by her son Todd McCaffrey. In the book I'm writing I've tried not to copy things I read in their books but of course there will be similarities.

Some of my dragons have telepathy. Others don't. My dragons were created magically and no natural equivalent existed before powerful magic users made them. Each color has distinct abilities and different breath weapons. I'll give some detail about many of them without giving away everything as I feel some of it is better left to discovery while reading the book.

Gold dragons breath fire and have no problem using this against people that get in their way. White dragons have a chill breath that freezes air and the water in the air as well as adding enough substance to encase someone in ice or at the very least give them hypothermia very fast. Silver dragons send out an ultra sonic blast when they open their mouth that can pulverize just about anything. Blue dragons breath out noxious fumes that is similar to tear gas. And then of course my dragons can cast spells and have other magical abilities.

For the above mentioned dragons, one of their main enemies is the red dragon, largest of all the dragons. They breath fire like the gold do, but the similarity ends there. Their abilities are mental and they are more intelligent than the gold and green dragons. They live on a different continent than the other dragons until the time they decide to move in and begin fighting against the others who are coming out of their long period of hiding.

I've been thinking about dragon flight speeds recently and trying to decide what they should be. I am thinking that the ride-able sized ones should have a normal flying speed of 50 miles per hour. When pursuing they can go as fast as 70 MPH and of course faster when diving or when flying with the wind. I mostly needed to figure this out so as to get flying times consistent in my novel as I have found a problem right now that seems like it took them too long to arrive somewhere. I feel it also makes sense to allow them to be able to fly two to four days straight without sleeping and without stopping but that is subject to change at this point.

With my dragons if they are out to get you and can see you, you are in trouble. They have things far more devastating and greater range than their breath weapons.

In my world these dragons want to live in peace along side human and elf nations and so don't go out of their way to hurt them. In fact their creators actually created plants and trees that give them a much better food supply than any living thing could and they tend to eat those things. So as my dragon's go about forming their nation, building defenses, and planning for the worst they try to avoid killing people. Then finally an alliance of enemy nations make them mad enough and the dragons unleash a massive assault the like of which has never before been seen in my world.

The main characters are humans that the dragons magically enhanced before they were born. One was raised by a silver dragon and the others were raised by humans with no knowledge of the dragons. When enemies launch a surprise attack and begin to track down their enhanced humans, now teenagers, the dragons are forced to recall them early. Humans who help the dragons care for the plants and animals in their forests are called foresters in my novel.

Time Travel

I seem to be spending a lot of time thinking about time travel and often try to figure out how to use time travel in my stories. Even the story I am working on which is high fantasy was going to have some time travel in it. Those scenes never made it into the story and likely won't. I'll have to leave it for another story.

In my way of thinking with my belief in God I doubt we will ever be able to time travel. This doesn't stop me from dreaming about it and writing stories about it. If time travel were possible I am of the belief that we couldn't change the past as all we would accomplish is being a part of that past even if history hadn't recorded our part in it.

So if someone were to try to prevent the assassination of president Abraham Lincoln they would fail because they did fail as we all remember that he was assassinated. One scenario that would work is if a switch took place but in that case the real Abraham Lincoln went into hiding or was whisked away to some other time, never to return.

I do not like the multiple dimensions or alternate realities themes or that if you were the time traveler you would remember how it was but everyone else would not. It seems to me that if technology can be used to time travel that there still would only be this one earth with the people on it and that no matter how hard one tries you couldn't really change the past.

This wouldn't mean I couldn't go back in time and interact with people. I could even by stocks in a company I knew would be around in my time. I could buy coins I knew would become valuable. I'm a coin collector and would try to get some 1909 S VDB coins along with gold coins. The way I see it if I did that, it already happened, and so I didn't change anything. However, up until the time I traveled back in time I probably wouldn't know about the stocks nor where the coins I'd bought were stored. Most likely I'd just bring them back with me to the future and cash out. Of course, if everyone could do this then we'd probably be living in a much more chaotic time now than we currently have.

I started this morning by tweeting about time traveling with this tweet: If you could time travel, when and where would you go? Why? To be honest, I am trying to find ways to make friends on twitter and through this blog besides simply tweeting every follower I have and asking you want to be my friend. It's not the same as having a good conversation about things that interest us. So I posed that question.

I can answer it better here with more than 140 characters. I am sure I would travel back in time as well as go to the future. I know one of my first, if not first trip, would be to go to the future and see if there was a colony or exploration trips to the moon or Mars and see if I could get on one of them. I might have to do some traveling to the past to buy things I knew would bring me wealth in the future so that I would have the money to get on an expedition.

I would likely give some serious thought to see if there were any way to fix my failed marriage before it failed, but that would only be if I believed the past could be changed - although that might be the thing I tried to change even if I were convinced that it wasn't possible.

Also I would go back in time to meet and talk with Jesus before his crucifixion. That I'm sure would be a very interesting conversation, especially as I would expect him to know I was from the future.

I think if time travel were something that I could do on a regular basis, whenever I wanted to, I'd end up using it too much to extend my days so that I could get more done which would have the effect of shortening my life span because I'd be living for say 48 hours in a 24 hour time period because I'd be in the same 24 hour period of time more than once in different places. I don't think I'd want to meet and talk to myself and that is one area that boggles my mind as to how such an encounter would play out.

Too Many Changes?

It seems in a short span of time many changes have come to me. Some, perhaps all, are my own fault - in one way or another. I often feel I have too little control over the changes and wish I could have nice long periods of time where everything just went smoothly and I could move peacefully along with my life. It seems that won't happen in my life, who knows, it might be boring. I'd like to give it a try anyway.

It seems since school for my four children has started (first week of September) that my writing time has vanished. I find I write best in the mornings when I am refreshed from a good nights rest. I thought to be able to write in the morning after dropping off my oldest, Willem, at seminary. That didn't happen as my third oldest, Liem, doesn't want to walk to the bus stop alone. It is good that I am getting more time to talk with each of my children one on one, but has been horrible for my writing. I thought to be able to commute using slug lines (instant carpools) and the subway which would have allowed me to write on a lap top for about two to three hours per day, including an hour or so in the morning. That didn't happen because by the time the bus comes for my second oldest, Adonis, it's already 7 AM and then I have to drop off Sharleen at day care. By that time the lot I would go to is full and there are no more people waiting to pick up passengers so they can go in the high occupancy vehicle lanes.

I hope this doesn't sound like I am complaining, just explaining how things are going for me. If I'm extremely best one of you who reads this will have a suggestion that will work for me on how to make time to write. I'm currently on the second draft of my story which goes very well when I actually sit down and work on it. In the evenings when I get home there is too much noise and/or I don't feel like writing and so I just sit on the computer and play games, the latest distraction there is Minecraft. Part of my problem these days after work is that I feel too tired to work on my story. Maybe that is a psychological change that I need to change again.

As for the story itself, I've made some fundamental changes that tighten it up and make it flow better. Unfortunately, by writing a couple minor characters out of the story it leaves some trickle effect changes that I have to fix because they are no longer included in the story. Plus I managed to find a way to change a chapter I liked to make it fit better and help the story along instead of it getting cut from the story. I would have cut it if it came to that, but I think this works better. It too, is causing trickle effect changes in the beginning chapters of my story.

On a brighter note, Amanda is making good progress with the cover for my book. At first I was worried that my book would be ready for publication before the cover was ready which is why I found a cover artist earlier. Well, now I think she'll have the cover ready months before I have the novel ready, unless I can etch out of my schedule time to revise on a regular basis. Hasn't happened yet, but could happen any day now. It could be as simple as needing a goal just as I had goals until I finished the first draft. I did have other goals after that and they were working fine until my schedule got thrown out of whack by the start of school and adjustments to my commute schedule not working the way I had hoped.

For those who read this please share what has worked for you to make writing time when you have to manage a household (I'm single), children (I have custody of my four children ages 16 to 10.), full time job, and three hour commute. I seem to get many ideas of what to write and how to write it but draw a blank when figuring out when I can write.