Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

We’re continuing to critique first paragraphs of my loyal blog readers which were posted here as comments a couple of days ago. Yesterday, we critiqued Patty and John, and there was a question worth answering from a reader today on that:

Andra asked:

I have a small comment. I found starting with 2nd person then jumping to 3rd person a bit jarring. Maybe that was the intent?

Randy sez: The first sentence was the following:

Balancing a live goat on the back of your bicycle has its challenges

This is not actually second person. Instead it’s simply an observation that is a truism, and using this form is common. We are zooming in to the POV character from the author’s POV, so this actually is in danger of being authorial intrusion. I’m OK with it however, since it’s fairly common to do this at the very beginning of a novel. Janey Austen did it in Pride and Prejudice, and it still works, as long as you keep it short. I think it works here, which is what really matters.

Now, let’s critique Camille. Here is her first paragraph:

Ian MacLean nearly escaped.

He made it to the edge of the lamp-lit street with only four hard strides bridging the gap between him and his freedom: Maggie’s farm truck. Even in the pallid streetlight, his Granny’s old rattletrap never looked so good.

“That’s far enough!”

Randy sez: This is a pretty strong opening. The first sentence hooks us right away in only four words, telling us who the POV character is and setting up the first part of this scene by telling us in advance that Ian is going to fail. That’s normally a little dicey, but you have to jumpstart a story somehow, and it’s common to “cheat” a little at the beginning.

However, I think Camille is “cheating” a bit too long. We need to know pretty quickly who or what he’s escaping from, and we don’t. The modern reader is impatient. You can hook her curiosity and make her ask “Huh?” but you are not allowed to be coy with her. If Ian is “escaping” then we need to know (from within his POV) what he’s escaping from. We don’t need the whole meal, of course, but a little snack would be good.

OK, so Ian is striding along, which is good, but now we get two more characters introduced in quick succession: Maggie and Grannie. Or are Maggie and Grannie the same person? It’s not clear, and clarity is what you need here.

Understand that there is a time and place for being slightly mysterious and obscure. But references to people is not the place, and the first introduction of characters is not the time. We need to know RIGHT NOW how Maggie and Grannie are related.

I’m reminded of an example from an old Writer’s Digest that spoofed a Tom Clancy novel, in which a particular scene had somewhere between 2 and 7 characters. It wasn’t clear, because the author kept calling them “Mr. Smith” and “Chuck” and “the Executive Officer” and so on, all in an apparent attempt to avoid repetition. But lack of clarity is worse than repetition. Clancy often lacked clarity on this score.

Final point: The closing sentence really needs a tag. Is it Ian who speaks? That is the normal convention when you have an unattributed quote–the dialogue is understood to refer to the last character shown in action, (in this case, that’s Ian).

But a moment’s thought immediately tells you it can’t be Ian. Somebody is talking to Ian, and we need to know who it is. Why? Because we barely know this character and we’re confused, and dad-gummit, there are 99,999 other books in Barnes & Noble, and if THIS book is fuzzy and unclear, well the one next to is likely to be better. So that first paragraph better be a snapper.

I won’t revise this opening. It’s quite strong, but it needs a bit of sharpening to bring it into focus. I will say that I read the first 20 pages of this book on the plane coming home from my last writing conference, and I thought it was stellar writing. So it sharpens up pretty quickly. Good job, Camille! Go ahead and post your revision here if you get it sharpened up.

Now, we’ll turn to Daan’s submission:

11 February 1990 - Thousands of people were gathered outside the gates of Victor Verster Prison just outside Paarl, a town surrounded by the vineyards of the Western Cape. The air was filled with excitement and anticipation as Nelson Mandela was about to be released after he was sent to prison 27 years ago.

Randy sez: I’m delighted to see that Daan is writing what he knows. Daan lives in South Africa. It makes great sense to write a novel about one of the most influential South Africans of all time–Nelson Mandela. At least, I hope Nelson is a key character in this novel. Since this is all I’ve seen, I’m going to guess that he is.

First point that needs rethinking: This paragraph is “telling.” One can get away with “telling” if it is excellent. See the beginning of A TALE OF TWO CITIES or HARRY POTTER #1 or countless other books that start off with a fresh and new way of “telling.” But this example isn’t.

How can Daan improve this? There are a thousand ways to “tell.” Here are a couple:

Focus on Place. One simple way is to focus on interesting and unique details in the place itself. The scene in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS in which Clarice Starling visits Hannibal Lecter is a prime example, in which the prison comes alive in stark detail. Tom Wolfe brought the world of aeronautical engineering alive in THE RIGHT STUFF by doing this also–beautifully rendered detail.

Focus on Character. See Book #1 of Harry Potter, in which J.K. Rowling spends the first page telling about the horrible Dursleys. By the bottom of the page, when you discover that they have a secret that they’re terrified people will learn, you want nothing more than for that secret to make Time Magazine.

Personally, I prefer not to start with telling. OK, honestly, I do it all the time myself, but then I kick myself and fix it in the second draft or the fourteenth, or whenever it is that the fumes of the first draft fade away and I realize that I’m fooling myself and really I should have started this book by showing, instead.

So if this were my novel, I’d focus in on one person in that crowd, show us what he sees, make us hear what he sees, make us feel what he feels. Within a few paragraphs, I’d let my reader know what my POV characters desperately wants. I’d show why he can’t have it, and isn’t likely to get it. And the story would be launched.

That’s what I’d do. Daan, what are you going to do? I’ll be interested to see if you can turn this from “telling” into “showing.”

Tax Day is behind us!

To celebrate that happy event, I’m running one of my
rare 24-Hour Specials on all my fiction-teaching
products. See if you can spot the pattern:

* Fiction 101: 50 percent off
* Fiction 201: 50 percent off
* Public Speaking: 50 percent off
* Strategic Planning: 50 percent off
* The Snowflake Method: 50 percent off
* Writing SuperArticles: 50 percent off
* Writers Conference Survival Guide: 50 percent off

Why is everything 50 percent off?

To find out why, click here:
www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com/links/24.php

All good things must come to an end. This 24-Hour
Special will run from midnight to midnight, Pacific
Time, April 17, 2008.

This deadline will be strictly enforced.

Yesterday, I challenged you, my loyal blog readers, to submit the first paragraph of your novel. Right now, there are about 72 comments piled up, so I’m going to start working through them and critiquing them in order. Today, we’ll look at Patty’s and John’s submissions:

Patty wrote:

Balancing a live goat on the back of your bicycle has its challenges. Tia stood on the pedals and pushed uphill toward the market as the young pygmy bleated and kicked against its bungee straps.

Randy sez: There is a lot to like here. The first sentence is strong because it’s different. You know instantly that this is not a novel about angsty, affluent America. In fact, the novel is set in Togo, Africa, a country Patty knows well. But she doesn’t tell us that right away, which is good. She tells us a small amount of information and then gets straight into showing the action. This is also good.

The second sentence immediately shows us our lead character in action–Tia riding her bike. This is good, because now we know who to root for. It’s always important to show your lead character for the scene as soon as possible. Readers don’t care about the scenery. Readers care about people.

One small issue I see right away is that we don’t know if Tia is a he or a she. I have inside information, so I know that Tia is a girl, but it would be good for Patty to let the reader know that ASAP. “Tia stood on her pedals…” would do the trick.

The other issue I see here is also a small one, but I believe it’s worth pointing out. In the second sentence, we have two characters taking action. One is Tia, the POV character. The other is the goat. I prefer to alternate the active characters by showing them in separate sentences. The reason for this is subtle, and is explained in detail in my article Writing the Perfect Scene, so I’ll leave you to read it there.

Finally, there is a reference to a “pygmy”. Presumably this is a pygmy goat, but there is just a chance that the reader might thing it’s a human pygmy. Not a high chance, but it might be better to make it clear.

I would revise the paragraph just slightly this way:

Balancing a live goat on the back of your bicycle has its challenges. Tia stood on her pedals and pushed uphill toward the market.

The young pygmy goat bleated and kicked against its bungee straps.

Please bear in mind that there are a thousand ways to write a paragraph like this, and it’s not clear which is best. Patty’s was pretty good to start with, so there wasn’t a lot I could do to make it better.

John submitted this entry:

Jeffrey threw the screwed up report at the maglift floor. Another attempt to recreate his experiment, another laboratory explosion. He punched the wall. He had made a successful shunt once. Why couldn’t anyone else?

Randy sez: This starts out pretty strong, with an action sentence. We know right away that our POV character is Jeffrey and that he’s unhappy. That’s good–we’re leading with conflict.

The second sentence is slightly problematic. Is it interior monologue? Sort of, but it doesn’t have the feel of a real person’s thoughts–the language is more formal than most people think. It feels like there is some authorial intrusion here–the author is working in a chance to feed the reader some information. I think it would be stronger here to put it more fully in Jeffrey’s words, and to not be quite so clear. Let the reader know part of the reason for Jeffrey’s frustration, but maybe not the whole thing.

The third sentence reverts to straight action–Jeffrey punches the wall. This tells us clearly he’s frustrated, so this is good.

The fourth and fifth sentences are again a mix of “almost interior monologue” but mixed in with a small amount of “author’s voice”. The key issue I think is this: “He had made a successful shunt once.” When people think about themselves, they usually don’t do it quite this way, in fact-oriented terms. They tend to color it with a bit of emotion.

I’m a little confused here about one thing. It seems that the failed experiment was somebody else’s screw-up, not Jeffrey’s. But we don’t quite know who is responsible. On first reading, I actually thought it was Jeffrey, but now I’m pretty certain that it’s somebody else. Unfortunately, I don’t have anything specific about that somebody else, not even a name, so I’m not quite sure who to be mad at. This is nit-picking, of course. The paragraph has a lot to like.

I don’t have a specific revised version to suggest for this paragraph because I don’t know the answer to a key question: Who screwed up the experiment? If I knew that, then I’d know who Jeffrey is angry at, and the interior monologue would write itself. I don’t think Jeffrey is angry at the situation–he’s angry at the incompetent imbecile who can’t reproduce his experiment.

Again, I’ll add a caveat here that this is just my opinion and there is always a chance I’m wrong.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at the next couple of sample paragraphs that were posted today.

I’ve read all the comments my loyal blog readers have posted today and there were some good ideas there. Here is what I’m going to do:

1) I am closing the topic of one-sentence summaries. We’ve had a good run on this subject, and we’ve all learned a lot. (I’ve learned a lot just by being forced to think analytically about what I already knew intuitively.) However, it’s really time to move on.

2) Iain has created a forum dedicated to the Snowflake method, with two main topics, Step 1 (the one-sentence summary) and Step 2 (the one-paragraph summary). Thanks, Iain! I’ll add that to my blogroll also under the heading “Forums”.

3) As of now, we’ll be switching to critiquing your first paragraphs. Go ahead and post your first paragraph here as a comment. I will critique them in the order they are posted, until we run out of steam on those. I expect we’ll be doing them for at least a week or two.

4) I will think hard about starting a critique service in which I critique a one-sentence summary and first paragraph for about an hour’s pay. Be aware that my hourly rate is outrageously high. The reason, of course, is that I am Xtremely productive and can get a lot done in an hour. I haven’t decided for sure yet about whether I will do this, because my life is exceptionally busy right now, but if I decide to do it, my loyal blog readers will get preferential treatment.

So start your engines, folks! Post the first paragraph of your novel here as a comment. (If your first paragraph is very short, then post the first couple of paragraphs. Shoot for about 50 words.) I’ll start critiquing them tomorrow.

We’ve been discussing one-sentence summaries for the last couple of weeks, and I think we’ll be drawing this topic to a close in the next few days.

Today, I’d like to finish critiquing Laura’s summary sentence, which I started last week (but was unable to finish because I didn’t know the genre). Here is Laura’s latest comment over the weekend:

This will be a Women’s Fiction novel. She is the Controller (Head accountant) of an up and coming “hip” fashion accessory company. When she finds out the charismatic owner is basically a crook and confronts him, he gives her the choice to leave or be fired. She’s bought into the American Dream, not to mention the So. Ca. lifestyle, and finds herself on the street with a tarnished career and major burnout. Chucks it all and decides ambition is way overrated. Decides to go find something to do that she loves instead.

She doesn’t go looking for the job as a groom, just kind of falls into it. As you can imagine, the ranch owner becomes the hero.

Sorry to go on and on, but want everyone to have an idea of the plot.
Please continue to tear up the sentence!

Randy sez: OK, that gives me enough to go on. Here is my suggestion:

“Fired by her crooked boss, an accountant meets her dream man at a dude ranch.”

15 words, 3 characters, 2 plotlines, 1 dude ranch, 1 ranch dude. I think it’ll work. The focus here is on the future–the guy. What do you all think?

Now, let’s look at Gerhi’s one-sentence summary, which we discussed last week also. Gerhi wrote:

“A dorky dad does a gender bender to steal his toddler son from a deranged dimension.”

Randy sez: You do NOT want your lead character to be “dorky”. That’s a non-starter. In another post, Gerhi explained that in going to the mirror dimension, the dad becomes a woman. This has a lot of potential, so let’s backload that at the end of the sentence. I would recommend we make the adjectives on the dad less interesting so as to focus on the gender switch. Here is my suggestion:

“After chasing his toddler son into a mirror universe, a young father discovers that he has become a woman.”

19 words, 2 characters, 2 universes, and 2 crossovers. You might think we’re over the word limit, but 3 of those words are “a” and 8 of those words are 4 letters or less.

An operational issue: Probably 80 to 100 of my loyal blog readers posted one-sentence summaries, and it should be clear that we are never going to get through all of these, especially since new ones keep coming in daily. And the larger problem is that there’s a limit to how much I can improve a sentence in 5 minutes of work. Normally, I spend at least an hour writing a one-sentence summary for my own novels.

I was mulling this problem over the weekend and hit on an idea. For those of you who REALLY need a strong one-sentence summary, maybe I could offer a paid service: one hour of my time to buff up your one-sentence summary to a high polish for a suitable fee. I would have to set the fee high enough to drag me away from my many other worthwhile projects.

Let me know what you think of this idea. I would probably not advertise this service outside the blog for awhile, if ever. For one thing, my loyal blog readers deserve first shot at my limited time. For another, I’m not sure how many one-sentence summaries I can do before becoming completely deranged. I might end up wandering off into some mirror dimension, with consequences that could only be described as tragic.

I’m jazzed! Yesterday, I challenged my loyal blog readers to critique Laura’s one-sentence summary of her novel. We’ve been obsessing on one-sentence summaries for two full weeks now. (If you’re going to obsess on something, it might as well be important, and this topic is.)

To refresh your memory, here is Laura’s first cut at a one-sentence summary:

A savy businesswoman dumps it all for aspirations to be a groom on a dude ranch.

The sentence is a fine start, but it needs fine-tuning. Here are the points that many of you picked up on:

1) “Savvy” is spelled with two “v”s.

2) “Groom” makes you think she’s a guy getting married.

3) “aspirations” is really a needless word here.

4) The story as given lacks conflict. We don’t know what problem she faces at the dude ranch that makes her life worse than it was before.

5) “A savvy businesswoman” is good, but it could be sharpened into something with more intrinsic conflict that explains the flight from Fortune Five-hundred in favor of feisty fillies. It would be very helpful to know our heroine’s reason for leaving, but it’s even more important to know what genre we’re working with. The one-sentence summary should always tell you what the genre is, some way or another.

So let’s consider some options. Here are some possible genres, and some possible ways to tweak Laura’s sentence. These are a bit wordy, because I’m whipping them out quickly without taking time to really sharpen them up.

Comedy: A corporate bigwig dumps her job to work on a dude ranch, but discovers she’s allergic to horses.

Romance: A love-starved CFO leaves her Fortune 500 company to pursue a John Wayne lookalike on his dude ranch.

Suspense: After a deal with the Mafia goes awry, a female CEO goes incognito at a dude ranch.

Horror Spoof: After attempting suicide at corporate headquarters, a zombie woman cannot be released until she mucks out 1000 stalls on a dude ranch.

Spiritual: A newly widowed businesswoman seeks meaning by leaving corporate America for the simple life on a dude ranch.

Laura, the ball’s in your court. I think we have more work to do, but we’ll need you to fill us in on the story a little bit more. What’s the genre and what is our heroine’s conflict once she starts mucking those stalls out?

We have time for one more today. I’ll take Gerhi’s comment/question, since he contributed significantly to critiquing Laura. Gerhi wrote his latest one-sentence summary here:

A disengaged father steal back his three year old son from a mirror dimension.

My question: How do I put into that one line a sense that I hope a lot of the book will be humorous even though the concept is serious? In other words, when do you indicate the style of writing?

Randy sez: Put in some humor, absolutely! That proves you can, which is something you have to show the editor. You can’t just tell the editor, “I’m so funny, people fall on the floor laughing when they hear my jokes.” So if your story is humorous, it really would be a fine idea to make the one-sentence summary funny. This isn’t always easy, since there are different types of humor. If you are good at one-liners, then your one-sentence summary is a great place to show it off. If your humor is more the “build the joke slowly, get it rolling, and milk the audience for laugh after laugh,” then that’s VERY hard to show in a one-sentence summary.

I happen to be pretty decent at one-liners. However, I won’t contribute one here, for two reasons:
1) I don’t know the story well enough.
2) The humor in a one-sentence summary is an advertisement for what you can do, and so it might be considered deceptive if an editor found out that your hilarious sentence came from me.

So Gerhi, I would challenge you to write a one-sentence summary that tells your essential conflict and has a humorous kicker at the end. I have no idea how best to do that, but if you can pull it off, you’ll likely have a winner. Let us know if you come up with one. I think we’ll all be interested to hear it.

Due to popular demand, we’ll continue critiquing the one-sentence summaries that many of you have posted here over the last couple of weeks.

Here’s one from Gary:

“You are me, and must kill you.”

Randy sez: I think this is a record for brevity. 7 words, 1 character, 1 plot. Only 22 letters!

The only problem is that I don’t understand the story. So I would say this one needs to be expanded a bit. There are two issues to be expanded. What does “you are me” mean? I could make some guesses, but in a one-sentence summary, you don’t want the reader guessing–you want them to KNOW. Secondly, why must you kill you? There needs to be a reason, some motivation for it. Killing is never interesting in isolation. There has to be a reason. The reason the Jackal wants to kill Charlie DeGaulle in THE DAY OF THE JACKAL is that half a million dollars (in big, fat, juicy 1962 dollars) was waiting for him if he succeeded. And he came THAT close to succeeding.

Robert posted this one:

A swordsmith’s son must save the kingdom of Britain from a mysterious black stone’s enchantment.

Randy sez: This is a good strong one-sentence summary. Can it be stronger? Yes, possibly, on a couple of points:

Point one: I’m going to guess that a swordsmith’s son would also likely be a swordsmith himself. (If not, what is he?) So could we replace “swordsmith’s son” with “_______ swordsmith”? I don’t know what goes in the blank–that depends on what his inner conflict. But there’s no doubt that if he was a one-armed swordsmith (or fibromyalgic or dislexic or WHATEVER), he’d be a more interesting guy.

Point two: What is that black stone’s enchantment doing, exactly? This might be hard to answer, but it seems it could be more specific. Is that stone playing bagpipe music that enslaves those pesky Brits? Does it exude the odor of frying bacon, driving them mad with hunger? Does it emit microwave mind-control messages from Merlin? I’m being a little goofy here, but the question is whether you can be more specfic. Abstraction is great for mathematical physics, but in fiction, concreteness is good.

Jeffrey wrote:

A research engineer and a Hopewell shaman, separated in time by 1800 years, work together to fight an ancient evil entity.

Randy sez: This sounds quite promising. What kind of “research engineer”? Does it matter which field he’s in? If not, then does it even matter that he’s an engineer? What skills does he bring to this battle with the evil entity? Why must he be an engineer in order for this story to work?

The Hopewell shaman is pretty specific. I’m going to guess he or she is the one who’s living 1800 years ago. I don’t know if it’s possible to say what year the shaman lives in, but it might be worthwhile trying to figure out if the sentence could be rewritten to tell us.

The big questions I have are about the nature of that ancient evil entity. Who is it and what are its powers? What is the nature of the battle? In what way could an engineer help? What is Mr. Evil Entity trying to achieve?

Laura posted this one:

A savy businesswoman dumps it all for aspirations to be a groom on a dude ranch.

Randy sez: OK, maybe it’s time to see what my loyal blog readers have learned in the last couple of weeks. I’ll critique this one tomorrow, but first I’d like to see what you all have to say about it. What would you tell Laura if she came to you with this one-sentence summary?

Just a quick note for my loyal blog readers who may have missed the memo in my April e-zine:

I will be teaching a weekend seminar on writing in Couer D’Alene, Idaho on the weekend of April 25-27. The teaching will be Friday night and all day Saturday. On Sunday, I’ll be doing paid one-on-one critiques of writing samples and web sites.

I’ve never been to Couer D’Alene, but I hear it’s beautiful, and I’m looking forward to meeting the great folks in the Idaho Writer’s League who are sponsoring this event. You can get ALL the pesky details on their web site here.

Of course, this announcement won’t do you much good unless you live in the great northwest, but this blog is read by so many people that I’ll bet there are quite a few of you who can make it.

I’d love to meet you there! I’ll be speaking in detail on many of the things we’ve discussed here in bits and pieces. I have eight full hours to talk, and I can say quite a lot in eight hours. I’ve got a full lineup of topics on both the craft and marketing of fiction. I will also have some good deals on my books and some great deals on my CDs.

I’m working through the one-sentence summaries that my loyal blog readers have posted here over the last couple of weeks. I’m trying to go in order, so those who posted first get theirs critiqued first.

The next on the list is Karla, but she recently posted a revision, so I’m going to look at both of them.

Karla wrote:

Okay, I am going to go ahead and edit the one sentence summary I originally submitted. Is this better or just different?

Original: A pastor’s wife joins a girl biker club and encounters new adventures that startle and shake up her husband’s church.

Revised: When a burned-out pastor’s wife becomes a biker chick, her new adventures startle and shake up her husband’s church.

Randy sez: I like the original better, but it still needs work. The original has a pastor’s wife joining a girl biker club. To me, that implies a fair bit of conflict and definitely an interesting character. The new version adds in the descriptor “burned-out”. The problem I see with this is that this description has been way overused and is now verging on a cliche. It can still be done, of course. Burnout continues to exist. But calling it “burnout” is the cliche. In any event, I think we’ve got enough to describe this lady without the burnout. In fact, I think it works even better to strip down the revised version just a little:

“When a pastor’s wife becomes a biker chick…” I think that sets up the story nicely.

Now for the second half, things suddenly get vague. This biker chick has “adventures”. She “startles” folks. She even “shakes them up.” All of these are fine for a first cut, but specific is always better than vague. If you tell us the adventure, we’ll be able to guess that the church folks are both shaken and stirred.

What adventures could our biker lady get into? An infinite number! Tell us one, Karla, in three or four words, and we’ll guess the rest.

Karla, when you pitch this to editors and agents, if they seem interested, you should also let them know pretty quickly that you’re a biker babe yourself, not to mention one of those minister’s wives. I’m sure you already know to do that, but many of my loyal blog readers probably aren’t aware that you’re writing what you know here. Now they do.

Next question: Shall we continue on One-Sentence Summaries or is it time to move on? We have many dozens more posted here, but I don’t want to keep flogging a dead horse. If you all think you’ve got it, we can find a new topic.

I’m going to interrupt our current series of blogs on One-Sentence Summaries of novels, to make a quick announcement. Tomorrow, we’ll get back to business.

Ahem, my announcement: I have recently had yet another work of art published. This one is not a book, it’s an article.

A little backstory first. As many of my loyal blog readers know, I’ve been a part of the evolving story of the alleged Jesus family tomb since it was announced about a year ago with much fanfare. Like most everyone else on the planet, I am skeptical that this tomb ever housed the mortal remains of Jesus of Nazareth. Of course, it’s possible. The question is — what are the odds?

Being a theoretical physicist and a troublemaker with far too much time on my hands, I have written some articles over the past year that got me quite a bit of notice. In fact, back in late October of last year, a statistics peer-reviewed journal, The Annals of Applied Statistics, asked me to be a referee for the forthcoming paper by Prof. Andrey Feuerverger, the statistician who was hired to analyze the alleged Jesus family tomb.

So I spent a considerable part of November and December reviewing Dr. Feuerverger’s article and writing a response article. I also took the opportunity to do some new calculations to improve on my previous work. One rather unusual issue was that Dr. Feuerverger requested that his paper NOT be circulated prior to publication. (Normally, academics are only too happy to get preprints out as far and as fast as possible.) So I honored that request, and in fact have not really made any public comments on the tomb controversy.

But now Dr. Feuerverger’s article has been published, along with comments by eight referees, including mine. I have posted a new article on my web site that summarizes all the new info (many, many pages in the journal, not to mention a 29 page supplementary article that the journal asked me to include on their web site that details my latest calculations).

You can read all about it in my article: Analysis of Andrey Feuerverger’s Article on the Jesus Family Tomb. I know not all of you will be interested in this, nor will all of you even understand why I’ve put so many hours of my time into this apparently absurd project. The answer is that it was just something I wanted to do, and I didn’t think anyone else would do it quite the way I wanted. So I did it.

Tomorrow, we’ll continue on with our study of those pesky One-Sentence Summaries. See ya then!