Your Turn

Every four to seven days for almost nine months now I’ve posted a blog on “The View from the Back Pew.” Today’s blog is my 54th. It’s assessment time.

I’m asking myself, Why do I blog? First of all, for the discipline of writing. (Though I’ve other things waiting to be written without the same time pressures.)

I write, also, for the pleasure of communicating. Problem is, except for reader comments, which are rare, I’m flying blind (or deaf). But am I connecting with any live minds out there in the ether? I'd really like to know.

I'll acknowledge also a self-interested motivation. I’ve hoped that this blog might, without constantly harping on my recently published novel, give me enough name recognition to attract readers to Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough. This, too, I have no way of knowing.

So, today I’m asking a favor. Scroll down to the word “comments” below and me some feedback. My questions:

1) Who is reading this? Give me a name, a nickname, an Internet ID, or whatever.

2) I write on a variety of subjects. What would you like to hear more of? (a) matters related to the writing and selling of fiction? (b) reflections on what I’m reading? (c) musings from the back pew on matters of faith and church life? (d) observations on aging and life in a retirement community?

3) If you have bought or read Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough, was it this blog that stoked your interest? If not, what was it?

Your turn. Comment on any of my questions, or say what you please. I’m listening.

The Tax Man Cometh

At the age of 83, I’m admittedly a babe in the woods when it comes to business affairs. I’m getting an expensive lesson.

In September, when I offered my novel, Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough, for sale locally, my tax accountant did the paperwork and online work to set me up for the collection of state and local sales taxes. He filed online with the state of Alabama and gave me papers to file with Baldwin County and the City of Spanish Fort. All three jurisdictions levy sales taxes.
I paid him $75 for his services. It seemed reasonable, although I wasn’t real happy about having to seek professional help for the privilege of collecting taxes.

I took the county form to the nearest county court house annex and was told they’d send it to the proper office. When I dropped the city form off at city hall, I received an unpleasant surprise. “That will be $35 for the remainder of the year,” I was told.

“What for?”

“For your business license.”

As I said, I’m a late learner in these things. “I don’t want a business license,” I told her.

“But that’s what this is,” she said, “an application for a business license.”

“I need that, just to collect your taxes for you?”

“Yes, you’ll be doing business.”

I paid it of course. I was told I would owe another $65 in January.

Ten days later, a surprise in the mail. A bill from the county for a county/state business license. This time, only $30, good until next October 1.

My CPA told me I’d have to file forms with each jurisdiction every month “whether you do any business that month or not.” So today, a visit to his office to file sales taxes collected in September and to learn the complexities of doing my own filing in the future.

It took him nearly an hour to set up the online payment forms that I can use in future months. Good man, he asked, in return, a signed copy of my book.

In this first month of book sales, the taxes I owed the three jurisdictions totaled $35.98. For October, it will be less than that. In November, the game will probably be about over as far as personal sales of my book in Alabama go. All told, I may collect as much as $80 in taxes through December, at a cost to me of $140 and a signed copy of my book.

It’s rather late in life, but I’m learning about government and business.

Authors Nights at Westminster Village

In the six years I have lived at Westminster Village, our active Leisure Services Department has on several occasions sponsored book readings. In the last three weeks we have had two.

Almost three weeks ago, I had the good fortune to be the featured author. I told how I had taken to writing novels at the age of 80 and read half-a-dozen passages from Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough, after which I signed copies as people attending bought them to read for themselves.

Except for the Kindle version, which was published last December, it was the first time the novel was for sale in Spanish Fort, and therefore a special night for me. I’ve had the pleasure since of hearing from some well satisfied readers.

On Tuesday of last week, the Village hosted Sonny Brewer, the popular author of four books, all set in or close to nearby Fairhope, where Brewer lives. Of course, I attended. I’ve been a fan ever since reading The Poet of Tolstoy Park. I’ve reread it twice.

As Brewer read briefly from three of his novels, including the just published The Widow and the Tree, I realized anew what a lyrical writer of prose he is. He pushed my envy button, for sure. But he spent most of his forty minutes telling stories related to the writing and publishing of his books. As a teller of stories, he is a real artist.

When Melissa Manjone, our Leisure Services Director, signed me up for my night at the podium, she didn't tell me that Sonny Brewer would be our speaker just two weeks later. I’m glad I was the first up to bat. Brewer is an act I would not have wanted to follow.

Red Robes

About three blogs back, I recalled how the choir of my childhood church processed down the aisle and into the chancel every Sunday singing Holy, Holy, Holy. I have one other memory of church processionals. It has to do with bright red robes.

In the later years of my active ministry I served as interim pastor for a year and a half at the First Presbyterian Church of Lincoln, Nebraska. It was a handsome old Gothic church in downtown Lincoln, a block from the high rise Art Deco state capitol building and not far from the University of Nebraska.

As in my boyhood church, the choir processed down the aisle every Sunday. Not always to the same hymn, however. It was a good choir. They sang better than the angels and they looked really sharp in their scarlet robes. A theologically appropriate color, I thought; better than in some churches where the color of the robes is chosen to complement the color of the paint on the walls.

One Saturday, when I had been in Lincoln only about a month, one of my new Nebraska friends took me to my first University of Nebraska football game. I don’t remember who the Cornhuskers were playing that day, but they won. “Of course,” their fans would say. The Cornhuskers had a habit of winning.

What I remember most about that Saturday is that the Cornhusker fans all turned out for the game dressed in the school colors. The U of N side of the stadium was a solid sea of red. I was impressed.

The next morning as my associate pastor and I followed the choir down the center aisle, I was struck by a jolting question. Were those red robes really chosen for their doctrinal significance? They were Cornhusker red.

The Naming Game

When I started writing my current novel, set in Mobile, Alabama, and Costa Rica, I labeled it “Megachurch,” a working title. Over the course of its development, encouraged by members of my bi-weekly writers’ group, I’ve experimented with other titles. There have been two or three versions of “The Tattoo, “The Unholy Tattoo,” “Pastor Matt’s Tattoo,” etc., but I’ve never been happy with the use of that device in the title. It figures in the plot, but is not central to the message of the book and probably not appealing to the readers for whom I write.

As I move into Draft 7 of my editing and rewriting process, I’ve put a new label on this book-in-progress. The manuscript now bears the heading “Sunrise in the Cloud Forest.” That describes the climactic event in the novel, and also suggests its overarching theme. At last I have a title I feel good about. It just might endure.

Banner Week

This is the end of a banner week in my life as a published writer. It was marked by two happy events.

On Tuesday I introduced my first novel, Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough, to my fellow residents of Westminster Village in an evening book reading/signing, hosted by Melissa Manjone, our Director of Leisure Services. The reading had been announced almost a month in advance. It was well attended, and book sales surpassed expectations. Thank you, Melissa.

On Friday I received in the mail my first royalty check for books sold through amazon.com in August. It was a modest check, but the first month sales were a boost to my morale for they, too, exceeded expectations.

I’m not tempted to frame this first royalty check, but I will make a Xerox copy to file away somewhere to be discovered amidst my clutter by my heirs.

Of course I am not yet in the best seller league, but Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough is off to a respectable start, and I have reason to believe that my September royalty check, when it arrives, will reflect an even greater number of sales.

So I'm celebrating. Lift a glass with me.

Holy, Holy, Holy

We have just concluded a five-week study of Revelation on Wednesday nights at Spanish Fort Presbyterian Church, led by the Reverend Samford Turner, our local presbytery executive. Though he has been out of the active pastorate for seven years, holding down an administrative position, Samford has not let his talents as a Bible teacher grow rusty. He made one of the most difficult books of the Bible come alive to the substantial number of folks who come out on Wednesday night for supper and Bible study.

On those Wednesday nights we sang some of the many hymns that are rooted in the book of Revelation. Of these, the old classic, Holy, Holy, Holy, is my favorite. When he announced it on the second night of our study, Samford told a story that took me back to my own childhood.

Samford lived in Mobile as a boy and was privileged to grow up in the Government Street Presbyterian Church, the historic old mother church of Presbyterians in coastal Alabama. He told us that in his boyhood the congregation at Government Street stood up and sang Holy, Holy, Holy as their first hymn every Sunday.

I may have been the only person in the room who could say a similar thing. When I was a boy, our family church was the Second Presbyterian Church of Washington, Pennsylvania. I have two early memories of that church.

One was the memory of being taken by my father to see the building site when our new Gothic church was being built. I was four or five years old. I don’t think I had ever seen any kind of building construction before, and this site was like a yawning crater opening up in the earth.

My other, more vivid, recollection is the memory of standing in that church with parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, great aunts and great uncles, cousins--the whole Scots-Irish Johnston tribe filling the same three adjacent pews--as the choir processed down the long aisle singing the same hymn every Sunday.

Of course, it was Holy, Holy, Holy. I have loved it ever since.

Muslim Correspondent Needed

I’m stuck! Now that my novel, Parson Campbell's Breakthrough, is in print, I’m well into the writing of a new novel about a megachurch pastor’s struggle to maintain his church and his marriage against the machinations of an ambitious associate.

That part’s going OK, but one of the subplots follows the conversion of the pastor’s son to Islam and his marriage to a young American Muslim woman whom he meets in law school.

I want to get the Muslim wedding right, and I need a Muslim correspondent who will answer the questions I have about the wedding setting and ceremony and then read and critique the two short chapters that I will write as part of my larger story.

This novel will, I think, be a positive note in a time when American Muslim-Christian relationships are strained. Have I a Muslim reader of this blog who will share this brief effort with me? Or a reader with a Muslim friend who might be enlisted? Let me hear from you.

A View of a Reborn Church

In this day when so many of the churches I’ve known over the years are diminishing in membership, and some of them struggling even to survive, I’ve been heartened by a video sent to me by Dean and Beve Finley, friends with whom I was associated some years ago when I was an interim minister in Lincoln, Nebraska.

The video tells the story of the Carondelet-Markham Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, where the Finley’s daughter, the Reverend Susan Finley, is pastor. It’s the story of a church in a depressed neighborhood, now reborn because its seventeen surviving members reached out to Liberian refugees, people of another race and culture, and found that in serving these new neighbors the life of their dying church was renewed.

I’ll say no more. For a story that will move you to hope, perhaps even to a new vision of commitment and ministry, copy this URL into your browser:
http://www.pcusa.org/goodnews/.

Then click on the encircled arrow overlaying Susan Finley’s picture.

A “View From” Blog to Feast On

Back sometime in the early history of blogs my son Mike started writing “The View From My Rooftop.” In the last year or so, as business obligations have become more demanding, Mike’s postings have become less frequent. Since he and Mary will soon exchange their city condo, with its rooftop view, for a single-family home in a less urban setting, the fate of his view from the rooftop is uncertain.

It is obvious, of course, that I borrowed from Mike when I named my own blog “The View from the Back Pew.” (I should have named it "The View Out the Church Door," for it ranges wherever I choose to take it.)

Now Mary is posting a “A View from My Table"(http://aviewfrommytable.blogspot.com)--a third point of view. You can feast on this blog, for Mary provides mouth-watering pictures of what is on her table along with recipes for those who find the pictures irresistible.

In recent days the menus have included: lentil soup, featured in Dr. Angelo Acquista’s book, The Mediterranean Prescription; Caprese salad, with fresh tomatoes and sliced mozzarella; and potato-crusted flounder with fire-roasted red pepper and chorizo.

Lucky Mike! He eats at Mary’s table. That’s what I call a fantastic view.

The Soul Food Buffet

Near the end of every month, residents of Westminster Village anticipate a special evening buffet dinner (our evening meal is normally served at the table) featuring the food of some special culture. Chef Breck has given us Italian, Polynesian, Caribbean and the food of a host of other cultures. Last night he came closer to home when he gave the black members of the kitchen staff the privilege of providing the kind of meal they would serve guests in their own homes. It was Soul Food night.

The menu for this Soul Food Buffet began with bacon and corn chowder and seafood pasta salad. On the main buffet line we found stuffed pork chops, southern fried chicken and slap yo’ mama meatloaf. Though I would never think of slapping my mama, I opted for the meatloaf and it was the best I’ve eaten since my own mama put her Yankee-recipe meat loaf on the table when I was a boy.

Along with my meatloaf I ate Louisiana dirty rice and green bean casserole. Both were excellent. I could also have had down home collard greens, Mississippi red beans or potato and crabmeat casserole. Between Betty and Jo and Richard, the couple with whom we ate, we sampled most of these things. All were pronounced good, even by Jo, a thin little lady who worried that such a menu might be loaded with hog fat.

Our dessert choices included sweet potato pie and hummingbird cake. I had never before eaten hummingbird cake—in fact, had never heard of it—but I’m going to ask our food manager to add that to the list of excellent cakes that appear on our tables with regularity. The cake looked something like pound cake, which I am fond of, but was more of a caramel color and had pineapple and nuts and who knows what all else in it.

Today I’m not going to go near that dining room. I’m still full of soul food, and feasting on the memory of it.

Nicholas Sparks

Last night I read the first 96 pages of Nicholas Sparks’s novel, The Lucky One. Sparks has become one of my favorite novelists, and as I read those pages I consciously asked myself why. First of all, I decided, because Sparks knows how to tell a good story. I’m not yet deep into his plot, but he aroused my interest in the first five pages, a requirement for any novelist who hopes to get published. So I’ll stay with this. I want to know where this story is going.

Beyond plot, however, Sparks has a way of introducing his characters that I find compelling. He tells us more about what they do than about what they look like. Yet, in my mind’s eye, I have a picture of Logan Thibault. Ex-Marine, he has walked from Colorado to North Carolina. He’s tan and fit. Tall and lean. Nothing striking about his features, except long hair like Tarzan’s. I can almost picture him, but it may not be the picture the next reader has.

Same with Beth. Good looking, but in what way? At almost thirty, she’s more sexy than the co-eds her ex-husband has surprised at the nude beach. Is my picture of her like anyone else’s? It will do for me.

And Deputy Keith Clayton. Apparently good enough looking to be a successful womanizer, and fit enough for his law enforcement duties and to think he might enjoy taking on Logan Thibault.

Chances are, by the end of this book, Nicholas Sparks will have told me more about these characters, but for now I’m doing well enough on my own imagination. I don’t have to know the color of Logan’s hair. This is writing worth emulating.

Introducing Parson Campbell

Although Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough has been available as a Kindle Book since early this year, and the paperback edition can now be ordered on amazon.com, this print edition will first be available for local sale in Spanish Fort on September 22. On that date Melissa Manjone, our leisure services director, will host a reading and book signing evening here at Westminster Village. It seems right to me to make that the local introduction of the book.

My talk on that occasion will be on the plot of the book, with selected readings from each of the three plot lines, and on how at the age of eighty I came to undertake the writing of this novel. I am open to opportunities to repeat this program in other venues.

I am beginning to think also of a second presentation, this time on the characters in the book, for use in circumstances when I have reason to believe there will be an overlap in my audience. I have such occasions already scheduled with a local church book club in October and my Westminster Village book club in December. The talk will center on Eddie and Myra Campbell, of course, and on Mr. Melon, the antagonist, with attention also to Mama Campbell, a Missouri realtor, and to Cy and Josephine Pennington, Myra's Bluegrass horse farm parents.

There is a third layer of characters on the Parson Campbell stage with minor or cameo roles that I may save for a third talk. I think of Elberta Gettys and Mrs. Hutchinson, and of Alma, Myra's once-a-week household help, who knew just what to do with cast-off longjohns. And then there's Murphy, who was Alma's canine partner in crime. These characters are the salt and pepper in the Pear Valley soup.

If you’re hungry for a good read, order Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough from amazon.com. There’s a handy link on my website at www.bertjohnston.com with a sample chapter to dip into.

The amazon.com site for this book also offers a “Look Inside” feature through which you can read random passages and examine the covers up close. Just like in a bookshop, but you don't have to drive there.

Mountain Climbing in the Book World

Though I have lived along the Gulf Coast for most of the past thirty-five years, I grew up in West Virginia and still think of those forested mountains with a wistful memory. My ridge running days have left their mark upon my soul.

I think of those mountains often in these latter days of my life when I have turned to writing. It took me over two years of day and night effort to write Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough and more than another year to get it polished and published. Each of these accomplishments was like scaling a literary mountain. But I don’t yet have the view I had in mind when I began the climb.

It’s like hiking in the Appalachians – always, it seems, another peak ahead of you. So, I’ve stopped just a moment to rest and enjoy an energy bar, and now I’m moving up the steep slope toward the third peak. It’s called “Mount Marketing.” I won’t reach my destination as a wannabe author until I attain the high end of this trail.

Give me a little push, if you can. Tell your friends they’ll surely want to read Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough. A guy named Bert Johnston wrote it, and he set it in the Virginia highlands.

Read a sample chapter at: www.bertjohnston.com.
That site marks the top of your first foothill. Click on “Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough” and be transported to the order page at www.amazon.com/books.

Top of the world, friend. Great view.

In the Wake of the Big Leagues

Our bi-monthly book club met this month on the first Monday evening. Sorry, it has never adopted a name other than “the book club,” but now there’s a second book club meeting at Westminster Village, this one on first Monday afternoons. For the moment the two groups are identified simply by reference to the time of day they meet.

The format for the new club is different, however. Instead of an assigned book, the afternoon club shares brief descriptions of what each participant is currently reading. It’s a good way to compile a “must-read” list. Several of our residents are participating in both clubs.

Our book for the Monday night group in August was Dianne Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s Wife. We agreed that this true story of courage and imagination amid the horrors of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw has been beautifully told. All of us had lived through World War II, but still found this book a shocking revelation. Who, after reading it, could ever deny the Holocaust? Who, also, could ever deny the reality of human compassion?

For our October meeting we will return to fiction, with Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants. It has been two years since I read it. I will happily read it again.

Our group usually does not choose its books more than one meeting ahead, but at this August meeting my fellow members honored me by choosing to read Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough for our December discussion. I’m pleased, of course.

It’s a daunting thought, however, to follow Diane Ackerman and Sara Gruen. I think I’ve written a good book. I hope it’s more than a sand lot game, but I don’t fancy my work to be in the same league with these modern classics.

For a sample chapter of Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough, go to my website: www.bertjohnston.com.

To order from the website, click on my title to go directly to the book on: www.amazon.com.

The Cat Who Prays

A few days ago I introduced Walter Mitty, the large tiger cat who shares our apartment at Westminster Village. I didn’t tell you that he prays. I don’t mean “preys.” Mitty came to us six years ago without front claws, and couldn’t chase down a crippled cricket.

Moreover, if he prayed in those first days with us, it was privately, in his closet, and we weren’t aware of it. It’s a habit he has picked up from Betty and me in the time we have had him. Most evenings somewhere between nine and ten o’clock, we share a Bible reading along with the reading of a selected devotional writing and a prayer.

It’s a bit of a stretch, of course, to say that Mitty prays with us. Only God could confirm that. But he has come to understand that we want no attention from him during these fifteen or twenty minutes, so he waits us out, sitting on the floor between our chairs, relaxed but upright and, we’ve noticed, most often with his eyes closed.

When the Amen has been said and the Bibles placed back on the table, Mitty comes to life. It’s treat time, and he is rewarded for his stillness. The kibbles are probably what he’s been praying so patiently for.

The Transformation of Walter Mitty

A young couple whose baby was allergic to cats gave us Walter Mitty. They had never formally named him but he answered to “Kitty.” We wanted something a little less generic than that, so we settled on “Walter Mitty.” He quickly adjusted to being called “Mitty.”

In addition to the obvious advantage of rhyming with his earlier name, we found “Walter Mitty” an appropriate name because he was a very timid cat. During his first week at our house, we saw him only if we looked behind the washer and dryer or under the guest room bed. He ate his food and used his box, but not when we were awake and watching.

After a week, Mitty decided he was safe with us and he came out from behind-or-under and joined the family. He even became my lap cat in short order. If the doorbell rang, however, he was instantly out of sight. Visitors had to take our word for it that we had a cat.

Mitty was solely an indoor pet. When we moved to Westminster Village he adapted well to apartment living. Even the hall outside our apartment door seemed like another world to Mitty. He did not venture out and he did not show himself to people who entered the apartment. When we had lived here two or three months, I pulled him out from under the bed one morning and introduced him to our maid, who came on alternate Tuesdays. “Debra, this is Mitty, just in case you thought he was a phantom.”

Mitty was about three years old when he came to live with us, not much more than an adolescent as cats go, maybe a young adult. He’s now a middle aged nine-year-old, and has outgrown almost all of his earlier inhibitions. He is Debra’s good buddy, and is more likely to be on the bed than under it when she changes the sheets.

No visitor comes who isn’t properly greeted and sniffed out. And though he rarely ventures more than twenty feet from our door, Mitty insists on being allowed into the hall for a few minutes first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

All of which is to say, timidity is not always a lifelong affliction. Given a lot of love and a little encouragement, the Walter Mittys of this world sometimes morph into extroverts. Not quite? Well, at least into social beings.

From Hoops to Hurdles

Yesterday it arrived: the third proof-copy of my novel, Parson Campbell’s Breakthrough. This time the cover was perfect. Light enough to show the wood grain, but with enough contrast to show effectively the notice that is tacked to it.

What to do first? I e-mailed Lindsey Archer, who designed the cover and then patiently submitted three amended versions to adapt to the publisher’s printing process. At the same time, a message to my son Mike, whose savvy about writing and technology has been an indispensable help along the way. I am grateful to both of them.

Then, this morning, I clicked on a button on the Create Space website to move the publishing process forward. Today is officially the date of publication, a red-letter day on my calendar. Now I wait to see how soon amazon.com shows it on their online catalog.

Along with the congratulatory replies from Lindsey and Mike was Mike’s reminder of the work ahead: “Now to develop a marketing plan.” Ah, yes. We move from jumping through hoops to leaping over the hurdles of the marketplace.

For the time being my second novel is in "Park." The engine is still running but it is not moving forward. Oh, for the good old days when the publishers did the marketing and writers got on with the writing of the next one.

The Adventuresome Life

Ian Fleming, author of all those James Bond novels, also wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a novel in which he offered a philosophy of life that was probably his own: “Never say ‘no’ to adventures. Always say ‘yes,’ otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.”

Arnold J. Jacobs, in The Know-It-All, calls that “moderately profound….not quite Ecclesiastes, but it’s pretty good advice.”

It reminds me of the old saying, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

I would add my own caveat: some adventures, though admittedly exciting, are morally adverse from the start and, in the end, bear sour fruit. I’d like to amend Fleming’s advice to “Go with God, and never look back.”

That’s adventuresome enough to make any life exciting and, at the same time, deeply satisfying.

A Lasting Happiness

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote of a time, shortly after his marriage to Zelda and the publication of This Side of Paradise, when he experienced a moment of depression so extreme that he burst into tears while riding through the city in a taxi. He cried, he said, “because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.”

Now there are all sorts of reasons for depression, but if he was anywhere within shouting distance I’d say, ”Come off it, Fitzi, this one just doesn’t meet the test.”

I am past the point of having everything I ever wanted. I can remember having a stimulating and challenging vocation, a large and comfortable home with my family close around me, vigorous health, and a growing investment account. That was then.

Now I have reached the point in my retirement years where I have to pause to consider why I am getting out of bed in the morning; I have no job to go to, no yard to mow or flower beds to weed. My wife and I have downsized, our investment accounts are flowing in the wrong direction, our nearest family member is six hours away, and advancing years are taking their toll on our health and vigor.

But I do get up every morning, and I remain as happy as I was in “better” years. It’s a simple matter of faith and trust. Early in life, before I achieved what I could later recognize as success, even before I married and had a family, I latched onto a saying of the Apostle Paul that has been a watchword during every stage of my life. Paul wrote from prison to his friends at Philippi at what was obviously a low, low point in his life:

“Not that I complain of want; for I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content.”

Grab hold of that. It’s the formula for a happiness that will not go away, come hell or high water.