This is just a personal note about what is happening behind the scenes, not so much the teaching stuff, but the presentation of it.
Everyone can see that the latest series of Bible lessons is about to end. When you see me commenting on John's Revelation, you know we are there. It will mean publishing another book. The whole theme has been showing the continuity between the Old and New Testaments by chasing down the law and doctrinal passages. It's been an organic study, meaning that it centers on what is called "Biblical Theology" (what is clearly stated in the text) versus "Systematic Theology" which is collating things in the text and trying to organize it logically. The latter often results in sheer nonsense simply because the structure tends to be artificial, drawing out assumptions that simply aren't there in the Bible.
I'm not sure what direction I'll go after this current series is finished. What I do know is that publishing it has suddenly gotten very easy. My previous publisher -- Smashwords -- has merged with a company based right here in OKC: Draft2Digital (D2D). While the old Smashwords website is still there and my books are still available there, the process of publishing has been moved completely over to D2D, and their handling is way more polished. An awful lot of work I used to do in preparing a manuscript is now automated. Most of the fussy details are obviated completely, but then, so are my choices.
Not to worry. The point is that I no longer need to keep old copies of MS Office around; D2D accepts the current Word format, or even plain text if I feel like it. I don't get to choose fonts, subheadings, etc. The title page is automated, as are the Table of Contents, etc. And these books are published to Amazon. I haven't chased it all down yet; things are still in process. Still, it will be a lot less work for everyone, as the whole thing is far more automated. All I have to worry about is content and some organization. For me, this means I can do the work on all of my devices, if I feel like it, because I have an MS 365 account that works on all of them -- Office in the clouds.
D2D promises the same uncensored openness as before. Let's hope they can keep it that way.
Everyone can see that the latest series of Bible lessons is about to end. When you see me commenting on John's Revelation, you know we are there. It will mean publishing another book. The whole theme has been showing the continuity between the Old and New Testaments by chasing down the law and doctrinal passages. It's been an organic study, meaning that it centers on what is called "Biblical Theology" (what is clearly stated in the text) versus "Systematic Theology" which is collating things in the text and trying to organize it logically. The latter often results in sheer nonsense simply because the structure tends to be artificial, drawing out assumptions that simply aren't there in the Bible.
I'm not sure what direction I'll go after this current series is finished. What I do know is that publishing it has suddenly gotten very easy. My previous publisher -- Smashwords -- has merged with a company based right here in OKC: Draft2Digital (D2D). While the old Smashwords website is still there and my books are still available there, the process of publishing has been moved completely over to D2D, and their handling is way more polished. An awful lot of work I used to do in preparing a manuscript is now automated. Most of the fussy details are obviated completely, but then, so are my choices.
Not to worry. The point is that I no longer need to keep old copies of MS Office around; D2D accepts the current Word format, or even plain text if I feel like it. I don't get to choose fonts, subheadings, etc. The title page is automated, as are the Table of Contents, etc. And these books are published to Amazon. I haven't chased it all down yet; things are still in process. Still, it will be a lot less work for everyone, as the whole thing is far more automated. All I have to worry about is content and some organization. For me, this means I can do the work on all of my devices, if I feel like it, because I have an MS 365 account that works on all of them -- Office in the clouds.
D2D promises the same uncensored openness as before. Let's hope they can keep it that way.