Frank Creed on FB and Twitter Are Not Me

Frank Creed's identity has been hacked, and I fear what an imposter will do. Please beware.

War of Attrition, Flashpoint's sequel, is finally out!

The big LAUNCH-day is finally here! War of Attrition, the long awaited sequel to the award-winning and Amazon best-selling Flashpoint: Book One of the Underground is now out!: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=frank+creed&x=17&y=23

Plot synopsis:
Set in 2037, Calamity Kid and his muscle cell are targeted by the One State's Federal Bureau of Terrorism and must survive alone in Chicago's Underground. At one-half its usual might, the cell encounters traps and snares set by a faceless opponent-and question the suspicious arrival of a bio-engineered One State traitor. Blamed by the media for the very violence they're trying to contain, CK and his fellow saints race for their lives to avoid the high-tech crosshairs aimed into the underground. War of Attrition, Book Two of the UNDERGROUND, is the sequel to Frank Creed's award-winning Christian sci-fi/ cyberpunk novel, Flashpoint: http://tinyurl.com/2blh3x7

Also, for your Christmas shopping needs, Join the Underground: the Role Playing Game http://tinyurl.com/23u8v6d

Faith,
f
http://frankcreed.com/

EC Gags Creation Theory?

I was a teen during the Iran Hostage Crisis, but when journalists referred to the terrorists simply as Fundamentalist Terrorists, I saw trouble. The thought eventually made it into my writer's notebook, and became the critical part of my end-times sci-fi novel, Flashpoint. 9-11 made the concept of religious persecution for reasons of security, realistic and scary.

The fact that young or old Earth age is having a similar effect in the E.C. is a songbird in the proverbial mine. The United States' cultural trends follow Europe's by fifty to one-hundred years. Our church memberships are plummeting, as they already have in Europe, and Christianity's a rapidly shrinking psychographic in all of North America. The day of real persecution in the West is quite conceivable. What will our world be like between now and the second-coming? The important thing is that we keep living our faith, and avoid a Christendom-subculture-life-raft-leaving-the-sinking-ship mentality. We must be in the world but not of it, and live as he commands. As a witness to a world without love or hope.

One of the "scientific process" steps is observation. The problem of using the scientific process to answer the origin of life? Nobody was there to observe. The Ancient Hebrew word {Yom}, or "Day" was used like the English word: a 24 hour period, a period of daylight, or an era of time. Nobody can disprove that God created the universe in its present form, with partial decayed radiation in rocks, five minutes ago. Young or old Earth age is not a point of doctrine. This very much reminds me of how the Catholic church felt that Galileo's theory blasphemed God's obviously flat Earth.

Charles Darwin proved that God gave life an amazing gift of adaptation. Evolution, one species adapting into a whole new species, is wild speculation. Even in the totality of the fossil record, what's known as "the permanence of kinds", still stands. One kind cannot be shown to have been another kind. In fact, the oldest layer of fossil-bearing-rocks have dinosaurs and modern day house-cats. Few know that the Geologic-Column—that chart with the Jurassic, Triassic, etc. periods—was constructed ACCORDING to evolutionary theory. Few places in the world are the layers even in the proper order.

The EC's consideration of thought-policing Creation-Theory is small minded. Earth-age really doesn't matter to Christians. We fear science for no good reason. God gave us a second book called creation, and He's left His fingerprints all over it. He is "there." I highly recommend Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds—Phillip E. Johnson, When Skeptics Ask—Norman Geisler, and The God Who is There—Francis Schaeffer.


"So just sit back and relax and let me have your head for a minute—I can show you somethin' in it That has yet to be presented, OH YEAH." —Click, Click, BOOM, Josey Scott, Saliva

To God be the glory,
Frank Creed

Young Earth Age?

God's word is infinite wisdom in the finite container of human language. Consider that Christ fulfilled over three-hundred OT prophecies, and how many of His contemporary Jews missed their Messiah? God shifts mankind's paradigms all through history and, we know from Genesis, prehistory.

Creation and humankind's moral fall are points of doctrine that won't bend. We have a reasonable creator who created a reasonable universe. Those with Christian presuppositions have learned creation can be understood through reason. Again, nobody was there to observe these things and these space time events. They're being interpreted to us in a dead language, by a man halfway across the planet 5000 years away in time. Inspired or not, understanding Moses' wisdom is a real challenge.

Forcing doctrinal events into a young Earth age makes two assumptions not backed by Scripture. Adam & Eve's fall took place:

1) on Earth, and
2) in this dimension.

Stay with me now . . .

The Bible was supposed to crack if our Sun was not the Universe' center because that's how Moses' creation story was interpreted. The Heliocentric theory of the universe was disproven, and Scripture still stands.

Check Strong's Concordance for the word "Worlds." It's used in the sense that this huge universe may not have been created for just for Earthlings.

• What about Genesis 5:1-2? Did God create more humans after Adam and Eve?


• What about extra-dimensional beings mating with human women?


• Genesis 6, the Great Flood, wiped out the Nephilim.


• People used to live for hundreds of years.

God's acted into space-time creation with huge change—at the fall, and the flood. Every time we get God figured out, He shifts another paradigm. Let's choose our dogmatisms very carefully.

Faith,

f

You're It!

I've been tagged! Both on the Christian Writers Notebook and on Shoutlife!

What is it to be tagged? Well, according to HRH (who tagged me, btw) "Tagging is a game played in the blogging community whereby one blogger writes up his or her own list on a certain topic and then "tags" a certain number of other bloggers to respond with their own lists on the same topic."

The first rule of the game, however, is to post the rules of the game. Here they are:

1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

And, here we go . . .

Eight Random Facts about Me

#1 I make Raman Noodles in my coffee maker (and have been known to leave in the old coffee filter—but hey, I like coffee too. Upon hearing the story of the "coffee noodles," my future mother-in-law asked (with no small amount of concern) my then fiancé, "Do you know what the h*ll you are getting yourself into?"

#2 I remarried four years ago after vowing to never do it again, to a woman I met by chance, on-line. I figured I was safe enough since she lived in Vancouver, B.C. and I was 2000+ miles away in Indiana and we chatted/ emailed daily. Even our first face-to face meeting occurred because of a misunderstanding: while in chat we mentioned that it would be nice to meet some day and somewhere in that conversation she thought I had invited her to fly to the midwest and hummed and hawed over it and eventually decided that she would. I thought she had invited herself! Providence was at work and we didn't realize it!

#3 I have seven cats (Mavis McWavis, Molly May, Angst Mayba, Kot, Jess, Koda and Pepper). Mavis has traveled around the United States with us and has visited western Canada and has the distinction of being a "Miss Feline Pine" 2005. She's the kitty in my author pic.
—another pertinent cat fact: my now-wife decided that I was suitable to chat with online because I announced that I was a cat person.

#4 I was in a highspeed head-on collision 10 years ago; LifeLined to Indianapolis and was diagnosed by several specialists to be severely brain-damaged and wheel-chair bound for the remainder of my life. A day after my pastor came and prayed with me, I was miraculously healed. Now I write.

#5 I spent a year in Israel as a foreign exchange student: slept on the beach for a week when I had run out of money, traveled to Egypt, learned to speak Hebrew, witnessed a car-bombing, was nearly abducted by an obsessive host mother (the organization moved me asap).

#6 I am the proud part-owner of the GreenBay Packers. Well . . . I do own a share and have the stock certificate to prove it hanging in a place of honour above the fireplace (much to the chagrin of my wife).

#7 I am an Eagle Scout and totally unrelated, this Christmas on a trip to B.C. saw hundreds of Bald Eagles sitting in Cottonwood trees along the Fraser River. Wow.

#8 I was divorced at an early age and lived the life of a hedonist until I was introduced to the writings of the Biblical philospoher Francis Schaeffer in my mid-twenties.

I've tagged: Daniel I Weaver, The Stiltskins, Grace Bridges, Sue Dent, Karri Compton, David Brollier over at CFRBlog, S.M. Kirkland on MySpace, and Lydia Daffenberg.

The Problem

Finding Christian speculative fiction (sci-fi and fantasy and horror), in my youth was impossible. C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia and Space Trilogy graced the lonely shelf. Every modern genre author credits Lewis as their inspiration for good reason: he's all that genre fans could find.

In the seventies and eighties of my childhood, mom would take me into the local Christian bookstores, and I'd straight-edge for the fiction shelves. After years of only finding Lewis' titles, I stopped looking in Christian stores. My favorite fiction came from secular stores.

I'd given up in the early eighties—about a year before Steven Lawhead's Empyrion was published. After Peretti's Darkness books came out, I hopefully scanned Christian shelves again for a couple more years before abandoning hope. Obviously this was a once per decade event.

A year ago the only Christian spec-fic authors of which I'd ever heard were Lewis, Peretti, Dekker, and arguably, Jenkins. Since then, I've discovered dozens of Christian spec-fic authors on the Web. I formed the Lost Genre Guild in September of 2006, and we've erected a respectable Web infrastructure for the promotion of our favorite fiction. Genre fans, read on for a killer link with more traditionally published titles than you'd ever dreamed existed.

Some spec-fic sub-genres have recently broken the CBA publishing dam. Doors opened for Christian fantasy after the Lord of the Rings films scored at the Box-Office. Genre purists and book-retailers don't lump horror into the genre, but the definition of setting and characters does. The race we call "angels" are supernatural extra-dimensional beings. At some point when nobody was looking, some creative librarian tacked up a "spiritual thrillers" label on the shelf that ought to have read "horror." "Spiritual thrillers" sounds more like Hannibal Lechter sitting across a confessional from Clarisse Starling than fallen angels under the bed, but at least the belief system that inspired The Exorcist is also moving forward. I wonder if The Prophecy series of films, featuring Christopher Walken, didn't also have an effect. And Anne Rice accepting Christ surely looked good to the CBA world.

That leaves one of spec-fic's three main sub-genres still floundering behind the dam: science fiction. I believe there are several reasons for this. There have been no sci-fi cross-over films or popular culture fiction to shoehorn publishers into risking bets on new authors. Many view Christianity and science to be a contradiction in terms. Sci-fi's been such an anti-Christian world-view genre it's no real surprise that mothers dodge children around the aisle.

You've just read introduction to a four part series that will explore the concept of Christian science fiction. Because you're still reading, you get a cookie! The most complete Biblical spec-fic book store I've ever found belongs to Jeff Gerke, AKA novelist Jefferson Scott. Any genre fan will want to see and bookmark this site of Lost Genre novels:
http://www.wherethemapends.com/Booklist/booklist_intro.htm


Frank Creed
www.frankcreed.com
email: admin@frankcreed.com
http://www.lostgenreguild.com/index.html
blog.lostgenreguild.com

Biblical CyberPunk?

Biblical What?

Fiction authors must write with a very specific audience on their frontal lobes. They must write for their niche. I've found the terms Christian science fiction & fantasy and Christian speculative fiction, to be too broad.

I'm tired of the debate surrounding "Christian fiction." One side says you must write subtle or secular, and leave your skill to glorify God. The other side insists Christianity must be included in character and plot. I say, every author's fiction-ministry has a different purpose, voice, style, etc. We're like snowflakes—no two are the same. My fiction purpose is discipleship, not evangelism, so I use the descriptor "Biblical."

Sci-fi invokes visions of spaceships and ray-guns. My own dystopian sci-fi is set only thirty years in the future, and focuses on bionics and cybernetics: the fusion of technology and anatomy. This sub-genre of sci-fi is called cyberpunk, but cyberpunk is, by definition, exclusively anti-religion. I've flirted with using the term faithpunk, but I'm not sure it's meaning would click with readers. So, for lack of a better term, my niche is Biblical cyberpunk.

Read 3 of Frank Creed's Biblical Cyberpunk short stories in Light at the Edge of Darkness.

And, while you're at it, read about his Biblical Cyberpunk novel Flashpoint, coming in Septmber 2007.

Growing Sales for Religious Books!

Writer's Digest ran an article in '06 that predicted a boom in religious books for the next five years. I hoped that boom would include Christian fiction. The following article indicates that Christianity's lost genre (speculative fiction), just might be set to boom. Feast your eyes on this article that appeared in the April 15, 2007 issue of AtlasBooks Advocate:

Religious Books Sell!

By Sarah Bolme

If you have pondered whether your publishing company should enter the realm of religious books, you will be delighted to hear that this category of books is selling well. Religious books were ranked second in sales growth for 2005 (first in sales growth for the year were Education/Curriculum books). Religion book sales, with their nine percent sales increase, are growing faster than overall book sales, which increased around 5% this past year.
Growth for the religion book category is not new. Sales growth has now been the trend for this category for the past few years. Although religious book titles account for about 5% of the total book market according to AAP (American Association of Publishers), sales in this category grew 37% in 2003, 11% in 2004, and about 9% in 2005.

Religion buyers for both Barnes & Noble and Borders Group, Inc. report that their religion sales have increased steadily over the past several years with Borders reporting that its religion sales have increased 36% since 2000. Religion sections in both of these stores continue to grow with the most sales in the Christian Fiction (sales of Christian romance titles have grown 25% a year since 2001) and the Christian Living titles.

Industry veterans have differing views on what has spurred the continued growth of religion category books. Some feel it has been the move from publishing mostly theological material to publishing more books with practical everyday principles. Others claim it is due to the few mass market religion-themed and Christian bestsellers such as the Left Behind Series (which has sold over 40 million copies), The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren (has sold over 20 million copies) and Bruce Wilkinson’s The Prayer of Jabez (sold over 10 million copies). A number think that it is a new willingness of American people to talk about and incorporate “religion” or “faith” into their everyday lives, a changed spurred by the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Still others think that it is due to the aging of the Baby Boomers, who – confronted with their own mortality – are now considering spiritual issues. A few others feel that the growth is in part due to the fact that mass-market outlets (such as Wal-Mart and Target) now carry religious titles.

As with sales growth in any arena, when there is profit potential, companies jump at the chance. While the religious title category encompasses more than just “Christian” titles, the fact is these titles do make up the majority of this category. Historically, Christian titles have almost exclusively been published by “Christian” publishing houses (Zondervan, Thomas Nelson, Multnomah, etc.). With the increase in religion sales, large New York Publishing houses have jumped on the bandwagon and are creating more and more imprints for Christian titles. Simon & Schuster launched Little Simon Inspirations this past February, its first Christian imprint for children; and Random House Children’s Books’ imprint Golden Books recently returned to the Christian market with a new Christian-interest publishing program introducing a dozen new titles this past year.

The good news is religious books are selling. The increase in religion category sales appears to be boosted by more than just the few religious best-seller titles mentioned earlier. A recent report by ECPA (Evangelical Christian Publishers Association) shows that consumers of Christian books read more and spend more on books than the general population. Another study by the Barna Group showed that nearly half of all Americans have read at least one religious book other than the Bible from cover to cover in the last two years. With an overwhelming majority of the population of the United States reporting a Christian religious affiliation, religion title sales have the potential to continue to grow for years to come. So whether you already publish religious titles or are looking to break into the religion category with a new title this year, there is room in the market for your next project.

***************************************************************************************************************Sarah Bolme is the director of Christian Small Publishers Association (CSPA) (http://www.christianpublishers.net) and the owner of Crest Publications (www.crestpub.com). Sarah’s newest book, Your Guide to Marketing Books in the Christian Marketplace, can be found at http://www.marketingchristianbooks.com. © 2007