AUTHONOMY

I’ve spent the last three or four months playing around on a web site called Authonomy:

http://www.authonomy.com/ It is a “slush pile” for Harper Collins whereby budding authors get to post their “masterpieces” with the hope of rising to the top of the heap through means fair or foul and landing on the publisher’s desk.

Though I’ve since removed three, I had posted five unpublished manuscripts and received mainly spam comments which, rather than say anything useful about any of my books, solicited support for their work – if you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours. Backscratching is one way to climb to the top of the reams of posted manuscripts. I can’t say this appealed to my Christian sensibilities. I was happy merely to post my efforts and await unsolicited comment. These comments are supposed to help you hone your work. I received hardly any comments among which only one or two were helpful.

I found myself doing far more reading than writing as I sailed the ocean of potential books. Some material was clearly rubbish by anyone’s method of reckoning. Other samples took a bit more work before I was able to determine that I had wasted good time. I read various genres, but eventually found myself on a mission to back good Christian material regardless of genre. Invariably what seemed to me to have potential left me in a dilemma: should I back a book that had good solid Biblical material somewhere in it or should I reject it outright because it is tainted with pessimistic any-minute end-of-the=world Dispensationalism? Then there are the Theistic Evolutionist crowd with their attendant Theological Liberalism. They sometimes have some good things to say, but they pick and choose from the Bible as if it is they themselves that are infallible and not the Bible!

I think I’m over Authonomy and will pull the plug on it soon. I’ve still got a library full of good solidly Reformed books at home to read, not to mention some novels and other works. Why should I get square eyes from reading stuff on a computer screen? Away with Authonomy I say! Mind you, it is kind of addictive – I may yet have another look…