Writing
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If you don’t like math, ignore this With my associate pastor, Cathy Howe, I'm working on a series of children's books. The final set will look something like this:
—pre-kindergarten: basic Bible stories
—going into K and 1st: basic academics in light of the Bible
—1st, 2nd, and 3rd: Christian character qualities
—3rd, 4th, and 5th: God's plan for salvation
We're having a lot of fun putting this together. We'd like a usable prototype of the K/1 volume available for the start of school in August. And I want to take the proposal and samples to the Oregon Christian Writers Conference in July, too.
I've run into a rather odd snag, however. The International Bible Society will allow me to use quotations from Scripture, as long as the number of verses used is under 500, and as long as the quotes are less than 25% of the total text.
This is hard to figure out! My word processor is happy to tell me the total number of words in my current draft. But then I have to check the word count for every quote, add those up, and divide to get the percentage.
This is, obviously, do-able. But there I'm jammed. Since the total word count goes down as I delete quotes, I don't have a target number of words to delete. Instead, I'm trying to keep track of how many words I'm taking out, then refiguring everything. Ponderous!
I asked the college boys who do my yard work if they were good at higher math. When they said yes, I showed them my predicament. They explained to me, very gently, that if I have 100 words, only 25 of them can be from the Bible. So I should count the words from the Bible and bring the number down to that target. I couldn't successfully get across the fact that both numbers vary as I work ...
Ah, well. I'm sure the ongoing subtracting and dividing serves to keep my brain working ... and it sure is going to be fun to see the finished product!
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