Category Archives: Me

Happy Birthday, Mom

I had a annual ritual on my defunct blog about the Four Last Things of wishing my Mom a “Happy Birthday.” Today would have been her 102nd. The fact that she led and lived a full life doesn’t minimize her death. (“Well, Paul, she did live a long time.”)

Born January 20, 1916, she married my Dad on April 15, 1937 (before that became Income Tax Day here in the USA) and she passed away November 7, 2005. In between she served the Church in her capacity as a teacher’s aide and later secretary at the parish school. Oh, she also raised 5 kids. I was the fifth. Mom and Dad needed to practice on the first four before they got to having me.

Her death hit me rather hard, despite being expected. “Anticipatory grief” does not prepare you for the real thing. At least, it didn’t do so for me. Being treated like garbage by several members of my family (one in particular) did not help.

As usual, it is a day of melancholy for me. I miss her, but I also am grateful that my Catholic faith tells me that our relationship isn’t dead, just because she is gone from the world. I believe that she is in Heaven. Perhaps she is in Purgatory, but I feel she passed through quickly, as much as the passage of time has any meaning there. As a result, I feel as if I can still connect with her through prayer and the Mass. And I long for the day when we can be reunited. My usual disclaimer, I’m not being morbid or suicidal, I just long for the day when I can go Home.

Over the years I’ve tried to spiritually develop so that my yearnings for Heaven are proper, that is I desire to get to Heaven to be united with God and not just so that I am reunited with my lost loved ones and God just happens to be there, too. That takes God for granted and that Heaven is just a perpetual playground or wonderful endless happy family reunion with Christmas and Easter dinners and picnics all thrown together.

Yearn for the face of the beloved, and all else will fall into place, as well. Trust in God.

NOTE: This post was pieced together from several posts about my Mom’s birthday. Feelings of hurt and melancholy still remain.

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In Exile

“In Exile.”

Yes, I’ve renamed this blog. Again. Since this blog has near zero readers, I doubt it will be noticed, much less cared about. 😉 The title is similar to the “In the Land of My Exile I Praise Him” title from a few years back, only more manageable. 🙂

Why the change? A title other than “Paul Sofranko’s Blog” has the opportunity to bring a greater focus to whatever it is I’m doing here. “In Exile” fits as I do feel as if I am in exile, far from my true home which is Heaven. I hope to get there someday.

“In Exile” also fits a personal feeling or “self-identification” (to borrow an abused pop-psych term popular nowadays.) I never feel like I fit into any group I ever belong to. I alluded to that here. Whether it’s family, school, work or whatever, I always felt on the outside looking in. (Church has been an exception – Church in general, not parish.) Sometimes the feeling was so intense years ago that I felt that I was the only person really alive; everyone else was a product f my imagination (or God’s). There’s even a word for that, “solipsism.”

So, “In Exile” feeds off of that. It’s also dramatic and literary.

Are you a creative Catholic? ""Building a Civilization of Love: A Call to Creative Catholics," is my new book exhorting Catholics to apply their faith to change the culture for the better!

Know someone who is an alcoholic or addict? "The Sober Catholic Way" helps Catholics by describing the many ways in which their faith can assist in maintaining sobriety, and is a basic handbook on how anyone can live a sober life. . (Thank you!!)

Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, Apostle

Today’s feast day on the Catholic liturgical calendar is important to me. It is the “Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, Apostle.”

Paul, originally called “Saul,” was a badass Jewish Pharisee dude who viewed the Way of Christ a serious enough threat to the Judaism of the time that he personally led a vicious persecution of the Church. He was directly or indirectly involved with the arrests and deaths of scores of Christians.

Until one day.

Acts of the Apostles 22:4-8 “I persecuted this Way, even unto death, binding and delivering into custody both men and women, just as the high priest and all those greater by birth bear witness to me.

Having received letters from them to the brothers, I journeyed to Damascus, so that I might lead them bound from there to Jerusalem, so that they might be punished.

But it happened that, as I was traveling and was approaching Damascus at midday, suddenly from heaven a great light shone around me.

And falling to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’

And I responded, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ And he said to me, ‘I am Jesus the Nazarene, whom you are persecuting.’

Popular tradition holds that he was knocked of his horse, there is however no scriptural evidence of that.

Why is this feast day of the Church important to me? I mean, apart from my being named after St. Paul?

The idea of conversion is central to my identity, especially after 2001. I am both an alcoholic in recovery and a revert to the Catholic Church.

I won’t discuss my alcoholism here, I have a blog devoted to that: Sober Catholic. My reversion to the faith is covered there, too, but not as much as my alcoholism recovery.

I was born and raised Catholic. Educated in a Catholic school from kindergarten through 8th grade. I was an altar boy (no girls allowed back then) at Mass and I had a fairly decent grasp of Catholic teachings.

Turned out my knowledge didn’t include the obvious need to apply it directly in daily living. Somehow I missed the lessons that we were to live out our Faith, not just pray, go to Mass on Sundays and whatnot. The actual, direct infusion into my life of Catholic living wasn’t really there. I mean, there were “daily living” things that I followed, such as no sex outside of marriage, but the Faith didn’t always form my decision-making.

Add that my knowledge of the Faith might have been broad, but it wasn’t deep.

And so I left the Church. It occurred during a rough period in my life when things weren’t going well and I prayed fervently for relief, but got none.

And so I decided that since “prayer didn’t work,” I’ll stop attending Mass. I wasn’t struck dead by lightening and this encouraged me to continue missing Mass.

I never became an atheist. The idea of “no God” is ludicrous. Created things need a creator. Made things need a maker. I instead just came to the conclusion that organized religion was a method of control over the masses.

Life continued, things got better in some ways. However these “better ways” lead to different problems which I won’t bother with here. Life happens, things occur and we adapt and cope or we do not.

I wandered about aimlessly spiritually for 15 years. I finally reverted to the Catholic Church at the same time I began my recovery from alcoholism. It just seemed to “make sense” now, and as AA introduced me to the notion of “applied spirituality,” I decided to explore what the Church actually said. Being confined to a couch for weeks on end because of early sobriety illness and watching the Daily Mass on EWTN also exposed me to a healthy dose of sound theology and doctrine.

Such things have a way of straightening out one’s mind. Truth does that.

I also learned that Catholicism isn’t just something that you do for an hour on Sundays, and off and on through the week when you pray (to get out of a jam? to get something?)

There isn’t much to this post apart from tying my reversion in to the feast day. Paul was hard-headed and stubborn and bent on destruction. So was I. I was hostile to the Church, as was he. (Although I wasn’t murderous with rage.)

After his conversion, he changed his life’s path and became a great Apostle, converting countless Gentiles. He did this by allowing Christ into his life.

And what an example of this!

Galatians 2: 20 “I live; yet now, it is not I, but truly Christ, who lives in me. And though I live now in the flesh, I live in the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and who delivered himself for me.”

And this “faith of the Son of God,” he received it:

Galatians 1:11-12 “For I would have you understand, brothers, that the Gospel which has been preached by me is not according to man.

And I did not receive it from man, nor did I learn it, except through the revelation of Jesus Christ.“

And so Jesus Himself taught St. Paul His Gospel. (Next time someone says that they looked throughout the entire New Testament and declare that “Jesus never said anything about….” to defend their unholy lives, remember this. He might not have said anything on “whatever” Himself, but He did through St. Paul.)

My conversion wasn’t as complete or intense as Paul’s. Jesus “lives in me” as He does in all of His brothers and sisters, but Paul’s conversion was deep andd critical to the future of humanity.

Mine: it’s good enough to write a blog for Catholic ex-drunks and to perhaps write Catholic-themed fiction.

All Scripture passages via Sacred Bible: Catholic Public Domain Version

Are you a creative Catholic? ""Building a Civilization of Love: A Call to Creative Catholics," is my new book exhorting Catholics to apply their faith to change the culture for the better!

Know someone who is an alcoholic or addict? "The Sober Catholic Way" helps Catholics by describing the many ways in which their faith can assist in maintaining sobriety, and is a basic handbook on how anyone can live a sober life. . (Thank you!!)

Sticker shock

I am at a turning point or crossroads in my blogging. I received an email from our website’s hosting service and it was an offer to renew soon before the price goes up.

I had mistakenly assumed that the renewal option was for the price we had last paid for hosting. I was unawares that the cost had gone up to almost double.

Momentary panic-stricken fretting as to whether it’s worth to keep on doing this ensued. “This” as regarding this particular blog? Not really, as I don’t blog here much for now; the potential uses for this blog were probably mostly in the future. But my wife and I have four sites. The hosting is through BlueHost, and they offer competitive packages versus the rest and they excel at one thing: offering multiple domain names per account. This enables us to host all four of our sites through them. My primary blogging effort, Sober Catholic, is worth the cost (at least my wife thinks so 😉 ) and will thus go on. As it won’t reduce costs to quit this blog, this will continue, too.

However, the doubling of the hosting costs did bring to the forefront of my conscience one thing. How serious am I at all this? One good thing about money is that it is a great motivator. One bad thing about money is that it is a great motivator. Money is the motivator for too many things.

So as the old saying goes, “It is time to fish or cut bait.” If we are to pay the hosting fees now as well as the domain name fees later before they expire, I have to make this worthwhile. I have to use this more to justify the costs. I know I have said countless times before (mostly on Sober Catholic) about “blogging more often,” but that was a battle between myself and an inner demon, discipline. And in those battles the consequences were mostly interior ravages and self-esteem issues. But now an element from the Real World has entered the fray. Money.

I will also explore ways to “monetize” this thing. And with that goes more blogging on it as monetization efforts are pointless unless there’s activity to draw people.

The turning point. Or crossroads. Continuing to plug away.

(Donations accepted, please see the PayPal link up above. If you’re amongst the people who donated in June 2013 when we were last up for hosting renewal, you needn’t contribute again.)

Are you a creative Catholic? ""Building a Civilization of Love: A Call to Creative Catholics," is my new book exhorting Catholics to apply their faith to change the culture for the better!

Know someone who is an alcoholic or addict? "The Sober Catholic Way" helps Catholics by describing the many ways in which their faith can assist in maintaining sobriety, and is a basic handbook on how anyone can live a sober life. . (Thank you!!)

Becoming antisocial

Time. Where does it go? Clocks tick, the days pass, and the time we have left for doing whatever we’re supposed to be doing while on Earth dwindles.

And so I’m cutting back on social media use. (Wow, that’s a hard switch from the melancholic opening…) It should have been done quite a long time ago, either excising some uses totally or being more disciplined. But, better late than never.

I’m a writer and a blogger. Not my source of income, my “day job” as it were, but what I will eventually be. (Full-time writer, living solely off writing income. Making progress, but still quite some time away…)

And social media is getting in the way. There are so many distractions….

It seems that almost every writer, published or aspiring, has a social media presence. But, some appear less than others…. Could they be… actually writing??????

I have a wife, a full-time day job, and two cats and a vegetable garden. They all require time and attention. This obviously cuts into time spent writing. So… something has to go.

I know! Social networking!!!! (Well, not all of it…)

There are writing Groups on Facebook, on LinkedIn and on Google+. Not to mention old-school discussion forums going back to the 1990s. Lots of writers writing on them. When do they actually write write, (as opposed to social write?) Maybe they’re full-timer writers, and posting away on Facebook or a forum is just their equivalent of yakking it up with colleagues during break times and lunch at a day job? Maybe they’re aspiring writers getting help, advice, commiseration or just trying to “feel like a writer” by hanging out with others.

But it ocurred to me that no real writer writing is actually getting done (well, in my house.) Some, but not enough. I mean, progress is being made on a novel, but more serious application of planning and research and such has to be made to the draft. You know, writing.

So I’ve begun limiting my time on the social nets. Google+ has largely disappeared from my social habits. Once in a great while I visit it, but mostly for a blog page I maintain, or some Communities. But even that is getting rarer. Google+ was nice, but I always felt like I had to be “cool” or “really intelligent” when on there as Plussers typically dismiss Facebook as riff-raff. Which is silly, but people tend to find a need to justify actions (i.e. not liking one thing or preferring it to something else. If your FB Timeline is full of garbage and riff-raff, that’s your fault.) And even Facebook for me has dropped off, I actually go days without using it. LinkedIn? Hah! Maybe once a week. I do make a daily habit of using Awestruck, a Catholic social network.

So, I have been strengthening the habit of writing. Every day. Not just often. Daily. At first it was just getting off of social networks. I survived that. Now to continue with daily progress of… writing. (This has been an issue with me for decades. And the struggles to do that appear here on this blog once in a while. Give me credit, except for when I was drinking, I never gave up…)

This is a follow up to a post on SoberCatholic.com, right here: The Sober Catholic Trudge Report Will No Longer Be out.

This post (“Becoming Antisocial”) has been planned for a while, but as it happens an impromptu visit to my Twitter account made me discover that I was irritating someone. Anyway, Twitter is another social network I’ve largely ignored. But I’ve been doing that for years. Why would a writer use Twitter? One hundred and forty characters? Seriously? How can a writer limit themselves to that??????

Are you a creative Catholic? ""Building a Civilization of Love: A Call to Creative Catholics," is my new book exhorting Catholics to apply their faith to change the culture for the better!

Know someone who is an alcoholic or addict? "The Sober Catholic Way" helps Catholics by describing the many ways in which their faith can assist in maintaining sobriety, and is a basic handbook on how anyone can live a sober life. . (Thank you!!)

Viking dream

OK, so I had this dream one night last week in which I was a person participating in something like a “Society for Creative Anachronism/Historical Medieval Battles” competition, but it was all Viking. It took me this long to post it here;a version has appeared on Facebook.

Anyway, the dream. In order to join this “Society for Creatively Anachronistic Historical Medieval Battles” you and your Viking-wannabe friends have to band together, get involved in the competition, and if your hacking and slaying, looting and pillaging were sufficiently acceptable, you were in.

And my group apparently were already members, and we had an enjoyable time in this particular event which also had wannabe Vikings competing.

One such group of hopefuls was from a western NY human services org that caters to people with developmental disabilities. I used to work at this particular agency. However, these Viking wannabes were mostly, not entirely, but mostly, women. And “women can’t be Vikings” was one of the rules of the Society for Creatively Anachronistic Historical Medieval Battles. But they comported themselves well, and by any standards, save for the rule barring women from joining, they’d be a shoo-in for membership.

So, we were like, “Who’s gonna tell ’em they can’t join?”

“You tell ’em.”

“No, you tell, ’em.”

“Uh-huh. I ain’t gonna tell ’em!”

And so it went like this for awhile.

Off to the side observing all this was a group of lesbian feminists holding broadswords. Now, THAT’S disturbing dream imagery. Anyway, they were passing judgment on us, saying that we’re Neanderthals (“Uh, no, we’re VIKINGS! Neanderthals are in another Society…”) for doing all this hacking and slaying. They went on to say that they were offended by our society’s competition and were going to have it banned.

We didn’t particularly like this, and pointed out that we members of the Society for Creatively Anachronistic Historical Medieval Battles don’t just go around hacking and slaying, looting and pillaging.

“Oh?” asked the lesbian feminists, hands on the broadswords leaning up against their hips. “And just what else do you do?”

“We’re environmentalists!”

“What?” They were incredulous.

“Sure! While we’re out there in the forest, hacking and slaying, looting and pillaging, we’re not just keeping track of blood-volume spilled and a body count. We’re observing tree growth, animal migratory behavior and deer herd numbers!”

They still seemed incredulous, but didn’t respond.

Two of our members quietly discussed the situation and were heard saying, “We can solve this right away at once; we can tell the human services people that we need ‘further evidence of their prowess’ and so they’ll have to take on the lesbian broadsworders. We won’t tell the lesbians anything, they’ll have no choice but to defend themselves. They look pretty handy with those broadswords…”

“That’s what freaks me out,” interrupted the other.

“…and the other people should be able to take out most of them, while losing many of their own. Afterwards, the surviving lesbians will just go their own way, leaving us alone, and whoever’s left from human services will probably change their minds about joining!”

“Brilliant!”

And with that, the dream ended as I tend to naturally awaken daily at 6AM, plus or minus a few minutes.

Now bear in mind that this was a dream and not indicative of my personal opinions of human service organizations, lesbian feminists, Vikings and anyone who enjoys a good broadsword, blood and guts. I am NOT RESPONSIBLE for anything my subconscious dredges up.

It was an odd dream. I’ll try to post odd ones now and then, they’re at least entertaining. I think I was reasonably accurate in relating this one, Lord only knows what didn’t survive the awakening.

There really is a “Society for Creative Anachronism;” they usually dress up as medieval knights and such and go jousting, or something. There is also an “Historical Medival Battles” organization. From what I can tell from Facebook and You Tube it is a sporting competition where guys dress up as medieval knights, enter a ring like is used in boxing or mixed-martial arts, and beat the living heck out of each other with swords. They do wear lot of padding. It is very popular in Europe, especially so in Russia and Eastern Europe.

The SCA allows women members, the HMB probably has a women’s combat division, for all I know. There is no such organization that combines the two names, and banning women is sexist, anyway. I’m not even going to explore why that attitude showed up in my dream.

Are you a creative Catholic? ""Building a Civilization of Love: A Call to Creative Catholics," is my new book exhorting Catholics to apply their faith to change the culture for the better!

Know someone who is an alcoholic or addict? "The Sober Catholic Way" helps Catholics by describing the many ways in which their faith can assist in maintaining sobriety, and is a basic handbook on how anyone can live a sober life. . (Thank you!!)

…and then there were three…

It didn’t happen this way, as Rosie isn’t a morning person. But this is how it might have happened if she was…

Rosie stretched awake in the early morning hours, sunlight filtering its way through the curtains and painting the bed with it stark colors.

“Mrmphlph?” she asked, and hearing no reply from her husband Paul, glanced over and noticed his side of the bed was empty.

Getting up, she gracefully exited the bedroom and wandered down the narrow hallway to the rest of the house, becoming aware of a silence filling the place with… an expectation of something…

And then she saw… for over by the windows in the living room, eerily quiet, was Paul and their two cats, Ninja and JerrieCat, looking intently out the window towards the ground. They took no notice of her.

“Uh-oh,” she thought, “this can’t be good.”

“Um, honey…?” But she got no further as Paul motioned her to be quiet. He pointed with his hand as to what the trio was looking at.

“What?” she persisted, to be met with and low rumbling growl from JerrieCat.

And so Rosie walked over to the window, navigating the floor strewn with catnip toys, actually missing them all this time. Arriving at the window, she looked in the direction indicated and saw…

…another cat. Mostly tabby colored, with white fur here and there. Perched imperiously on the small front porch landing.

“Oh, no, and then there were three…?” she wondered…

TO BE CONTINUED (???)

Are you a creative Catholic? ""Building a Civilization of Love: A Call to Creative Catholics," is my new book exhorting Catholics to apply their faith to change the culture for the better!

Know someone who is an alcoholic or addict? "The Sober Catholic Way" helps Catholics by describing the many ways in which their faith can assist in maintaining sobriety, and is a basic handbook on how anyone can live a sober life. . (Thank you!!)

working habits

In working on my novel, I have discovered that I have odd working habits. Not that they are getting in the way of progress, but it’s interesting to observe in myself. 😉 I’m sharing this only because I want to, and you can extract whatever value you can, especially as I’m not a published novelist yet; you should really pay more attention to the work habits of the successfully published ones. But this stuff “works for me” and has kept me from “giving up” on this particular work.

For example, I don’t outline beforehand. I outline after every few dozen pages or so to map where I’ve been and I outline the next several scenes. Otherwise the novel is all in my head and pours out in some manner.

I do keep a separate bulleted list of plotlines, just to keep track of all the disparate action and so that I don’t fall into the rookie novelist’s trap of forgetting to resolve a plot. This is also helping me to direct a convergence of many of them into a epic scene where the novel “finally gets going” in the minds of the millions of readers who will buy the book. 😉

I employ a heavy use of LibreOffice’s highlighting function to color-code ideas in these outlines and lists. I use LibreOffice for everything in writing; I don’t bother with commercial novel writing software or other fancy pieces of software like mindmapping and wikis and such that other writers report using to their great profit. I prefer to keep it simple (albeit messy) in a software that works equally well across operating systems (I use Mac OS X and Linux). I think I’m replicating what I would have used “back in the day” when typewriters and legal pads and notebooks –  the paper kind – were all the rage.

And recently I’ve sidestepped making actual progress on the draft by also doing something backwards: I am now writing up a backstory, actually a biography, of a character who is turning into a pivotal protagonist. In doing so I am also fleshing out ideas for the novel, giving it some meat for certain scenes I’ve already written and will be writing. From what I gather, many writers do much of this sort of thing beforehand. To me, it’s like a cross-pollination. I am developing new ideas for the character, while also incorporating ideas already used into the biography; it’s a synthesis of material.

It’s an interesting exploration of how i’m crafting this work.

Are you a creative Catholic? ""Building a Civilization of Love: A Call to Creative Catholics," is my new book exhorting Catholics to apply their faith to change the culture for the better!

Know someone who is an alcoholic or addict? "The Sober Catholic Way" helps Catholics by describing the many ways in which their faith can assist in maintaining sobriety, and is a basic handbook on how anyone can live a sober life. . (Thank you!!)

I see… people in need of intercessory prayers

OK, that’s not quite as pop culture-iconic like the movie line, “I see dead people,” but that’s what I’ve been seeing over these past few years.

What?

All right, here goes: Ever since I relocated to western New York State in 2007 I’ve been seeing people who remind me of persons I’ve known in the past. Could be anyone: old school mates, work colleagues, whomever. At first it would be just in my current parish during Mass. In fact, I blogged about it previously “…This brings up something else, a phenomenon I’ve noticed at my home parish, and nowhere else: Every so often I see people who bear a striking resemblance to someone from my old, hometown parish, either a physical similarity, or “something about them” is reminiscent. Odd. It would be one thing if I experienced this at other parishes, but that has not happened, only where I attend Mass now. (Source: Strange Sightings in Church.

Well, it’s changed. It is no longer just in my home parish, it is happening in a lot of other places and numerous times a day. They are no longer just people “from my old, hometown parish,” but people from throughout my life, its various periods and places lived. And it’s not as if these people were particularly special to me, sometimes I’ve forgotten their names.

Wierd.

So, what to do? I pray for them. There must be a reason I am beset with this “gift.” For some reason, in a mysterious way that the Lord isn’t sharing with me, I have been selected to perform the Spiritual Work of Mercy known as “praying for the living and the dead” on a daily basis.

I already have an interest in death and dying and the afterlife (see my death blog “The Four Last Things – Death. Judgment. Heaven. Hell.” So perhaps this is a more practical application.

This is also applicable for use in a protagonist in a novel that’s on the backburner…

Hmmm… I wonder…

Are you a creative Catholic? ""Building a Civilization of Love: A Call to Creative Catholics," is my new book exhorting Catholics to apply their faith to change the culture for the better!

Know someone who is an alcoholic or addict? "The Sober Catholic Way" helps Catholics by describing the many ways in which their faith can assist in maintaining sobriety, and is a basic handbook on how anyone can live a sober life. . (Thank you!!)

In the Land of My Exile…

I might be doing it again. Changing the name of this blog. Oh, no. How whacked is that? 😉

I’ve been thinking, and now is a good time for this before this blog gets really noticed. It’s not as if I publicize it beyond automatic feed distribution to Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Twitter and my other two blogs. I don’t really do anything to make it well known. So for the time being, while it’s “finding its way” as my primary blog to yammer about writing, reading, and whatever else that may cross my mind and possibly motivate a blog post, now is a good period to continue contemplating its title.

I may revisit an old one. The previous title was “In the Land of My Exile I Praise Him,” which was from the Old Testament’s Book of Tobit (13:6). I felt that was fitting. This place (the country I live in on the planet it sits on) is not my permanent home, nor my true home. Heaven is. (Well, “permanent” if I make it there…) “And to “praise Him” is something we believers all should be doing, in our prayers and meditations, in our words and works, in the way we live. We are in “exile” here, just passing through this transient place, on a pilgrimage to where we’re meant to be.

As I mentioned in this post, I, Blog, I rejected “In the Land of My Exile I Praise Him” as being a little pretentious, at least for me. But what if I shortened it…

Now, “In the Land of My Exile…” is still somewhat Biblical, but not overly so (not that being “Biblical” bothers me). But with the ellipsis at the end, it adds an air of mystery. It just hangs there. What exile? What land? Where’s home? What does this mean? Is this just another idiot blowhard pundit pretending to be profound or literary in their self-examinations and introspections, as if anyone really cares?

It also is kinda science-fictiony/fantasyish, which is somewhat along the lines of the fiction I’m slogging through. The current novel I’m working on, as well as another work set in the same place with some of the same characters (see It wants to be a novel, but perhaps later) are more like “contemporary fiction with fantasy elements grafted on.”

I was thinking of “The Blog With No Name,” and have three blogrolls entitled “The Good,” “The Bad,” and “The Ugly.” Or maybe they’d be just groupings of “important” posts. I can also have a picture of me in a wide-brimmed hat for profile picture and favicon. But I quickly dismissed that idea.

So, like I said before, “Don’t come here looking for profound, insightful commentary on current events, Catholic or secular”, but I may take a look about the land of my exile and beyond, see what I see about me and write about it. Could be deep, could be something you’d rather print out and use as birdcage liner or do-it-yourself cat litter.

It’s still “Paul Sofranko’s Blog” regardless of the title. I read somewhere that a writer “has to” have a website/blog to “engage” people and “showcase” their stuff.

So…

  • my primary blog to yammer about writing, reading, and whatever else that may cross my mind and possibly motivate a blog post
  • take a look about the land of my exile and beyond, see what I see about me and write about it.
  • “contemporary fiction with fantasy elements grafted on.”

Hmmm…. a title to encompass all that…

Are you a creative Catholic? ""Building a Civilization of Love: A Call to Creative Catholics," is my new book exhorting Catholics to apply their faith to change the culture for the better!

Know someone who is an alcoholic or addict? "The Sober Catholic Way" helps Catholics by describing the many ways in which their faith can assist in maintaining sobriety, and is a basic handbook on how anyone can live a sober life. . (Thank you!!)