Body Temperature: 104.4 (F)

This is getting more serious than I thought it was.

Please keep me in your prayers if you're into that kind of thing. If not, well, that's fine. Keep me in whatever it is you keep people in.

Unless it's a box in the basement. I don't think that'd be very helpful.

So I've always known, but never really thought about, this one simple fact: there are thieves on deviantART. I've only heard about the ones that steal art, but it stands to reason that if there are art thieves, there are literature thieves as well.

Gasp if you so wish.

Since I am going to be in college when I get back from my mission, and since I'll need money to pay for books/housing/tuition/education in general, and since writing happens to be something I'm good at... well, you can see why I don't really want random people running off with significant works.

Part of me is worried about plaigarism - someone else coming along and getting the money for my work. I doubt I'd have a problem proving it's mine, but I'd rather not come back from Mexico and go straight into a legal battle over copyright issues. Not that fun.

So. I'll be leaving a few chapters here as a preview (so people will actually want to buy the thing >.< ) but for the whole story... well, I'm still deciding what to do with that. I'll have to look into my options, and I'll let you know soon what's going on. Thanks for everyone who left me comments and advice, it was all greatly appreciated!

-Josh

PS - I'll still be using devART for short stories and previews and little things like that. It's not that I'm not pleased - far from it, actually. It just doesn't meet my needs for every project.

Last friday I met with some students from my public speaking class to talk about speech ideas. One girl wanted to talk about the testing center's design, notably the entrance. In her words (more or less), "You walk in and the first thing you do is walk up this giant concrete staircase. It feels like you're walking to your death."

Of course, I thought she was just exaggerating. Surely the school would take better care of the test-stressed students! Well, I just took my first test in the testing center, and when you walk in, there's a huge concrete staircase that feels like walking to your death.

Go figure.

I just got back from a week-long boating trip with my youth group, and it was probably one of the craziest weeks of my life! Our leaders said we would have 90-100 degree weather all week, and for the most part we did... until Thursday. After we got back from rock climbing it started to rain, and I don't mean a little drizzle that makes stuff a little damp. I'm talking the heaviest downpour in the history of forever. It was almost like standing under a waterfall, and that's not an exaggeration. That quickly changed to marble-sized hail and then turned back into rain, and within about 5 minutes our campsite was completely flooded. We ended up trenching our sites and diverting all the water down the hill (which probably didn't make the lower campsites happy) and then helping our neighbors to the same to their site. Fortunately, nobody's stuff got soaked so there wasn't much damage. One of our neighbors cut his foot open though, and we ended up having to drive him to the hospital (all his buddies had had a bit too much to drink). They were pretty nice and we ended up giving the guy a shirt to remember us by.

Other than the ridiculous weather, it was a fun week, but I'm glad to be back home.