Stokes Sounds Off: 10/23/16

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Sunday, October 23, 2016

Book Progress

Though I have not worked solidly on adding any scenes to my first book, a couple of developments have been made. I had originally titled the first book in the series "The Lord Looks on the Heart Book 1--The Teenage Years". But I felt that since this is a book about LDS teens growing up, I wanted something different that sounded better. In doing some research, I have come up with a better title. I thought I remembered in the scriptures something about someone "growing up unto the Lord." The more I thought about it, the more that made sense as a subtitle for my book. For those who aren't aware, I am writing a series of books chronicling the adventures of a group of friends. I had originally envisioned having this book encompass from the teenage years to when my characters paired off with other characters (in the book or yet to be introduced) in marriage, but when I shared what I had written with Brandon Sanderson, he suggested that I divvy up the book into a series: the first discussing the teenage years, the second on missions, the third on marriage, and so on to include their posterities. I liked that idea so much that this is what I am going to do. I will keep you posted on the progress I make towards making this series a reality. When I get closer to publishing it, I will plan on posting excerpts of the book on this blog. That's the latest on my writing. Thanks so much for your kind attention.

Average Ages of the Brethren

Hello, all! Though the next apostolic birthdays are not until next month (President Uchtdorf's 76th two weeks from today and Elder Renlund's 64th exactly one week later), I wanted to bring you up-to-date on the latest apostolic age averages. As of about an hour ago when Sunday the 23rd of October 2016 was born, the average age of the First Presidency is 82.84 (with just President Uchtdorf being younger). The average age of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles is 74.39, with half of those 12 being younger than the average. Finally, the average age of the apostles overall is 76.08, with 8 of the apostles (53.33%) being younger than the average. Again, not sure how those averages compare historically with the average throughout the ages, but there it is, such as it is. Thanks so much to you all for your readership and support.