The Teachings IN PRINT

When I wrote my first blog here a couple months ago, I was a leisured man and imagined I'd be adding a blog every week or so. I'd forgotten that "the days grow short when you reach September." Did they ever! The twelve-hour days didn't end until just two days ago, when suddenly all but the last half of one percent of the work was finished -- and nothing could be done about that remaining half of one percent until I received one last URL from my webmaster. I took a whole day off to do nothing at all.

THE TEACHINGS looks like a simple book. After all, 90% of it is made up of selections from already-published books, books that don't need writing or editing. But it was a difficult book, and what made it difficult were conflicting objectives.

To see what I'm talking about, let's say there are thirty passages that make The Story of B a terrific book. Obviously I couldn't include ALL THIRTY of those passages in THIS book. If I did, people who were enticed to read The Story of B itself would be rightfully outraged to see that they'd already read the best parts here in The Teachings. But I also couldn't include NONE of them here -- or what would entice them to read The Story of B in the first place? So I include just a third of them here. But I can't include the ten MOST enticing of the thirty (for the same reason I couldn't include ALL THIRTY), and I can't include the ten LEAST enticing (for the same reason I couldn't include NONE of the thirty). So picking those ten made for some hard sorting to find an assortment representing all degrees of enticement.

Now I hold my breath. I can't imagine doing anything that would be more useful than what I've done here, assembling the quintessential elements of all these books in a single volume. I'll never produce anything more gratifying to me or more valuable to my readers. No book in my future will ever be as important as this one. Here it is: http://amzn.to/1qwFsda.

Give it a look!

A New Kid on the Blog

I am definitely a new kid on the blog, this being my very first ever. I'm having to grit my teeth and tell myself very firmly: You DO have time to do this! You DO have time to do this!

It's hard to believe that I do have time for it. The last couple of months have been made up of twelve-hour workdays seven days a week to finish a book promised for "this fall."

It came about this way. This year it finally dawned on me that the millions who have read Ishmael tend to read that book and STOP. Only about ten percent of them go on to read any of the books that followed -- Providence, The Story of B, My Ishmael, Beyond Civilization -- each unique but all endowed with the same virtues that made Ishmael a book that has changed many lives. You would think that someone as reasonably smart as I am wouldn't have had to wait fifteen years to notice this, but there it is.

I'm not alone in this. Other writers have had the same experience with their "first" novels. For example, very few of the millions who read Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, and Forrest Gump ever read the later novels of William Golding, J.D. Salinger, or Winston Groom. I think that, in a sense, all these first books were literally TOO SPECIAL. People who read them felt like they didn't NEED another.

But I'm pretty sure that if my own "first" had been The Story of B instead of Ishmael, THAT book would have been the special one, and the others would have gone largely unread. (Believe it or not, those who have read it often insist that it's the more valuable of the two.)

In fact, Ishmael was not, strictly speaking, my "first." The Book of Nahash, a sort of novelization of the Genesis story of the Fall, was written about eight years before Ishmael; the tales of Adam, which appeared in that book, were published in 2005. One of my personal favorites, The Book of the Damned, was written and published just a decade before Ishmael was published; in that book I accomplished some things I was never able to match in any of my later books.