As I indicated earlier, I’m thinking about doing a series of posts on the various research and writing projects on my plate.   As of yesterday, my trade book on the afterlife is finished and moving into production (meaning that it will now go to a copy editor to deal with grammar and style, correct typos, etc.; it will then come back to me to review his/her suggested corrections; it will then….  and so it goes, till it comes out in a year from now).

I had announced that the book was actually finished months ago, and it was, kind of.   But we still hadn’t settled on a title, and the title mattered because in the Preface of the book I discussed the title as a way of introducing the thesis and themes of the book.  If the title changed, well, that made the discussion irrelevant.

We’ve settled now on the title.  I *had* been calling it “The Invention of the Afterlife,” which a lot of blog readers, and others, rather liked, and a lot of others thought was a bit too much “in your face.”   My editor thought so too.  So we played around with options.  For a while we thought about “The Afterlife: A History.”  Nice, succinct, to the point, rather stately and subtly interesting.  But we decided it didn’t have enough punch.  It didn’t really grab anyone to make them think they really had to read the book.

And so we’ve moved to something kind of in between the two options, and …

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