OK, apologies to all 29,475 of you who noticed that I said “astrology” instead of “astronomy” yesterday, and that I dated the earth — not the universe –at 13.8 billion years old.   Mistakes noted!

It was a long day: ten hours of writing and editing, and then the blog.  Yuk!   But, well, at least I know that lots of you were paying attention.   I won’t post your comments if they simply were making corrections this time around…..

I am nearing the finish line with the draft of the book.   I’ve written all ten chapters and the Preface, and edited it all once.   Now I’m working on the second time through, editing, adding footnotes, improving style, polishing, and so on.   On Monday I’ll be sending it to four very sharp colleagues in the field: they’ve agreed to read it and make comments on everything from substance to style.  I HATE this part of it, because I always want anything I write to be perfect, and it never is, and people notice, and I have a thin skin about such things.  But I HAVE to show it to colleagues and friends so that they’re the ones who catch mistakes (instead of 12,475 readers).

So I’ve asked them to get comments back to me in a month.   Then I’ll revise it further based on what they say.  Give it a final read through, and send it in.

Not sure how many of you are aware: it typically takes a year to get a book published once it is in the publishers hand.   That’s true for just about every kind of book I’ve ever done: scholarly monograph, college textbook, or trade book.   It’s *possible* for a publisher to move much faster, but to do so they have to cut corners and push something else that is in queue out of the way.   So usually it’s a year.  That means this book, even though I’m nearly done now, won’t be published probably until next April.  

In the meantime I’ll be moving on to the next thing, which is a scholarly commentary on the early non-canonical Gospel fragments, including the Gospel of Peter, Papyrus Egerton 2, and a bunch of ones you’ve probably never heard of!   That one will be hard work, but I like to alternate between doing the popular book (my current project), the college textbook (the most recently finished book, My Intro to the Bible), and the scholarly book.