I mentioned yesterday that I have now sent in my manuscript on The Triumph of Christianity to my editor at Simon & Schuster.  It occurs to me that readers might be interested in knowing how the editorial process works.  I know I was almost completely ignorant of the process when I first started publishing books.   My unreflective thought then is that once I would finish writing a book and editing it as best I could, the process would be more or less over, without much left to do.  Wrong.  The process goes on and on and you think it’ll never end! So leading up to this point I have written the book.  That itself was a long process with a large number of stages.  I started by accumulating bibliography on the topic, reading the classics in the field, finding new books and articles that needed to be read, reading those, discovering other books and articles that had to be read, reading those, and so on.   On everything I read I took notes, so I could [...]

Last week I interrupted the thread I had been pursuing about why my unusual academic background prepared me to write books for general audiences in order to talk about my lecture in Odense, Denmark, at the University of Southern Denmark, on the relationship between the worship of the Roman emperor and the rise of Christian understandings of Christ as “Savior” and “Lord” and “God” (titles given to the emperor as well).  There is more to be said about this latter topic, some of it very interesting – but I think I’ve said enough for now.  I want to finish off the earlier thread. And for a rather momentous (for me!) occasion.  Two days ago, I finished my book manuscript The Triumph of Christianity and sent it off to my editor for her to work her magic with it.  I am very excited about this process, more so (maybe a lot more so?) than normal.   This will be the thirty-first book that I’ve published (some edited, most written).  So I do this kind of thing a [...]