I have a stack of books sitting on my desk. I actually use them as a stand for a lamp. But I chose them because they are big books and I needed some height on the lamp.

What are the books? They are reflections on plays and movies written by the people who were a part of creating them. I tend to get these for Christmas because I’m notoriously hard to get gifts. 🙂

The books on my desk now are:

• About the musical Wicked (long before it got picked up to be a hit movie)
• About the musical Hamilton
• About the timeless movie The Princess Bride

I love getting the back-story on the entertainment that I enjoy. It’s fun to find out that the star broke his toe right before filming an epic fight scene, or that the early versions of the script didn’t understand what the show eventually came to be all about.

These books also realign my thinking. It’s sooo easy to think that the show was created in one continuous take, or that the writers knew every scene that had to be included before the first role of film was shot. 

It’s not like that. Creating a great movie or musical takes a lot of time and even more steps and false starts. At the beginning, the creators might think it’s one thing, but by the time they’re done they’ve created something completely different.

I know exactly what they are talking about.

You know that I write books about the Bible. It would be tempting to think that I sit down at a computer and just start typing and out pops a book! Don’t I know exactly what to say (and how to say it) from the very beginning?

Nope. It’s not like that at all.

So here’s a little peak behind the curtain for you. I’m getting very close to wrapping up my latest book. I think it will actually come out later this month (after I close out the rest of the fine details).

But would you be surprised to learn that this book has been 45 years in the making? Yes, that’s most of my life.  It started with an experience I had before I was a teenager, a Bible study event that captured my imagination. Over the intervening decades, I’ve come back to this particular Bible Study at least two times (that I can think of).

I want to share it with you (when it’s actually finished).  Soon.  I am trying desperately to be patient because the pressure of the years in waiting are starting to get to me.

But for the moment, I have something else to share.

You know that movies change names all the time while they are being made. The big concept might change multiple times. And the advertising shot will go through hundreds of iterations.

Well, I’ve been doing the same thing. I needed to test this book (it fits really well into a Small Group format) just to see how it would work. So I created a working cover to be able to print some copies for my guinea pigs (aka church small group).  

I like the cover. I think it’s cool. But as I’ve gotten ready to publish for real, I’ve been looking at what the current styles and trends are – and they are not like my working cover.  So I’ve redone the cover to better communicate with potential readers (and small groups).

I put both covers up side by side.  Which one do you think is the working copy and which do you think is the one I plan to launch?

Click here to see the cover comparison!

That’s it for this week. Hopefully I’ll be in a place to tell you more about it soon!