Sometimes the Muse takes a long vacation.
It’s been seven years since my last book appeared. When What Catholics Really Believe came out, I thought I was on the verge of producing a manuscript every year or two. That wouldn’t be much by Barbara Cartland’s standards, I suppose, but then it was my intention to write something other than potboilers. As it turned out, my intention was a non-starter. Seven years passed with little result. To the extent I wrote, it was for This Rock or outside publications—short stuff, nothing book-length.
Not that I didn’t make efforts. I carefully culled my library, putting here the books I would need for background reading for this manuscript, putting there the ones I would need for that manuscript. I worked up detailed outlines that never metamorphosed into anything. The research books stayed in their positions for years, their old places on the shelves being taken by newly purchased replacements.
Some writers are able to compose in snatches; they carry index cards and jot down a few lines whenever they have free time. Once they acquire a few hundred completed cards, they have a book. I can’t work that way. If I’m to write at all, I need to set aside a block of time—the larger the task, the larger the block. For books I need entire days free or I find myself spinning wheels. I just didn’t have such large blocks available.
Catholic Answers kept growing—or kept having problems that needed to be tended to, which is about the same thing—and I’d arrive home too tired to think. At length, as new staff members came on, I found myself able to unload duties. I began to have free time, but it came in blocks too small to be usable. Over the years the blocks grew, and recently they coagulated enough to allow me to refocus on writing. The immediate result is Nothing But the Truth, which is due from the printer this month. Another book, The Usual Suspects (I call it a supplement but not a sequel to Catholicism and Fundamentalism) is due out next year. Those research books that had been gathering dust finally were put to use, and two more manuscripts are starting their way through the publication process.
I don’t know whether to feel liberated, having broken through the logjam, or inundated, since I have committed myself to half a dozen additional manuscripts. Maybe I have traded one master for another, but at least I think I’ll have something concrete to show for the change of allegiance.
Much of the credit for my liberation goes to Tim Ryland, who took over as editor of This Rock in December. Not only did he free me from production duties while bringing the magazine current, but he freed me from small-scale writing duties by taking over “Up Front.” I return to this page not because I have more to say or am a better stylist than he—I don’t and I’m not, as a review of the last ten issues will demonstrate—but because my colleagues argued that it’s expected that the magazine have a regular column by the apostolate’s president. I have acquiesced to their nagging but have told them that writing “Up Front” had better not interfere with the book manuscripts. Or else.