Last summer, while working from home and seeing to the news, and hearing people say, “Jesus says this,” and “Jesus says that” I felt gaslit.

Because the Jesus I grew up learning about in Sunday School, was not matching the Jesus that people were presenting. I go to church every single Sunday and I am either member of, or leading a Bible study every week. Are we even talking about the same guy?

So I decided to just go through the gospels and read them for myself, the whole gospels. I started with Mark because I knew it was the shortest and I could do it in one sitting. 

Mark took an hour, maybe. I wrote my notes on that. Then a day or two later, I sat down and read Matthew. Same story, slightly different details, I wrote notes on that too. 

Then I sat down to read Luke. At this point, I already knew the story, so it was all about the details that start showing up. I could longer do it in one fast read because I wanted really get into the nitty-gritty of what is actually happening. Leave nothing out. Document what’s happening like I was a student in journalism school. 

For the book of Luke, I read one chapter a day, with two of the chapters taking two days because they were longer, and there was a lot of details. I wrote down what happened. All of it. I didn’t just skip to the best part, or the encouraging parts, or the parts that were already familiar with. I wrote out all of it. 

Then I went on to John. Same way. Acts, then Romans and Philemon. 

Instead of calming me down, which it does for my regular life, it kind of radicalized me. It does both, it changed my perspective. I’m not so impacted by all of my daily concerns, but I am hotly aware of how far Christianity has slid away from the original, clean lines that the gospel writers put down. 

I have been jotting stuff down forever, and was slightly curious about publishing, but not enough to pursue it. If I wanted to publish anything, I should be publishing these notes that I am writing about the Gospels. People should hear this! 

So, I googled it and the first sponsored results were vanity presses. In a nutshell, they wanted $3000 cash to do a book. I’m like, “I don’t have $3000.” LOL. Even if I could scrape up the money, they didn’t seem to have any distribution, so I would just be sitting with a box of my own books in my living room. what was I supposed to do? Take them door-to-door with my kid’s wagon? 

Tim saw that I was interested in publishing, and he told me he had seen a notice the library called the Willamette Writers group that meets once a month. The second meeting featured an author talking on the three ways to be published. There is traditional publishing, self-publishing and hybrid. I took notes. Once you know what to look for, you can find tons of information on the Internet about the different types.

It has been a trip! Every day, after I get the kids off to school, walk the dog, feed the chickens,  and clean up the house a little, I sit down at my computer. While I am investigating how to get published, I am also editing what I’ve written, and I keep writing new stuff. I am obsessed. 

This has all taken a while, so I’ve gone through First and Second Corinthians. Now I’m starting over at the beginning with Genesis and that is very, very slow. God creates all of the world in the first chapter, so that bad boy is taking a minute. 

If you have heard anything about publishing, you might be familiar with the word “rejection,” because I’m starting to experience that on a new level. Since I started this little project back in, checks notes, September! I have a queried seven publishers. The first one took two months to get back to me and none of the others have responded. None.

Most of them require you to have an agent to even ask for permission to show them your writing. There are several places to find list of agents on the Internet, and I have been querying them. It’s very curious how much they want to know about me, but not my writing right away.

They you want to know my background, publishing history, and my social media. One agency won’t even look at me until I have 20,000 followers. Listen, I have 800 friends on Facebook, and 20 likes from my mother-in-law. So far, I have written to 21 agents and have been rejected by seven.

Everyone is asking for a publishing history. I used to work for newspapers, magazines and television back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I had a different last name then, so I don’t think it’s going to count. 

So, simultaneous to all of this, I have been trying to get some of my independent pieces published in online magazines and journals.  Remember when I said, I was jotting things down all the time? I have 300 essays sitting in the cloud. So I started cleaning up some of those and searching journals where the topic and style might match. 

I just received a rejection from one today. It says, “I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to consider it and would encourage you to submit it elsewhere.”

Magazines are pretty responsive, so I’m getting more feedback from them. So far, I have one free journal that is willing to publish something I wrote next October, so that’s exciting.

But not the book, that front is silent and cold as the stars at night.  I’m just trying to get some interest in my notes on Luke. 

One of the publishing houses I researched said they use an agent service where authors pay a fee for agents to read what you’ve written. Then, if it matches what they’re looking for, they will pass it on or they will send the author detailed notes of what to fix to make it more publishable. As an English professor, I got paid money to grade my students’ papers, and this was cheaper than of course at DeVry. I paid $129 to find out what’s wrong with my book. They did not hold back. 

No, my book is not publishable as it is now. It is just a dry retelling of the Bible and if people wanted that, they could just read the Bible. People want to have one single point drawn out, and be encouraged, and have simple questions that they can answer. Also, I needed to use more descriptive and evocative language. I cried.

After a day, when my eyes cleared, I could see their point. People want books in devotional form that they can read every day. My notes are broken down into chapters that look like little devotions, so if I just added on some reflections and some book club questions then it could be more palatable for the market.

Here’s the problem, I actually read Luke. Half of the chapters are about Jesus telling the Pharisees that they’re full of dead mens bones. Reflection question: Do you feel that you are an unwashed grave? Based on Jesus‘s story about the rich man, how hot is Hades?

Obviously, I’m joking, but also I’m not. Reading and considering all of Luke is very, very challenging. Christians have been naughty, and they may not like to read about that. In order to call yourself Christian you have to accept the whole package, right? Right?

Anyways, I have to drive the kids’ carpool this morning, and I haven’t made lunches yet so I have to go. Let me know if you have any tips.