The Processing Process
The story of writing one more book.
Jesus is a what that looks like a who, because you think you’re a who.
Kenneth Wapnick, Ph.D.
Elias Canetti used to say that the best books in his library were the ones he had not read yet. At the very least, that justifies having a lot of books. People who don’t read will ask if you’ve read them all, but that’s hardly the point. A project like writing my new book Recovering Jesus: Help is Here Now, drives the message home for me. The fundamental theme of the book has been a focus of my reading for about the last 60+ years. In the process I collected a huge library, which has been lost in part during life’s changes. In the late eighties, I donated probably 15% of my library, related mostly to astrology, to Michael Erlewine’s Heart Center KTC, in Big Rapids, MI. Then, in 2003, when I had moved from a 2-bedroom to a 1 bedroom apartment, I had probably 40% of my remaining library in storage in a friend’s basement, where it was eventually lost in a flood. Perhaps the worst loss was a facsimile edition of Jakob Böhme, and a complete works of Hildegard von Bingen, but there were many other priceless items. Still a lot of the core literature which I relied on for the current book was still on my shelves. My library is probably down to some two thousand volumes, and I give some away from time to time. But there were also many volumes I could no longer access when I started this research project.
This book project started as a research project for an article, during which I really became aware that there was precious little literature, if any, about the gap between the crucifixion, and the time at Nicaea when a Christian orthodoxy is finally established, and how the Jesus tradition fared outside of the Christian main stream: the Christians tell the story from the side of the apparent victors, the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church, which itself progressively split into more and more factions, though largely within the Pauline/Nicene tradition. Eventually, I ended up with 52 strands of research, just based on my own reading over the years, and I realized that it was too much for a book even. I went to work and refined it to a level of 25 chapters, and some appendices to cover some support materials. The idea of the book became more concrete gradually. But those first steps to reduce 52 topics to 25 sharpened the focus, to the point that it even began to feel like a book.
So now I had an outline. It was clear in my head, and I had to select the tools. My first book in circa 1975 (Handleiding bij de astrologische berekeningen - Eng.: Manual for Astrological Calculations) was still composed on a typewriter, and published in 1977. Later in the 1990’s I worked with Word and Ventura Publisher, but in 2003 I produced a book (The Gospel as a Spiritual Path) entirely in OpenOffice, because Microsoft Word crashed too often and did not really handle master documents very well. OpenOffice has since become LibreOffice, and I stuck with it, but I did bump into some limitations. It does not handle EPUB conversions very well, and for that, I ended up using Atticus. So much for the mechanical side of the production.
Developing the content was of course purely driven by my outline of 25 chapters, and a few appendices, which grew to a total of ten during the project. Eventually that still became about 800 pages and almost 160,000 words, in short, an ambitious project. Since I have been using AI quite a bit for business research in an R&D project, I realized the potential of some assistance with this project. The initial research had been done with ChatGPT, but then I switched to Claude to whip it into shape and make a book of 25 chapters out of the fairly wild bunch of 52 research threads. Once it looked like a book Claude was my research assistant and my drafting assistant for the final content of 25 chapters and ten appendices. The actual process was to draft a chapter at a time, based on an outline, and then to use that initial draft as the canvas for me to write the book on. The house was built based on my architectural drawings, the bricks of research provided by Claude under my direction as to how to connect the dots, and I then mixed the cement and did the bricklaying and finishing myself. This part worked fairly well.
What gave me trouble was the fact that I no longer had the editorial team I had for Closing the Circle in 2006/7. My friend Lenore who was my crack proofreader for that book, and a walking Chicago Manual of Style, has since passed away. She was invaluable for she did not miss anything and she knew A Course in Miracles as well as the Bible, and at times better than I did. Today, I have the web edition of the Course which is searchable, but then I had Lenore, who I could call and say where is that paragraph again where Jesus says such and such? She would always know.
I lost touch with the brilliant editor I had at that time, who really forced me to be very clear. The book improved immensely from my first draft because she questioned everything, and I mean everything. She’d make me read a paragraph out loud, and then ask me: so what are you trying to say? I would paraphrase the paragraph and often times her reaction was: then why don’t you say it? She´d force me to rewrite anything that was less than crystal clear.
Working back and forth with Claude worked somewhat, it was at times a good critic of my writing, but I was not satisfied. Eventually, I decided to use Grammarly, which led to some hilarious problems, and probably cost me an extra month, because it often created as many problems as it solved, but I continued using it, since it was effective in revising anything that was ambiguous or unclear. Sometimes it would restructure entire paragraphs, and mess them up completely, but I found that this forced me to rewrite those paragraphs to be better. It was like tilling the soil. In other words, just the fact that Grammarly stumbled over particular sections highlighted problems that needed fixing anyway, even if the initial fixes from Grammarly were often introduced new mistakes.
Most hilarious was the fact that it constantly tried to “correct” quoted text, and sometimes provided very faulty references, even to pieces that already had a reference, but just not in the format Grammarly expected. But again, I continued using it, for it forced me to re-examine everything. It was the best thing short of having my same brilliant editorial team from 2006/7, except it does not know any jokes, just stupidity.
Meanwhile the upshot of the whole book is that Jesus is more than all the traditions about him but we can learn a lot by realizing that his teachings kind of fanned out in many directions. Bringing all of that together, literally a lifetime’s worth of work, was hard labor, but the result is hopefully helpful to many. A website has been set up, https://recoveringjesus.com and hopefully the book will be published early August, so in a few weeks there will be a complete order page. I will first release it as an e-book. Print will likely take a little longer.