We’re expecting our first shipment of AND THEREBY HANGS A TALE this week. It will be in stores some time in June. It’s difficult not to be excited. At the same time, I’m just finishing the King James bio, MAJESTIE [Nelson 10/10], with all the necessary detail and long hours it demands, so my emotions are kind of confused, suspended between mild postpartum blues and pure joy. It’s part of the craft of writing.

I had a blast working on MAJESTIE. I told myself (and others) that I’ve never had as much fun on a project in my life. Then I remembered I said the same thing about TALE. Oops. The truth is, I enjoyed both of them and hated to stop and move on to something else. I am not sure you can do a book and ask things of yourself and your family without being totally in love with it. I can only hope it reflects in the reading.

In preparation for its release, I reread TALE just last week. I laughed. I cried. I remembered. All of it was immediate, fresh. The spirit of my three dogs, my dalmatians—Oreo, Salem, and Savannah—is captured in this book, as are all the memories of those days. It has been a while since I have read it through and I had the sense I was reading someone else’s book. I love that. It had the effect on me that I hope it may have on you when you read (notice I didn’t say if you read it). To be swept up by an irresistible spirit.

Google Books has a teaser that will give you some idea of what you’re in for. You can also download a pdf file of Chapter One from this blog if you need any convincing.

When I first wrote this post, I included the last few paragraphs of the book. I rethought the strategy. I won’t spoil the ending for you. As a consolation, here is a random excerpt from the book:

It is comforting to think of God as an author, a finisher, a perfecter. It comforts me even more to know he literally puts himself into his work, and that he does it so thoroughly. The signature he leaves is a living signature, the autograph of God, peculiar to him alone. It cannot be forged or imitated.

The finest painting of a sunset will never be more than a painting of a sunset. It will never change. It will have many admirers, but it will never live. The best it can do is mimic divine authorship. DaVinci’s Mona Lisa is a wonder, yes, but it is still a two-dimensional wonder, a wonder of old paint and genius.

The sunset I watched yesterday was much more than that. It was a living thing. It was fluid. It was lyrical. There was poetry and understatement in its movement. A single beam of dying light, a downy bloat of clouds, a sky that seemed to bleed. Moment to moment, from glory to glory, never dull, a playing out of some script, and right before my eyes. Asking things of my senses that a painting cannot ask. Moving me in ways unknown to art.

Now that is authorship.

And though I am more important to him than any spectacle of nature, he leaves nothing out. His signature is all around us. It is fluid. It is lyrical. The detail is immaculate, as he is immaculate.

Oh, yeah, it’s also about dogs.

Advertisement