I have written a novel about Jesus, or Yeshua as he was known in his native Aramaic. I wrote it, I suppose, to answer a question in my own mind about what this man meant within his own particular historical circumstances and what he might have thought if he could have looked forward into the way Christianity would leave its mark on history. On the whole, it is an inglorious past. That's my opinion, and not one I am expecting all that much support for, especially in the USA, with its 70% of church goers. In my native country and in England, people will not care about that. Only 14% of its inhabitants identify as practicing Christians. As former Arch Bishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said four years ago, the countries that go to make up the United Kingdom are part of a "post-Christian society."
Now I have sent my novel out to a first round of readers and must wait. This is a very difficult time for any author. In her hopes and dreams, everyone who reads the first page is going to stay up all night until they close the book on its last. Everyone is going to be bowled over, and publishing offers are going to start swirling down out of the ether. Her name will be submitted for the Noble Prize. Authors are very good on this imaginative front, which is why they are authors in the first place.
The reality is that some readers will like that first draft, some of them even a lot, but some won't seem all that enthusiastic. Nothing lives up to expectations, and while the comments come trickling back in, the author is plunged into a no-man's land, unable at this point to work on the revision, and sinking deeper into the quicksand of that glorious imagination slowly turning against him. These months of slog, these flights of optimism, have all been for nothing, he says to himself. He brought the best of what he had to the forum and now he is being pushed to the back of the crowd.
But there's another quality authors have, and its called buoyancy. Without this guilelesssness, a certain floatability, the daunting journey of writing a book would never have been completed in the first place. People who keep going despite all odds, especially in the arts, aren't subject to the same specific gravity. So they don't stay out on that limb for very long. They stand up, check their parachutes and take another leap.
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