The Believer's Guide to the Multiverse

Yesterday, the morning was a flurry of typing and hammering away at the keyboard.  With the passing of the noon hour, the draft of the manuscript I've been working on for the last month took it's final form.  Well, final form in the sense of being the final version of the pre-beta, unedited first concept of the book.   It's not quite ready to be shared, not quite yet.

But it felt like it had been birthed.

The question, then, now that I've got a bouncing baby book on my hands, was the name.   This had been something of a struggle over the last year.   I'd originally come up with a title that I was utterly unsatisfied with, which felt like it should work but just wasn't right.

That title was New Heavens, New Earth, the results of a semi-productive brainstorming session.   It felt like it *should* have been right.  Here's a book about a new theory about the cosmos and what implications that might have for people of faith.   So "heaven" and "earth."  And it came from scripture, which must make it good, right?   It seemed like it should be dead on.

And yet it just sort of sat there, flat and vaguely uninspiring.  I couldn't quite figure out why, but it felt off.

Maybe it was that it felt a bit too presumptuous, spiritually arrogant and full of itself.  C'mon, dude.  It's not THAT important.  Or perhaps it was that books with bible-titles always seem too in-house and self-referential.  Or maybe it was that the quote comes from John of Patmos, and just as I've got some favorite books of the Bible, I've got some least-favorites, too.

But then the bag containing the laptop containing 25,000 word manuscript was stolen, right as I was getting ready to do the final push to get it finished.

I was forced to reconsider the whole thing, and rewrite it.  In doing so, I realized that maybe a new title was in order, and eagerly dispensed of the old one.   A new one leapt to hand almost immediately, and I'll confess I like it a whole bunch more.

The Believer's Guide to the Multiverse, I'm calling it.   I kind of like it.