It Came Together This Way . . .
by Latayne C. Scott
(See below for giveaway details)
One day a fully-formed image appeared in my mind. It was of
a woman of ancient times. She was
walking away from a coliseum, beside a cart full of bloody body parts. She thinks of her dead friend Cordelia, who
had been pregnant for decades with a baby that was never delivered and turned
to stone within her body. Now that stone baby is in the cart too, seeing light
for the first time.
How did that image come to be? What was the process?
Writing – whether professionally or for personal
satisfaction – is an activity that many people share. There’s nothing quite
like looking over the words, “The End” and feeling that some unfinished part
inside ourselves is now complete, too.
Waiting for a book to be published, though, is frustrating
for many people because someone asks you to move over from the driver’s seat of
your car and now begins to take you at their chosen speed, not yours, toward a
distant destination.
(Sometimes it can take many months from your “The End” to a
publisher’s “Now Available.” To help people understand just why this takes so
long, I wrote a blog post that's been accessed thousands of times: “The
Seventeen Steps to Getting a Christian Book Published.”)
That lag of time, combined with an author’s distance from
his or her original idea, can really add up. In the case of my most recent
book, A
Conspiracy of Breath, it took eight
years.
I remember the day I first read in a Bible commentary that
some scholars believe that the book of Hebrews may have been written by a
woman. That was at least three decades
ago, and as the year passed, I heard the theory again and again. I came across a book that thoroughly and convincingly
set out the case for the authorship of Hebrews by Priscilla, the wife of Aquila
and the fellow tentmaker with the Apostle Paul.
(View a short MP3
video HERE)
I remember the first day I read an Internet news story about
a lithopedia, or stone baby.
I remember the day my daughter in law gave me a book called The Bone Gatherers, about the early
Christian women who provided proper burial for martyrs.
And thus it came together:
The story of Priscilla, aristocratic Roman, bone-gatherer, author,
friend, and protector. What must it have been like for such a woman to throw
in her lot with another Martyr who died on a cross? To hear the Holy Breath tell her words that would become Scripture?
And to live with courage during a time when almost
everything she loved, she lost?
 Dr. Latayne C.
Scott (Distinguished Christian Service Award, Pepperdine University)
writes controversial books. Her newest one, the critically acclaimed A Conspiracy of Breath, (TSU Press) is based on the scholarly
theory that a woman wrote part of the Bible.
Her first book, The Mormon Mirage--also controversial--
has stayed in print almost continuously for almost 40 years. She has nearly
two dozen other published books.
One notable recent book
is about the discovery of the ancient Biblical city of Sodom (Discovering the City of Sodom.) Her first novel is a murder mystery revolving around a
code developed by the early Mormon church. Both are.... controversial.
She's also won a national award for humor. Her kids say she's not so funny, but she just holds up the prize check. Latayne blogs at Latayne.com and Tweets @Latayne. |
