The 41st Sermon Up for a Vote of Confidence

The 41st Sermon is one of  nine books first offered by bookkus for reviewers to read, review, and vote on if bookkus should publish it. Entry portal here, I hope.

We are seeing many different publishing efforts in this epublishing age. This is one that I guess you would call crowd-deciding. I suppose it means I should go out there and ask friends, family etc. to vote for my book. Consider yourself asked.

Actually, if it gets you interested in the book, that's what is important to me. I've just done a major re-edit of the manuscript before sending it off for professional editing and proofreading before turning it into a paperback POD. I like The 41st Sermon a lot. But the ebook hasn't done very well. It has a Walker Percy connection, which I've commented on before.

It's also told from the third person POV, but with a lot of thoughts presented by that character in first person. I've now put those in italics. That simple change has given the manuscript a new tension and drama, I think. Much more powerful.

It's a good story and quite erotic. Episcopal priest in mid-life and mid-faith crisis gets caught up in a phony kidnap plot with a blonde parishioner who seduces him and turns out to be the daughter he didn't know about. And that that's just part of Satan's complications!

Here's a non-erotic taste from the beginning and then one from near the end:

He looked up. Phosphenes danced in the pale blue sky the way they did when he closed his eyes. Do people look up at the sky so much because they are curious about the weather or because they are looking hoping to see God up there? Maybe they looked up in fear, afraid that God was up there looking down and seeing everything they did. Maybe we're damned either way. Damned if He isn't up there – damned in the morass of own humanity – and damned if He is up there because we deserve His condemnation.

And so, for the first time in his life, The Reverend Christopher Talley, rector of St. Philip's Episcopal Church, offered up a real prayer to God. A prayer not taken from the Book of Common Prayer, a prayer with neither fine phrases nor elegant, wonderful sounding words, but a prayer without words taken from the book of his own newly discovered soul.