To Celebrate Walker Percy's Birthday Price of "The 41st Sermon" Dropped to 99 Cents

May 28 is the 100th year anniversary of the birth of one of my favorite Southern writers, Walker Percy. I've had a lot of ups and downs in my writing life and in 1992 Percy delivered an extraordinary high point. I had sent him the first chapters of The 41st Sermon hoping he would be willing to read the whole manuscript. I received a note back from him that what I sent read well and I could send the rest. Do so. Waited. Waited. Then a few months later read his obit in the paper. In honor of his 100th birthday I've lowered the price of The 41st Sermon to 99 cents. Episcopal priest is in mid-life and mid-faith crisis.

Read the whole story and the note in previous post here.

Hoping to Raise Funds to Read from "The 41st Sermon" at Walker Percy Conference

Hope you'll check out my Kickstarter project attempting to raise travel funds so I can read from The 41st Sermon at an academic conference devoted to Southern writer Walker Percy.

The 41st Sermon Discounted Until Jan. 22

Starting today and for a week The 41st Sermon will be discounted on Amazon from $4.99 to $0.99 and then in increments go back to original price. So if you think you have an interested in reading this literary work about a Episcopal priest at mid-life and mid-faith crisis, now's the time. Father Talley goes on his annual solo vacation where he also outlines the sermons for his coming year. This time he encounters a beautiful, blonde parishioner who snares him into her phony kidnap plot. If you know Walker Percy, the great Southern writer who burst upon the scene with "The Moviegoer," my novel has a connection to him. You can read about that here.

Here's the Amazon URL for The 41st Sermon

One reviewer:
Wow. Rarely do I find a book that twists as much as this one. I would have rated this 5 stars had it not started off so slowly during the character set up. Personally, I enjoyed it, the plot twists and presentation was excellent, the characters were well developed, and the content a bit taboo. I would recommend this book to any open minded individual.

An excerpt:
"The Greeks were honest," Father Talley told her. "They had a god for everything. A god of love and of war and even drunkenness. And isn't there something godlike in drunkenness, a power to be celebrated? And the power of sex? They accepted and celebrated all these elemental powers in a human being instead of trying to deny them the way Christianity has. Christianity used the Jewish god, a god who is everything, and by being everything ended up being a big, fat nothing. I should be sacrificing a lamb to Aphrodite for sending you to me. Instead, I'm supposed to feel guilt. I don't feel any guilt at all. I feel alive."

The 41st Sermon Now Available as Paperback

I am taking the steps to turn my ebooks into paperbacks. The latest work available is The 41st Sermon.  I've doing what I should have done from the front: pay an editor/proofreader to correct the manuscript. The errors I make are embarrassing to me when I see the corrections. I find I have a kind of dyslexia. I know the difference between brake and break and wondering and wandering and yet I make those bone-headed goofs.

As I get corrected manuscripts for the print books, I also resubmit the ebook files so that the corrected ones are available for Kindle readers.

The 41st Sermon has a connection to Walker Percy, that great Southern writer. I won't repeat it here, just refer you to an earlier blog. In the paperback edition, I was able to include an image of the note from Percy to me about the manuscript.

Here's the back cover text for the paperback:

When a 45-year old Episcopal priest, suffering from mid-life and mid-faith crisis, gets involved in a phony kidnap plot with his sexy blond parishioner the result is a supercharged novel of sex, payback for decades-old double-dealing, and despair, which only God can cure.

Father Christopher Talley, spends a week each year at a resort in the Ozarks. This gives him a chance to escape the constraints of his life as a minister – to fish, to drink, to cavort. He also writes his sermons for the coming year. This year, while at the resort, he runs across one of his parishioners, the lovely Molly, who says she is thinking of divorcing her husband, but has a different plot in mind.

...a strange story...lots of different themes – finding yourself, redemption, finding faith, learning what life is all about... I really liked the book, ... it had a lot of good things to say, and I thought the story was one in which many people could find enjoyment, once they get past feeling shocked about some of the issues that come up.... you need to be open-minded about the story, but if you are willing to do so, you should find something in here to love. Amazon Reviewer

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.

The Back Story on The 41st Sermon

Decided to get on a marketing push for The 41st Sermon after an avid reader I know really well and very much trust called it the best of my works he's read. And another reader I trust chimed in his approval, too.

It's one of my most undersold works and that puzzles me. More on that later, but first a little of the back story.

I was managing editor at The Olathe (KS) Daily News when I wrote this book. It was a good stretch in my life then. I had been able to assemble a great newsroom and we were doing really good news reporting. As a suburb to Kansas City, we beat the KC Star 2-1 in circulation and whipping them daily on local news coverage. It embarrassed them greatly when my court house reporter, Andy Hoffman, was able to find out and break the Royals cocaine story before the KC Star. (At that time, they had a morning and afternoon edition and their afternoon edition could only quote our morning story; that, folks, is called a sweet clean scoop in the newspaper world).

But what I really wanted to do was write novels. I would get up at 5 a.m., two hours before I headed to work. My son, who not yet in his teens would also wake himself up to practice the piano (Koji Attwood, google him, he went on to get a doctorate from Julliard and has a performing career). I was in the basement pecking at an early computer, an Atari 1040, if I remember correctly, and he was a floor above practicing.

On Saturdays, we drove from Olathe to Lawrence where he had an hour lesson with a KU piano professor. My wife shopped downtown Lawrence; I sat in the "Casbah" coffee shop and edited and rewrote.

I didn't keep any writing diaries, so I don't remember how long it took me to complete it. I never start with any sort of outline. The only thing I knew about The 41st Sermon was than a middle-aged Episcopal priest was headed on his yearly, weeklong work-vacation at a fishing resort to rest and write the outlines of his sermons for the coming year.

I didn't know what was going to happen to him when he got there. When his parishioner's wife showed up alone, things started to get interesting. You create characters and start to live with them in your head and they come to life for you and you hope you can bring them to life for the reader.

I've written another blog about the connection to that great Southern writer Walker Percy and won't repeat that here because this is the link.

I thought I might use the scan of that note to create some curiosity among Percy fans about The 41st Sermon. And, it's odd, the link above is one of my most visited blog posts. But it hasn't seem to have translated into downloads. It could be the Percy fan base, which has quite a few academics, look down their noses as self-published works and this whole ebook phenomenon and have refused to go digital. I've made it a free download a couple of times through Kindle Select program and usually free downloads will be followed with buys. But not this time.

It could be there are too many points of views, but I thought they were handled well and all those points of view provide the reader with information the individual characters don't have about each other. I think it makes the reader a sort of an omniscient viewer, but one who will encounter some surprises along the way.

I liked Father Talley and his struggles with his faith and his sexuality and himself. I liked Molly, the very sexy and independent siren. I liked Fr. Talley's wife, Kathryn, and her own road of self-discovery with the help of the psychiatrist, Richard, who is Molly's wife and has his own secrets to keep. I think the interactions of these people have an Updike sort of feel to it.

I think the novel deserves more readers and I hope this might encourage more people to get the book.