What Do You Think?

Here's a question for you about my book in progress, If You Love Me:

As you may know, I have been writing a book about what it means to love God in your daily life. Here's a description:

While God’s love is a familiar topic, you don’t hear much about the flip side: how well do we love Him? Does He “feel the love”?

If You Love Me offers the motivation to grow closer to Him and guidance in that effort. It provides a deepened understanding of the faith and positive reasons to do what is right — out of love. It uses fresh, (at times quirky) perspectives, anecdotes, and spiritual analogies, backed up by Scripture, solid tradition, Church teachings, and insights of saints and early Church Fathers.

The book also promises to be easy to give almost anyone, employing a nonjudgmental, often lighthearted style, with plenty of humor, enjoyable vignettes, and lessons learned from the author’s own journey.

Presenting a new outlook on life, If You Love Me aims to inspire readers to shape their lives into a gift of love for Him. 

I've signed a book deal with Ignatius Press and, with the advance they gave me, have been able for some time to suspend my ordinary freelance work to write the book. However, that's about to run out, and though I've just about finished the first draft, I still have more work to do to produce something worthy of the subject. 

So I'm thinking about running a crowdfunding campaign, through which people can support this project and help bring it to fruition. I'd give out thank-you gifts such as a themed bookmark or autographed copy.

Thus, for the first time, I'm going to open up a comments section to this blog to see what you readers think. You have a sense of my writing from reading this blog. (Oh, and by the way, a number of essays from the blog are incorporated into the book, although there's scads of new material too.) 

Should I go back to freelancing to pay the bills, limiting my work on the book to my slim spare time? Or should I spend the time and effort to launch a crowdfunding campaign in the hopes that it will allow the book to be published much sooner? What do you think?

P.S. Adding a comment is now easier! It will pop up as a separate page. 
       If you're on the "Home" page, click on "2 comments" (or whatever number it may be) at the bottom of the post. 
      If you're on the page with just this post, then the comments will appear at the bottom. Click on "Post a comment."

Recommending a Great New Book

I'm excited to see Marcus Grodi's new book Life From Our Land is now available!

I was privileged to work with him a bit on this book, and so I know it well and highly recommend it. It's very readable, interesting, funny, and inspiring. It addresses many quandaries in which modern man finds himself and gives compelling, thought-provoking answers.

The book has many other warm recommendations. For instance... 

Author Joseph Pearce writes, "Read this book and you will receive the riches Mammon cannot provide and reap the harvest of hope and wisdom." 

And Dr. Timothy O'Donnell, President of Christendom College, says: "This book is a hymn of gratitude for the wonder that is creation, which manifests the deep purpose of things."

Also makes a great gift--I'm going to go order a copy right now.