Be It Resolved…

There seems to be some hand wringing and teeth gnashing and garment rending in the leftie Christian blogosphere as the year winds down today. Some people are quitting things, while others are pulling in one million pageviews in a day (good for you, Adam!). In other news, dogs and cats are sleeping together. Etc.

Meanwhile, I’m coming off of a month of amazing times of travel, hunting, kids, cooking…and not enough writing. Not nearly enough writing. My book deadline is tomorrow, and I’ll miss it. But the book absolutely needs to get done by the end of January — it will release in Lent, 2015. In other writing commitments, I’ve got a chapter of a book due February 1 (attention, Baker Books, I’ll be late on that one, too). And then I’ll be writing an ebook, A Better Eucharist, to come out on Holy Week.

I’ve got a talk to prep for Christianity21 next week, and a sermon for House of Mercy later in January.

That’s a lot of content to churn out, and I lack the team of research assistants on which “Pastor Mark Driscoll” relies.

As I’ve written here before, when I was struggling to interest a publisher in my ideas for a book, my literary agent and I hatched a plan that I would double down on the blog. I did, endeavoring to write as many as 11 posts a week. It’s been very rewarding personally and professionally, and numbers have grown. That’s been gratifying, even if some of the criticism has been painful. Two sides of the same coin, I think.

There are bloggers here at Patheos who make their living blogging. They generate so much traffic that they can pay the bills with their Patheos checks. I’m not even close to that level. I am, however, totally committed to writing as good of a book as I can. The book I’m now writing will undoubtedly be the most important book of my career to this point. And I can’t afford to give it short shrift.

I’ve already pulled back on blogging, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. I post about three times per week. That’s likely to fall in coming days. 75% of my creative energy has got to go into the book, and the rest will go to those projects listed above.

Theoblogy is not going away. It will just be a bit quieter around here over the next few months.

As always, I very much appreciate your readership and friendship and support.

Finally, I’ll be on the road quite a bit during the first half of 2014, so I hope I get to see some of you!

Happy New Year!