Update on the Books I’m Writing Now

Winter has come to Canada and we’re having a run of snow-days. My older kids are home from school and that means I have more time to write.
Currently I’m working on two book projects: a book on gender minorities, and a book on NFP.
With the first project, I have an absolutely killer proposal that I’ve shopped around to lots of different Catholic publishers. They are all unanimous about it: this is a tremendously important book… that someone else should publish. So if anyone out there knows of either a) someone in Catholic publishing who might be willing to take a risk with this, or b) an agent who be interested in pitching it to a larger, secular house, let me know in the combox or drop me a line through my contact button.
The NFP book I know nobody is going to touch with a ten foot pole, so I’m going to publish it myself. My (admittedly ambitious) goal is to get it ready in time for people to buy it with their Amazon money at Christmas. If I really get on a roll, and the buses continue to be canceled half the time, then I might even have it ready before the holiday.
Some of you might remember that I collected questions for this project way back in the summer. You may even be wondering what happened to your questions. The answer to that is that they’ve been roughly organized into three categories:

1. Questions for which there are good (but not necessarily easily accessible) answers.
2. Questions for which there are answers – but they’re not necessarily sufficient.
3.Questions which simply do not have any good answers at all.

I’m continuing to dig through the available literature. My husband has a huge collection of studies on NFP and assorted other documents that he’s been combing through. I’m hoping to be able to provide a really well documented, realistic portrait of how effective NFP is, and what NFP use actually looks like on the ground.
We’ve also been looking into the history of the development of the Church’s teaching on birth control and sex within marriage. I’ve recently blogged about the problem of reading Vatican documents the way that Bible Protestants read scripture – as if they were simply a transparent window into the mind of God, perfect down to the last word, and fully comprehensible without reference to their historical or social context. One of the issues that I will definitely be tackling is the historical context for Humanae Vitae, and for subsequent Vatican writings on sex and the family.
We have been thorough, but my experience with research is that no matter what, there are invariably things you miss, so if anyone has suggestions for research sources that they think we might have missed those would be helpful.
Anyway, I don’t want to tip my hand any more than that. Pray for me to have good opportunities to write, and for the Holy Spirit to help me with the work. And I will keep all of you fondly in my prayers.

Cheers!

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