When I wrote my first blog here a couple months ago, I was a leisured man and imagined I'd be adding a blog every week or so. I'd forgotten that "the days grow short when you reach September." Did they ever! The twelve-hour days didn't end until just two days ago, when suddenly all but the last half of one percent of the work was finished -- and nothing could be done about that remaining half of one percent until I received one last URL from my webmaster. I took a whole day off to do nothing at all.
THE TEACHINGS looks like a simple book. After all, 90% of it is made up of selections from already-published books, books that don't need writing or editing. But it was a difficult book, and what made it difficult were conflicting objectives.
To see what I'm talking about, let's say there are thirty passages that make
The Story of B a terrific book. Obviously I couldn't include
all thirty of those passages in
this book. If I did, people who were enticed to read
The Story of B itself would be rightfully outraged to see that they'd already read the best parts here in
The Teachings. But I also couldn't include
none of them here -- or what would entice them to read
The Story of B in the first place? So I include just a third of them here. But I can't include the ten
most enticing of the thirty (for the same reason I couldn't include
all thirty), and I can't include the ten
least enticing (for the same reason I couldn't include
none of the thirty). So picking those ten made for some hard sorting to find an assortment representing all degrees of enticement.
Now I hold my breath. Among my books (aside from
Ishmael, of course), none is more relevant at this time than this one. I very much doubt that I'll ever produce another that matches it in importance, so its success matters a lot to me. Here it is:
http://amzn.to/1qwFsda.
Give it a look!