What kind of book did you write after turning 55?
09.06.2025 08:45
Well, no. Pandemic. Libraries closed. Damn it.
If you don’t recognize those names, that’s OK. Today they’re remembered, if at all, as early American troublemakers who opposed Puritan orthodoxy.
Now I had the time to write my book. I went to the internet and found exactly the same sources I’d found at Norlin Library in Colorado. Well, no problem, I was living an hour away from the Harvard Library in Massachusetts, I’d just hop on the commuter rail and . . .
Still, I had a lot of time on my hands. So I set my book in 1986. I was an unemployed college student, with a pregnant wife. Now that was real-life experience.
And one day there’s a knock on the door and some guy with a fake English accent tells me that I’ve inherited a position in a medieval secret society and I’m invited to join. That’s where my research on the Family of Love and my wife’s ancestors came in.
Then the pandemic hit and I was out of work for what turned out to be 13 months. Between unemployment benefits and greatly reduced expenses (no commuting, expensive lunches, or conferences) I was doing OK financially, and I decided I should use my time by writing what I wanted to write, not what someone else asked me to write.
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I recognized them because they were all ancestors of my wife. Was my wife descended from Familists? Well, she didn’t know, she’d never heard of the Family of Love. So I gathered every single piece of information I could find in the 20th largest research library in the United States and put it in a file folder marked “Family of Love.” There simply wasn’t much information other than allegations and innuendo. Certainly not enough to write a book or even a journal article about. I wanted to do more research.
But I still don’t know one damn thing more about the Family of Love than I did before. *sigh*
I liked it. It has some rough spots but maybe I’ll get it published yet.
Along the way, I found myself writing about the things I knew and never thought I could write about. Christian youth groups for college students. The study of herbs, including what herbs can be used for abortions. Strange women who live in the woods and scare little children, but girls without husbands seek her out when they don’t want to have a baby. (Yes, that’s my wife’s grandmother in Mormon Idaho.) Daily life in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Nudism and naturism. Hiking in the Black Hills of South Dakota. My old professor Vine Deloria shows up as a Native American elder. There’s a hate crime that is based on one I covered as a radio reporter. And everybody has secrets . . .
In grad school I had run into some references to some secret societies in the early modern period, with names like “The Family of Love.” They were a Christian group that denied the Trinity, conducted their meetings in the nude, and practiced free love or plural marriage or something. It was hard to get information on them because in their case, “secret” meant “secret” and the only sources we had were allegations from their enemies. But it appears that the group was protected by Queen Elizabeth I who allegedly had Familists in her court and, it was suspected, might have been one herself. And there were rumors and allegations that Familists influenced the foundation of the Quaker movement, and later made it to America, where their members may have included Anne Hutchinson, Mary Dyer, and John Wheelwright.
Then I turned to fan fiction, mostly about characters exactly like me joining the crew of the USS Enterprise in the 23rd century, or the Legion of Super-heroes in the 30th century.
I have always wanted to be a writer. As a kid I was writing stories, none of which were any good. I wrote a story about me and my elementary school friends going around the world in 80 days to win a bet — seems I’d read a book that had a similar theme — and it involved things like travelling through Iran on camels (because that’s the only form of transportation available when you’re on a tight deadline) and being chased by border guards with scimitars. And ending up lost in the Himalayas until rescued by a beautiful Chinese guide. I wonder why it was never a New York Times bestseller.
So my book on the Family of Love became fiction. I’d always wanted to write fiction, remember? But I wasn’t any good at it. I had Iranian border guards with camels and scimitars. Maybe I was a little more sophisticated now that I was no longer ten years old, but everyone told me that I had to “write what I know.”
But I started pursuing other career interests and didn’t have time to write, or more to the point, to pursue the research needed to write good history. I ended up in print a few times though, usually because I’d run into somebody at a conference and they’d ask me to submit a chapter to their book on charismatic Mormons or the origins of the Inspired Version of the Bible or some such thing. It was enough that I once saw an AI bot refer to me as an “expert” on the Inspired Version (which just proves that you can’t believe AI.) Those were the days when I’d fly to conferences with a carry-on bag that contained my laptop, a copy of someone’s manuscript I’d promised someone at the conference I’d read and comment on, the printout of a book introduction I’d written for someone else, and if I was very very lucky, Brad Meltzer’s latest thriller that I was reading for fun.
Well, what did I know? I was an academic. I’d sold appliances at Sears and luggage in an outlet mall. I’d been a youth pastor. I’d never been a cop or an FBI agent. On the other hand, I’d never piloted a starship either, and people made money writing books about that. But I really did feel like I didn’t know enough to write a book. An interesting one anyway.
How bad was my stuff? Well I was one of the founding members of the Legion Fan Club, served on the first Board of Directors. And I still couldn’t get my stuff published in the club’s fan magazine. That’s bad.
Later on I found that I was a lot better at writing non-fiction. I spent years as a journalist writing short, punchy pieces for radio news. I ended up in grad school where 30- to 60-page term papers were considered par for the course. My professor, Vine Deloria jr, suggested I submit one of the papers I wrote for publication and I got a very nice letter of rejection from Lavina Fielding Anderson, the editor of the Journal of Mormon History — not a form letter, but several pages of suggestions from her and the rest of the editorial staff who had read my piece on the history of Native Americans in Mormonism. I have continually kicked myself for not following through, revising my piece and seeing it in print.