The Spirit War has been twenty years in writing and editing.
Born Catholic and educated in the USA, I came late to reading the Bible. In the early 1980s I developed a taste for heroic fantasy writing – read and loved The Lord of the Rings when it was for geeks only. At that time I also discovered the Gospels and the Bible in modern English translations. The character of Jesus leapt so vividly off the pages that I thought, a modern fantasy version of His story is a no-brainer for any enterprising writer.
So I started looking for the epic Jesus novel I was sure had to be out there. Ben Hur and The Robe were great, but neither had Jesus as the main character. The only thing I found that focused principally on the Messiah was Nikos Kazantzakis’s Last Temptation of Christ. With it’s weak, whiny Jesus and hardened prostitute Mary Magdalene, that was the opposite of what I was looking for. So I kept searching.
Towards the end of the 90s, with no heroic fantasy Jesus novel in sight, I started to write my own. At first it was sort of a pretend I’m an author, fake it to make it effort, just for my own enjoyment. But it took hold. Writing The Spirit War was never a chore that I had to gut out.
My paid jobs required international travel, which I got tired of quickly. The Spirit War became a companion that provided much enjoyment on quiet nights, after hectic days on projects. In all, this author wrote the trilogy in his home in Costa Rica and in hotel rooms in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Salvador, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, England and the USA.
I foolishly thought I was done when I typed The End in 2004. But good writing is rewriting. I have lost count of the complete revisions, both major surgery and style corrections, that have accumulated since 2004. But it’s been 15 years, with at least one revision per year.
Yes, I took a few wrong turns and ended up deleting entire chapters. I was editor as well as writer, with a British-trained eye for elimination of the dull, superfluous or repetitious. For a good read, cutting the unnecessary is as essential as getting everything needed in. Even so, the Spirit War got longer and longer. A single book became a trilogy.
The first printed edition of The Spirit War was hardbound photocopies of Microsoft Word pages, in Costa Rica in 2004. Twenty copies distributed to friends and family, with OK to good feedback. What most encouraged me was that every reader finished the 739 pages, so it wasn’t so bad that people quit on it.
Two small runs with Costa Rican book printers followed. These were struggles. Quark Express, which I never learned, was the page layout program of the early 2000 years. This made me dependent on tech guys for proofing and correcting – a nightmare. Then Adobe InDesign mercifully replaced Quark Express. I made sure to buy and learn that new industry standard page setup program, to regain my editorial independence. In the latter 2000 years InDesign, the internet, and USA Print on Demand through Lightning Source solved my book printing problems. The first POD Spirit War books came out in 2009.
For me, the trilogy easily passes the Selfish Author Test. I have written the fantasy-adventure story of Jesus that I always wanted to read.
Jesus said that a lamp should not be lit and left on the floor, but placed on a stand where it can light the whole room.
The world is a very big room, but the internet is a light stand that covers it all. This website is my attempt to let The Spirit War’s light shine as widely as possible.