Jonathan Edwards’s sermon about dropping spiders into a fire<\/a>.<\/p>\n(2) Worse yet, all these sermons are about the history of Unitarians and Universalists in New Bedford. No one wants to read sermons about New Bedford Unitarians and Universalists, except a dozen or so New Bedford Unitarian Universalists.<\/p>\n
(3) Worst of all, a potential reader will have to pay for these sermons. (Church budgets being what they are, our church can’t afford to print them in-house.) I will publish them on lulu.com and sell them at cost, but most people who read sermons are used to having churches give them away for free.<\/p>\n
When I am feeling enthusiastic, I think maybe a dozen people might buy this book. Then I remember that these are sermons with footnotes (yes, I have gone back and footnoted everything), and then I think maybe five people will buy this book, and two of those people will be me.<\/p>\n
So why am I doing this? Why am I spending hours and hours writing, and rewriting, and fact-checking, and footnoting, and proofreading? Because it’s fun, that’s why. Some people participate in National Novel Writing Month, and they write novels that no one will ever read. Me, I like to write non-fiction, and do footnotes and a bibliography. Everyone needs a hobby, and so what if some of us have a hobby that involves creating books that no one will ever read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I managed to get myself involved in a big writing project. This project has been sucking up all my free time. Some people would say that this project is a waste of my time, since hardly anyone will read it once it’s done. There are three reasons why hardly anyone will read this writing project: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3441"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3446,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3441\/revisions\/3446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}