A Crown of Life would never have been published had it not been for my dear wife, who fell asleep in the Lord last October. She loved the first draft of the book, completed in 2001, and kept after me to get it published. I had made a half-hearted attempt to publish it then, but I was happy just to have finished it and couldn’t believe anyone would pay to read an epic 200,000-word Byzantine romance.
Actually, it’s not so much Byzantine as Roman, and people who read Roman novels are by and large only interested in ruthless pagan Romans, not persecuted Christian Romans. Oh, sure, you can interest a few Evangelicals in Roman Christians but only if they are Evangelicals in togas who never think of sex. I learned that lesson when I tried to get the book published in 2001, after which I stowed it away in my basement, where it gathered dust for over a decade, while I returned to writing nonfiction.
My wife never showed the slightest interest in my nonfiction works, but she loved my novel and would not let me forget it. Just before Christmas of 2013, she plotted with our dear friends and kum Jim and Kathy Jatras to corner me on the matter over eggnog (spiked with Triple Sec). Jim and Kathy had also read the book and were just as enthusiastic as my wife was. I tried to laugh off the assault but eventually gave in to at least another look at the manuscript.
When I read it again, after nearly twelve years with nary a thought of it, the first thing I noticed was how much I had forgotten—characters, scenes, plot twists. It was as if I were reading a book by someone else. The second thing I noticed is that there were some exceptionally good characters, scenes, and plot twists. I hadn’t remembered the book being as good as it was. I had remembered my early struggle in writing it, the bad scenes written and then rewritten over and over again. I had not remembered the result of all that rewriting.
There were just a few rough spots that needed reworking, and I did that for my own satisfaction, still not expecting much. The payoff came when I walked in one day to find my wife, sitting at our dining-room table, reading over the final manuscript, eagerly turning pages, and then saying, without looking up, “I married a genius!” Golden words for any husband.
The book was self-published. That was part of the argument made by my wife and friends: Novels find their own market today online; no need to pursue prudish publishers. (There aren’t really any sex scenes in the book, but there are two seduction scenes and an attempted rape.) I still worried about its length, but when I mentioned this to Jim, he wouldn’t hear of it. “Don’t change a thing!” he said, more than once.
A Crown of Life is not everybody’s cup of tea, but then no book is. It’s also not high-brow literature, but then I don’t like high-brow literature. I have a degree in literature and enjoy many classics, but I find today’s high-brow fiction overwrought and pretentious—novelists pretending to be mystics. What I want from novelists is not mysticism but common sense, Christian faith, a sane understanding of men and women, and a good story. A Crown of Life has all that.
Thank God for the woman who saved it from oblivion! May her memory be eternal.
