March 11, 2007

I've been using most of my book time during the past week to work on the Holy Beggars web site. The exciting news is, I've created a social network; a kind of MySpace for the holy beggars of the House of Love and Prayer. The technology, from Ning, allowed me to single handedly put it together.

For a week I got obsessed with the possibilities of what I could do with this kind of on-line community. One of my challenges in writing the book has been how do deal with two conflicting values I am holding. On the one hand, I want to honor all my brothers and sisters who were involved at the House, and create a space for their stories. On the other hand, if I were really to do that, the book would be way too long and rambling for anyone to want to publish it or read it -- and my mission is to get this story out to as many people as possible.

The solution: keep the book skinny and the story tightly focused. Then create an on-line community, "Stories from the House," as a place where anyone who was there can post their story. Putting this together in the form of a social network feels very liberating. I have stories from quite a few people that I've collected over the years. I'll post some of them, invite as many as possible of my friends from those days to join, encourage them to share their stories, and then leave the rest up to them.

I'll keep working at this, keep encouraging people, and see what happens.

Today I was excited to have the first member, besides my wife Wendy and me, join the on-line community. It's my friend Donna Maimes, whom I rarely see these days but is very supportive of the book. That made me feel good.

In the mean time, I'm working on getting more endorsements from well known writers on spirituality. And this week I hope to get back to the main task for these days: knocking on the doors of agents and publishers.