**Warning** long biographical post here. May be TMI for some people.
Between 2006 and 2012, I published seven books with Deseret Book. They were all written to Latter-day Saint youth and I felt really good about their contribution. Although I still loved speaking to the youth of the Church, I found myself wanting to speak and write more to adult audiences. So I was excited to coauthor 52 Life-Changing Questions from the Book of Mormon with Brad Wilcox, published in 2013 (free excerpts here).
On June 20, 2013, I wrote in my journal about a conversation I had with Laurel Christensen and Lisa Roper at Deseret Book. Their bottom-line suggestion was something like, “If you are going to write to adults, you need to write something that will be really meaningful for that audience!”
That conversation was the beginning of The Founder of our Peace, although I would go lots of different directions in the meantime.
Between 2013 and 2017 I wrote all or part of five different books, each of which were rejected by publishers and/or discarded by me. It was a painful time, as I would feel really good about a project, make some headway on it (in a couple of cases developing a full-length manuscript) only to see it rejected. Here’s a sample journal entry from this time period:
“30 January 2014: When I wrote earlier that I was feeling like this could be a year of rejections, and that I should be okay with it, I don’t think it was prepared for what would come! Since I wrote that I have had articles/books rejected by Religious Education, IRRODL, Deseret Book, the Sperry Symposium, The Church History Symposium, and The Maxwell Institute. And January isn’t over yet!!!!!!”
I didn’t know it then, but many of those rejections would turn into parts of The Founder of our Peace. One of my ideas was to write a book on lessons from lesser-known Old Testament stories. I wrote up some sample chapters about David and Michal, Jehoshaphat in 2 Chronicles 20, and “The Good Lord Pardon Every One.” That book never came together, but at some point, I realized that each of those stories powerfully connected with the idea of finding greater peace, and I returned to them during the process of writing The Founder of our Peace.
Similarly, I had written short books about Fence Laws, and tapping into the vision God has for our lives, but neither were full books on their own. Sometime around 2017-2018 I realized that they too would fit well with a book about finding peace (see chapters 4 and 6 in The Founder of our Peace). Nearly all of the books I had started on or written between 2013-2017 (only to discard or have rejected) contributed in some way to The Founder of our Peace.
During this same time, I began developing ideas for my classroom and other talks that would also become part of The Founder of our Peace. For example, the idea of “The Trust Matrix,” came from a class I taught in 2016 on the Book of Mosiah, and ideas about “Unmet expectations,” came from comparing the prophets Jeremiah and Mormon in my Old Testament class.
In August of 2017 I had the idea of taking the elements from previous writing/teaching, along with a lot of new ideas and turning them all into a book called The Founder of our Peace. The rest, as they say, is history.
From August 2017-August 2018 I was living in Jerusalem. It was the perfect time to write about finding peace through Jesus Christ. I was more immersed in the life of Jesus Christ than I ever had been, and found so many connections to peace in the scriptures I was teaching and the sites I was visiting. The majority of the book was written during this time period.
Here are a couple of journal entries:
“1 August 2018: I asked him [Fergus] for his advice on how to gain peace (thinking about my book). He talked about Christ standing at the door and knocking, calling us to serve humanity and calling us to be still and get to know him better. I also felt that I did need to anchor my book more to Christ and get rid of superfluous things.” (See the introduction of the book where I reference this conversation with Fergus.)
“7 August 2018: I’m working on The Founder of our Peace book. I’ve been really enjoying working on it these past few days, weeks and month. I really hope that the book adds value and is really helpful in making a difference in people’s lives.”
The actual process of writing takes a surprisingly lot of work! At first, each chapter had its own folder (you can see from this arrangement that the final chapter order changed from what I originally envisioned.
Each chapter went through significant revisions. For example, the chapter on Trusting in the Lord went through more than a dozen drafts before I sent it out for review. Then I sent successive iterations to several readers for more feedback leading to a process of refinement (see below image). Similar work was done on each chapter of the book.
Once I felt the chapters were solid, I put the whole document together and started editing it holistically. At this point, I again had several people read through the whole book and offer feedback. Major changes were made (you can even see that I was flip flopping between possible book titles). You can also see that this process took a couple of months.
At this point, I submitted the manuscript to Deseret Book and got some great feedback from Lisa Roper and her associates on how to improve the manuscript. That led to another series of revisions! In March 2019 the Deseret Book Board officially approved the manuscript!
There was still some more wordsmithing to do, and at this point Emily Watts, Richard Erickson, Sheryl Dickert Smith, and Breanna Anderl at Deseret Book made a lot of significant contributions to transform my Word Document into a beautiful book. This included edits to both the “redline” version, as well as the final PDF. So as you can see, even after the book was “done” there was still A LOT more work that went into it!
Altogether, my “Founder of my Peace” folder on my computer includes more than 350 files!
It’s been about seven years from the time I published 52 Life-Changing Questions to The Founder of our Peace. It’s been an incredible journey, I hope that you will come closer to Jesus Christ as a result of this book. It’s definitely brought me more peace and helped me better know my Savior.
