Should I write a book?

This is just a quickfire posting, written in haste. I’m rather behind in my blogging as work is taking up the majority of my time and all I have time for when I get home is a quick dinner and a wash, which I prioritise over writing. So I may be infrequently posting, but at least I smell OK and have am ample waistline!

I do have some time off over Christmas, though, and I was pondering writing a book. I don’t have the time needed for something the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) which ended yesterday but I’ve long considered the possibility. I’m no spring chicken anymore, with my 30th birthday not seeming all that far away. So if I weren’t to start now, would I ever?

Then I run into my second problem: what to write? As with my blog, I am full of ideas and great at doing outlines and making a start. What I’m not good at is finishing and polishing the thing off. I now you’re supposed to write about what you know and are passionate about, so I was thinking about doing one of the following:

1) A fictionalised history of the early church, only setting it in modern business. The story would start with the retirement of the CEO and document the spread of the business along with the personal wranglings of the directors, especially the relationship between one of the CEO’s most trusted execs and a new guy who had previously made several attempts to kill the company off.

2) A manifesto for religionless christianity. This is a challenge that Dietrich Bonhoeffer laid down in his Letters & Papers From Prison and one I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I don’t know if something like this has been done already, or whether that falls under an Emergent/Fresh Expressions label; to be honest, I don’t know much about those two, so I may be inadvertently following someone else’s footsteps.

3) The joy of science. I would just go through all my science books and notes from college and university, pulling out all the things that I just find fascinating and interesting. It would be a bit of a compendium, with no overall narrative. It should just be something to bring a smile to a geek.

4) A snapshot of the churches in England. Similar to the Mystery Worshipper, my plan would be to take a sample of churches from across the country (one per county/major city) and just find out what is being preached on one particular Sunday, randomly chosen. I would download the sermons off their website, listen to them and write some notes on them. I already download quite a few from churches I’ve never been to and listen to them while I do the washing up.