When Dan Brown’s best-selling novel, “The Da Vinci Code”, exploded onto the literary scene in 2003, a flood of books entered the market to debunk it’s heresies. Now come two parady books, both titled The Givenchy Code.

The first on the bookshelves, published January 2005, is author E.R. Escober’s version. Its complete book title is The Givenchy Code: An Homage and a Parody.

Due out in June 2005 is the second Givenchy Code by author Julie Kenner. Its complete book title is The Givenchy Code: Cryptography Is The New Black.

What’s in store for these two parodies of the same title? Well, first there’s the question of whether Escober and Kenner could sue each other for using the same title. Since book titles cannot be copyrighted that may not happen. Will The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown sue them the way the Mitchell estate sued the publishers of The Wind Done Gone, a parody of Gone With the Wind? As for these two parodies of the same book title, they’ll probably join the numerous books that have hit the bookshelves in hopes of cashing in on the novel’s popularity such as: Cracking Da Vinci Code: You’ve Read the Fiction Now Read The Facts; Decoding Da Vinci; and The Da Vinci Hoax: The Truth About Jesus, Christianity, Mary Magdalene and The Da Vinci Code. All are currently selling quite well.

ER Escober’s The Givenchy Code: An Homage And A Parody is now available at xlibris.com and amazon.com.

Julie Kenner’s The Givenchy Code: Cryptography is The New Black can be pre-ordered at amazon.com.

This post will complete my series of articles on the Art & Soul conference from last weekend.

Last Saturday morning at the Art & Soul conference Lauren Winner presented On Writing and Prayer. Some more excerpts from her lecture (Part 2 of 2):

Easier Said than Done
Winner said:

It is easier to write about or talk about prayer or writing than to actually do them.

Winner then read the children’s story Mr. Putter and Tabby Write the Book. This was extremely funny. It pointed out how easy it is to procrastinate when trying to write.

Lauren Winner sets up a multi-media ‘Mr. Putter and Tabby’ presentation

The Discipline of Writing
Winner said that both writing and prayer are disciplines, but both can be fetishized to the point of failure. Like New Year’s resolutions, we can commit to write every day and pray every day.

Winner said:

Writing every day is probably a good thing. I don’t know; I’ve never done it!

We begin to think there is one right system to writing, but this is not the case.

Students ask her, “What is your writing routine?” Winner admits she too is guilty of festishizing other writer’s routines, but says we must find our way into our own disciplines.

Writing & Prayer Both Community Undertakings
Of all her points, this was the most counter-intuitive.

All prayer is praying corporately. Winner said:

Even when we pray alone in our closet we are entering the Triune life, and the Triune life is about the community of God. When I go to prayer I am not merely having a conversation with God, the prayer IS God. Prayer is about entering the ongoing community with God.

She said if you want to commit to write on a regular basis, tell your family you are going to do it. Writing in this sense is a communal undertaking in the absence of other people. Your family commits with you to give you the space and time to devote to the writing craft.

Some Writing Advice
Natalie Goldberg says in her book Wild Mind : Living the Writer’s Life (available here):

When you’re done writing for the day, stop in the middle of a sentence.

Winner found this works, though you might not think so till you’ve tried it.

This seems odd, but Winner finds when you pick up writing the next day, you don’t suffer from the perils of feeling stumped by a blank page. The momentum of an unfinished sentence allows you to more readily pick up and begin writing again.

Winner also recommends Rita Mae Brown’s book on writing Starting from Scratch (available here).

Two Pieces of advice from this book:

1) You’re a better writer if you exercise

Not sure if it’s the endorphins or the downtime to let your creative juices flow, but Winner finds this to be very true.

2) You can only have two of these three things

• Have a job that pays your mortgage.
• Write.
• Have a life.

Don’t be fooled into thinking you can have all three.

On Writing A Dissertation
Winner is struggling to complete her dissertation. She said:

I keep waiting for the dissertation elves to show up.

I suppose we all need such elves from time to time!

Saturday morning at the Art & Soul conference Lauren Winner presented “On Writing and Prayer.” Lauren Winner is best know by her autobiographical Girl Meets God. She is also author of the devotional text Mudhouse Sabbath, and the co-author of Protestantism in America.

Some excerpts from her lecture (Part 1 of 2):

Writing and Prayer
Some have pointed out the irony of much modern prayer. You work hard all day at a job, be parent to your children, and then save prayers until right before bed. But is waiting until the most exhausted hour of the day the best time to pray? Writing, like prayer, is another task you might not want to save until you’re about to fall asleep.

Lauren Winner speaks at the Baylor Art & Soul conference

The Myth of Productivity
Winner said:

Prayer has freed me up to think that not all writing must be productive. Society says our work has to be measured by productivity. Prayer is not productive the same way a factory is, although it is fruitful.

Winner talked about the liberating and sometimes healing aspects of writing creatively without the artificial constraints imposed by task-focused writing. She continued:

There has been a cost of sorts to being a productive writer. I felt for three years I felt that I was wasting my time if I wrote a paragraph if it didn’t see it into print. The measure of my writing was the finished paragraph I produced that made its way into publication.

She no longer has this worldview. Many days she writes just to write.

The Silence of Writing
Like prayer, writing is more about listening than talking.

Winner quoted something she read once:

People that pray and people that write both need time to be silent.

Prayer is not just about petition. It is also about listening. Most of our problems in prayer stem from that we don’t listen to God enough.

The root of the work comes from listening to the story we already know.

Winner also gave an interesting story from a Rabbinic Midrash. The first letter of the first of the ten commandment is Aleph — a silent letter. This is because, the Rabbis explain, in speaking the 10 commandments God was not saying anything new. As we enter silence, we can hear beyond the static noise in life and hear the ever-present truth of God’s presence about us.

The task of prayer, and of writing, is the task of the letter aleph.

Michael Hyatt, the President of Thomas Nelson, reports these interesting statistics from the CBA Marketplaces’ Top 50 Christian Books report on his From Where I Sit blog:

On Monday, I received the May list. It is sent to ECPA voting members (our trade association) a month in advance. Here’s how we stack up against our competitors. The second number is the 12-month rolling average.

Here’s his report on the titles Thomas Nelson and others had in this top 50 list:

Hyatt also notes the CBA market accounts for approximately 44% of their publishing revenue; presumably the rest is ABA and other channels.

Now what is misleading about this for the Christian Fiction author is this is all book sales, not just fiction. If you were to break this down by fiction sales it might be somewhat different.

Steve Laube said on the My Writers Group blog:

The majority stockholder of Thomas Nelson Publishers has placed all of his stock into a foundation that cannot sell those shares. This keeps the control of the company in Christian hands…to keep a secular company from coming in and doing a hostile takeover of the largest Christian publisher in the world.

It is interesting that this CBA juggernaut is positioned to maintain its Christian ownership, while larger secular companies have purchased many of the other publishing houses.