Crosswalk.com: So this is the first major project like that you’ve done with somebody else ever. Would you do it again?

Peretti: [Laughing] Never.

Crosswalk.com: Never?

Peretti: Absolutely never. Ted and I chuckle about it. After we worked together we realized we couldn’t ever work together again. The problem is you have one creative genius who's passionate about his work trying to work with another creative genius who's passionate about his work. We write from totally different directions and we didn’t find that out until we got together. So, it was pretty painful.

Crosswalk.com: What’s the next project in store for you?

Peretti: One thing I know I can do for sure is write another book. It might be another “Darkness” book after 18 years. In the meantime, right now I feel a real strong leaning to write and direct a motion picture, so that’s what I’m working on right now. I’m working on a screenplay for Monster. I’m like Abraham, just stepping out and going… I know not where, [but] I feel this is what the Lord wants me to do. So that’s what I’m preparing for, and they’re many pieces floating around out there that the Lord still is going to have to bring together. A movie’s a big deal, so we’ll see. 
Crosswalk.com: Let me switch gears here and ask about This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness. When you wrote those books in the 1980s, the Christian book marketplace was very different than it is now. Can you talk a little bit about that? Christian novels are everywhere now, but that wasn’t always the case.

Peretti: It’s a big question because there’s a lot of different things I could address there. But first of all, Christian fiction was not respected as a really worthwhile publishing avenue. That’s back in the days of the how-to books, Bible devotions type things -- those books, you still see that kind of book today … the prairie romances … there were the biblical novels based on the lives of biblical characters. [There was a] little bit of fantasy out there; there were a small number of authors, romance. I felt like a leper venturing into the fiction realm because number one, there was this Christian mindset that “I never read fiction…” When I first tried to get my book published, that’s basically what I got from most of the publishers… "we don’t publish fiction" and those that did publish fiction were restricted to the what they produced.

Crosswalk.com: But your idea was much different.

Peretti: Yeah, I sent my idea off and it was just so different that no one knew what to do with it. Even Crossway, which eventually published it, didn’t get it the first time. They were kind enough to write a letter -- no one else wrote letters, they usually just sent a little card. But they wrote a letter that said it was a very interesting idea, not quite a fit into our publishing needs right now … maybe later on. Anyway, I later on sent them a children’s book, the first of the Cooper Kids’ Adventures; that book got me in the door. They liked that one, it was safe and for kids, so they published it. Then they said, "By the way, you sent us this earlier idea that we rejected … could you send that to us so we could look at it?" And so I sent it to them, and they decided to publish it; they took a risk, adventuresome people that they are. And the rest is history.