Finally - the edited manuscript is in hand. Or rather on my hard drive. My marvelous editor has liberated my turgid prose. Now it sings. And it sounds like me, not her. I'm stunned at the help she has provided. The wait was worth it.
What a learning experience! I've published journal articles, with complete sentences, paragraphs of similar length, carefully documented footnotes, and one inch margins. I was well schooled, and it's hard to get Princeton Seminary out of your soul.
My Preaching 101 professor insisted, "Always prepare your sermon manuscript as if it's ready for publication." OK, check. But a decade or so in pulpit, and I realized I was talking with folks, not reading to them. So sermons became necessarily looser. Thoughts had to be organized, so they were written down. Rhetoric helped people listen, so thoughts were sequenced so they could follow them. When I began to post them on a blog (http://billcartersermons.blogspot.com/), I added a disclaimer:
These are the "scripts" for what Bill Carter prepares for his weekly sermons. But remember: he is a jazz preacher, so there's a good chance he will verbally improvise on what he writes. Because he's often on the go, these sermons have not been edited, scrubbed, or tidied up. They are offered in the hope that they will be helpful to whoever reads them.
Fair enough. That's preaching.
Writing a book - a full book, with a logical progression of chapters - that's a whole other beast. What Lil has done is spruce up those sections where I got stuck in my head. When I wrote to impress my Princeton professors (all of whom have retired), she took a chainsaw to my prose. "A book about jazz should sound like jazz," she said.
She's right. And we collaborated to get it there. Whew.
Now, it's time to get it to the copy editor. More later.
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