Just push the button

That last blog article was enough to get me out of my slump. The finished book has been dwelling on my laptop computer for three full months. I've been busy, sure, but not that busy. So I've submitted it.

How does an author submit a book these days? Everything goes by email. Many publishing houses have a page on their website with instructions for submissions (here's one). My late night project has been to identify a few prospects and draft a book proposal. Publishers have hints on those, too. 

I'll start with Westminster John Knox Press, my denomination's publisher, along with a couple of others. Best to shoot high!

Stay tuned. 

The Dating Game, Updated

Here is one of the painful memories of high school: getting the courage to call up somebody attractive and ask them out to dinner or the movies. I didn't do it a lot, most because there were a few occasions when I was turned down. That hurt. Made me shy. Took a while to recover.

One memory in particular: I dialed the number, identified myself, and asked for somebody named "Cindy." When she picked up the receiver, I played it cool and said, "Would you like to go out sometime?" She said, "No." Shot down immediately. As I tried to recover, I could hear tell someone what she said. Then she started to laugh. And hung up.

I chewed on the cold coals of humiliation.

This is the fear of sending a book manuscript off to a publisher. What if my fine effort is rejected? What if they laugh?

It's curious that I haven't sent out the book yet. True, the editing phase took a lot longer than I ever expected. There have been delays, some of which I do not understand. And there's the quiet fear that it will not be wanted. So I'll wait until confidence is regained.

Whiz Kid. (Well, not a kid, really)

Cousin John has three talented sons. Corey is the eldest and he's my copyditor. He's amazing. With over 6000 projects to date, he's astute, decisive, and quick. Thriving on a Riff is one of the forty-two nonfiction books that he has copyedited.

I can't say enough about his work. He would edit me if I did.

What does a copyeditor do? He polishes gems until they sparkle. Here is the description from his website: 

Copyediting is the process of editing copy for accuracy, clarity, style, consistency, and formatting, and correcting errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, word choice, subject/verb agreement, etc. Copyediting also may include fact-checking, checking references, and making alterations to a text for proper adherence to the preferred style guide.

Focus: correction. Deliverable: a piece of writing that is exponentially more effective at communicating its message and engaging its target audience.

He and Lil were a one-two punch. 

And dang, he's quick. Four weeks in his hands, and it's done already.

Check him out at https://coreymccullough.com/. Tell him that I sent you. And buy his books, especially the novel Rust on the Allegheny.  It's a slightly fictionalized story of the town where my mom grew up. 

In fact, the cover of his novel is a stylized image of the theater where she heard Louis Armstrong play.

It's all in the family.

Sometimes you find a brilliant helper

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.

Back at it

This year's sabbatical is over. The first major task upon my return was to put together the annual jazz communion service that our church presents on Labor Day weekend. We built it around the classic compositions of of Dizzy Gillespie, the fabulous trumpeter who co-created bebop with saxophonist Charlie Parker and pianist Thelonious Monk.

The service was a hoot. Attendance was good, even though the pandemic is stomping along. The church welcomes vaccinated folks, and requests that they wear facemasks and remain careful. I preached a sermon on a handful of Proverbs, all of them related to "a cheerful heart" - which exemplifies Dizzy's spirit and legacy, and is the way forward for all of us. You can read the sermon here.

As I picked up used sheet music today and finished tidying up the area, Big John stopped in with a bunch of compliments. He's our wonderful sexton, experienced in sweeping up after my messes, and always ready to offer brutally honest feedback.

"I was talking about you today with my neighbor," he said. "We want to know how you do it."

Do what?

"How do you tie in Dizzy Gillespie with the Bible and make a sermon that offers hope and encouragement?"

Good question. The best answer is that it's a practiced integration: I look for the connections. It requires taking both Bebop and Bible seriously and holding them in creative tension. It means listening deeply to each. It happens, for the most part, if I don't force something that isn't there - if I wait for the sparks to fly and to stay open for what I might not expect.

And I've been doing this for a long time. That's the "practiced" aspect of the integration.

It occurs to me that this is the heart of the book project. It's all about connections. Integration. Disparate strands of tradition that actually aren't disparate at all. I've been listening to Bible and jazz as long as I can remember. As my wife once said about me, "He hears things in his head." Yep, she's right.

And I will bet that you can do the same thing, to weave together things that matter a great deal to you. We do this all the time. It is how we make sense of our lives. 

In workshops with clergy, I frequently encourage them to take up an art form if they haven't already done so. Get out of your church and get your knuckles dirty with potting soil. Pick up knitting needles. Take up woodworking. Stitch a quilt. Shoot photographs. Learn how poems work. Or even, study how music is made. The goal is more than enrichment. It's bigger that enlarging one's perspective. 

It is learning to connect. It is discovering that all of life touches the rest of life.

 

It is discerning the Holy is in the thick of everything. 

Thanks to Jeff Kellam for the photos above. He sees connections.

Thanks to Frank Jones, who not only recorded the video of the service (watch it here), but led the crowd in singing. That was a gutsy thing to do.   

What's it like to be edited?

Well, this is a new experience for me.

After the first draft of my book was completed in late July, it has been in the hands (that is, the computer) of a skilled editor. Lil is a developmental editor. When we first met on a Zoom call some time back, she said, "Write the book you need to write, but there's no assurance that a publisher will want it. That's where I come in." 

The past few weeks have been slow going. Every two or three days, she e-mails a chapter back to me. It's marked up. Sentences are deleted. Paragraphs are shortened. Poems are trimmed. And the right column is filled with questions and comments: 

"Are you sure about this?"

"Whoa, that was an abrupt transition."

And my favorite: "Red Alert! Red Alert! Sounds like a sermon!"

I've published some books in the past, but they have never been edited. Well, let me correct that: one editor inserted the word "Amen" at the end of every chapter. I begged to have it removed when I saw the author's proofs, but I was ignored. Now I simply assume that she agreed with what I wrote.

In the sanctuary, nobody stands up after I preach a sermon to say, "Hey, that third paragraph was two sentences too long." No, I enjoy a captive audience. Or so I tell myself. They slip out to the restroom whenever they want. And over the years, a couple of folks have not come back. 

Whatever. When you are a preacher, it comes with the territory.

Likewise, if the crowd doesn't like the piano solo, they simply don't applaud. I have gotten used to that. Sometimes I have convinced myself that my improvisation was just too subtle or stunning to get a response. More often, it means the sound engineer fell asleep or went out for a smoke. Or perhaps I played something that simply didn't matter.

In the recording studio, it's a different situation. The band is putting something down for posterity. It will be heard again, and again, and again. (I know, that's a vain dream too...) When a tune is recorded for permanence, we want to make sure it sparkles. Otherwise, why bother? Landfills are full of the remnants of mediocrity.  

So, all praise for Lil. She is working hard to make sure that my hard work gets a hearing reading. She is tough and demanding. And she is good. Together we are collaborating to improve what I've written and to make it as accessible as possible. 

I am swallowing my pride. Or ego. Or false assumptions. 

It's a good lesson.

 

Mean What You Say

"Mean What You Say" is a tune composed by Thad Jones, one of the great composer-arrangers of this music. The title of the song is an invitation to integrity and integration, two values that mean a great deal to me.

Integrity seems to be a rare quality these days. We don't see enough of it in public life. For me it comes down to two integrating questions for this summer sabbatical: 

• How can I write about jazz from a distance, unless I'm making music?   
• How could I write about the spiritual life, unless I live it?

One of the great gifts of this summer sabbatical is a renewed opportunity to play music with friends. After a long pandemic shutdown, it feels good to make some melodies. I have enjoyed playing for a theater fundraiser in upstate New York, two gigs for the Scranton Jazz Festival, and a gala concert organized by saxophonist Al Hamme. 

We can set up and play anywhere. The photo above was take by our friend Nick in a wonderful Italian restaurant in Scranton that specializes in wood-fired pizza.  

Nick stopped back the next night to catch me me with a second trio as we played in a great coffee shop downtown. If you have Facebook, you can click and enjoy a clip of the trio in full flight. The highlight of that second night was when Mark Woodyatt stopped in with his magic violin and joined us for a couple of Chick Corea tunes.

In addition to these wonderful gigs, Al Hamme put together a great octet for a concert in my old stomping ground in New York. He never ceases to amaze me! The musicianship was impeccable. The jazz was swinging. Of course, Al make certain that we had new shirts to look sharp.

As expected - especially since the concert was cooked up by Al - the evening event sold out. 

As expected, the crowd stood and cheered a number of times, most notably when Tony Marino and Tom Killian blew up the place with a bass-drums duet.

By the way, that's my Mom in the second row in the multi-colored blouse. I took her along for the concert and the post-concert "hang" at a local BBQ joint. And I had a comfortable night's sleep in my childhood bedroom before traveling back to my mountain cottage.