Why edit? It’s a mammoth task with over 350 pages of text. But feedback over the years has led us to condense the material to a page-a-day format; reduce the daily readings from 300 or 350 words to about 250, but still retain the basic message of each one. As you can imagine, a useful exercise to sharpen and produce concise writing.
In addition, we have added a text from each day’s reading, and a responsive prayer. Each page is reformatted to camera ready and paragraphs reduced to newspaper style for easier reading. Now to add the front and back ends, build indexes listing Scriptures used and subjects reviewed, check references for accuracy and consider cover redesign.
It has also given us the opportunity to incorporate ideas from reading and conferences we’ve taken in the interim. As always, our purpose is to produce a worthwhile legacy for our family and others; if it sells, that’s an added bonus!
Looking back is a reminder of the frailty of our work. I’m sure you get the feeling a work is never finished; there’s always some improvement we could make. Editing is an opportunity to catch up on some of those improvements, but accept the fact is still comes up short and we depend on Him to complete it in the hearts and minds of our readers.
Here is a sample page.
