"MY EYES ARE FIXED INTENTLY ON MY SCREEN..."

A view of what I've been looking at!

Preparing a manuscript for publication is, as all writers (and editors) know, a real labor of love! A later post will give more background on the beginning of the reprint of To Heaven With Diana! But, for now, I ask your prayers (through the intercession, of course, of Jordan and Diana) as I put my nose to the grindstone, or, rather, the computer screen, and share my adventures in editing the books' manuscript.

The publisher, iUniverse, scanned the original edition of the book (Pantheon, 1960) by OCR (Optical Character Recognition), transformed it into a Word document, and then e-mailed to me. (Who knows at what point the reprint would be at without the wonders of technology?) The one thing I was worried about with the scanning were the book's footnotes and their rather idiosyncratic formatting, with each page having its own set of footnotes. Although I have to re-do the footnotes for continuous (and correct) numbering, the text of the footnotes and the old numbering was intact so it is moreseo a matter of copying and pasting text.

The biggest task as far as editing goes is to transform the Scriputral citations (from the Douay-Rheims' translation) from Roman numerals to Arabic. Jordan makes multiple allusions to the Scriptures in his letters, which shows how truly "saturated" he was with God's Holy Word. Very impressive and very edifying but, wow, all those allusions are keeping me busy now! To assist the process, I went through the MS (that's publishing lingo for manuscript), and highlighted the words preceding the footnotes, so my already strained eyes could easily find them.

There will also be some additions to the text, namely a new foreward by the Master of the Order, Fr. Carlos A. Aspiroz Costa, O.P. (not received yet!), an acknowledgements page, and an afterward, describing the life of the Dominican Nuns, and some additional citations to enlighten a new generation of readers. Yesterday, I was stunned to discover a major error in the book, where Pope Gregory VIII is cited as the pope during the time of Jordan's letters. NOT! It was Pope Gregory IX! But, for the most part, the editing and correcting is of a light and "delicate" nature. I commend myself to your prayers!