So this is what it’s like to be a devotional-writer:
I got home from Portland in the middle of the night East Coast time, wide awake because {Coffee + Jet Lag}. But look! Things came in the mail for me! No need to be bored.
Box #1 was a stack of these: The Catholic Mom’s Prayer Companion. It’s a collection of reusable devotionals for every day of the year, contributed by such a massive collection of Catholic writers that I think they were hard-pressed to find non-co-authors left for the endorsements. (But they did find a few.)
So I got a beer and flipped through to find my entries, just to see what they looked like and all that. One gets self-absorbed late at night. There’s not an index-by-author, so I had to do a combination of trying to remember what days I wrote on and just flipping through. Three lessons I learned:
1. Goodness gracious I can’t believe who else is in there! A lot of the co-authors are people I know from the Catholic writing community, some of them famous, some of them up-and-coming. At the risk of sounding cliche, when you’ve actually met and worked with so many interesting and talented and devoted Catholics? It’s a tremendous honor to be sharing a book with them.
(My favorite part of being involved with the Catholic Writers Guild? Finding out who the new talent is before the rest of the world gets in on the secret.)
2. Editors are your friend. When I wrote this post at Patheos, I was in the middle of overhauling a couple of my submissions for this book. So let’s cut to the chase: We are all very, very glad that my first attempts at the feasts of St. Mary Magdalene and of the Immaculate Conception did not make it into the book. The revised versions are far better.
3. I have a predictable soul. I think I found all my entries (Six? Did I count right?), and there was a consistent theme: The same things I was writing about a year ago are the things I needed to hear just this week.
–> Shout out to my brother-in-law: Why yes, I did get to be the person who wrote on the feast of St. Maximilian Kolbe. I was stoked. But reader, if you want to know what I’ve been particularly thinking about the past two days, take a look at what I had to say on the feast of St. Rita.
Contents of Box #2 to be revealed in the next post.
