Last evening I set to work seriously on a new project: editing a book for a friend. Bessie Black, a retired missionary along with her husband Bob, is a member of our church and our Life Group. Bob and Bessie are laymen who started their married lives as farmers. They felt the call of God to apply to the Church of the Nazarene to go as missionaries. God’s call was correct; the church had need for lay missionaries on certain fields. After two stateside assignments, they “shipped-off” to Papua New Guinea. After twenty years on the field, they retired to our neck of the woods.

About nine years ago I started a writers critique group at our church. It lasted a little more than a year. Bessie attended. She wrote and shared stories from her times on the mission field, not sure what she would do with them. I realized they would make a great missions book for our denomination.

I must digress for a moment. The Church of the Nazarene has, for many decades, published annually a series of missions books. Typically six per year, these are bought by our churches and circulated in the congregation. It gives our people a chance to connect with our missions program and see how their missions giving is being spent in areas of the world where Christianity isn’t the dominant religion. They books will usually have around six to eight chapters. I estimated they might be 12,000 to 16,000 words per book.

Now, back to the story. Back those years ago, I encouraged Bessie to continue with those stories, form them into a book, and submit it to our World Missions Department as a possible missions book. I helped with some editing and formatting, and with writing the proposal. The book was accepted. It was one of our six books a couple of years later. They titled it Once Upon an Island, since Bob and Bessie’s assignments had been in Papua New Guinea and the Fiji Islands.

Since then, Bessie has continued to write out the stories from her missions career. She doesn’t have a computer. She goes to area libraries and senior centers, uses the computers there, and saves everything to a thumb drive. While some writers might things these are not ideal conditions in which to write, Bessie gets it done.

In January, she e-mailed me here twelve chapters, asking if I would again help her get the book in shape. She had already sent a proposal and some sample chapters to our missions department, which hasn’t yet given her a definitive answer. She’s open to self-publishing it if they decide not to take it.

I began reading it almost immediately, but babysitting grandchildren, my Jan-Feb cold, and my own writing got in the way of doing much with it. Bessie has given me a couple of friendly nudges, including one yesterday. I knew I had to give her book more attention. Why wasn’t I doing so?

When I thought about it, the reason is simple. The mindset and work of the editor is different than that of the writer. I’ve been intensely writing on two works-in-progress, as well as beginning writer work on the next project. It’s hard to take off that writer’s hat and go to full editor mode. I needed to do that, however.

So, last night I brought my computer upstairs from The Dungeon to work on it in the evening. I had already merged Bessie’s twelve chapters into one file. Last evening I brought them all into a consistent format. Why do this, you wonder, when working with the words would be more important? Simply so that the formatting doesn’t distract me. This was done by bedtime. I even read aloud one more chapter to the wife.

Today therefore, I’m going to set aside Adam Of Jerusalem and Documenting America: Making The Constitution Edition and get into Bessie’s words. I’m ready, finally, to change hats. This won’t take more than a week, I don’t think. And, I’ll enjoy the work.