I had hoped to have Volume 5 of A Walk Through Holy Week published in late July, but I wasn’t able to get my act together and do the required publishing tasks. I finally put my mind to it over the last two days, and the book is now published. Final Teaching covers chapters 14-15-16-17 of the gospel of John, where Jesus gave his disciples instruction, encouragement, and cautions after they had finished eating their Passover meal. It’s a section of the Bible that is rich in words that can help us on our discipleship walk.
So Volumes 1-5 are published. They are:
Vol 1: To Jerusalem
Vol 2: Temple Teaching
Vol 3: Coming Troubles
Vol 4: A Difficult Meal
Vol 5: Final Teaching
The print book cover
Volumes 6, 7, and 8 are written, requiring only editing followed by the usual publishing tasks. Hopefully I can do all that by the end of the year, then be able to move on to other writing.
Concerning Volume 5, as of this moment the e-book is approved and for sale. Here’s the link to the Amazon listing. Just waiting for the print book to be approved and for the two listings to sync up. Hopefully that will happen today.
My summer schedule continues, though knee and balance troubles have prevented me from walking as much as I would like.
My special projects continue. I’m transcribing one WW2 letter a day, handling 50 scan files a day, getting rid of most of them, and doing a few other odd things. Though I’m falling behind a little on my correspondence, and on family finances. Maybe I’ll get to them before the week is out.
A morning rainstorm is preventing me from going out to pick blackberries. The vines will be loaded tomorrow—or this evening if I can get out then.
One thing I got a little ahead on is editing my latest book, A Walk Through Holy Week Vol. 5. I knuckled down yesterday and finished it, which was one of the reasons I didn’t get a blog post written. I also wrote the Introduction, though it still needs a bit of work.
Leaving The Dungeon in a minute for a mug full, and reading in the sunroom.
In my first editorial pass through the book, which was mainly for proofreading, I was concerned that I had been repetitive in places. In the second editorial pass, just finished, I was able to make corrections to eliminate the most blatant redundancies. However, I’m not sure I caught them all. Thus, I will make a third editorial pass through it, reading it quickly as would someone who bought it and couldn’t put it down. I hope in this manner any more obvious repetition will stand out. I’m going to do this pass via an e-reader, marking any edits needed, I hope the reading takes only two or three days, and that I’ll find nothing more is needed, except for minor things.
My expectations now are that I’ll do the publishing tasks next week, July 14 to 18, and have it up for sale right after that.
I’ll then wait until September to tackle the remaining books in the series.
It’s now 11 AM and still raining. Time to get a little reading done—with a fresh mug of coffee.
The harvest is in progress, and a good harvest it is.
Today, on our Independence Day holiday, my work continues. I transcribed another WW2 letter, bringing the total up to 13. No end in sight, but a pattern for what the letters are is beginning to emerge. I went through at least 50 scan files, verified that I have them also stored and properly named in OneDrive folders, and so was able to delete the scan files. Then brings me down to about 1325 left to go through, or about five weeks of work. I think it might actually be less than that, because I’ve already skipped close to 100 files that I’ll be keeping.
I picked blackberries this morning, close to a pint, from less than half the plants and only getting the easiest ones to pick. Cut back a few of the new branches so that the paths between rows are more easily navigable, and raked up the cuttings. The harvest is plentiful. After the season is over, I plan on a major cut back of the bushes. I have four rows of blackberry plants that have sprung up naturally. With judicious cutting on my part and a bit of training, these are producing a good harvest for three years in a row. But it’s at least twice as many blackberries as I need. So after this year’s harvest, and when the weather cools off some, I’ll take two rows out completely. I’m actually looking forward to that.
I’m finding the book I’m currently reading a bit of a slog (I have a habit of picking those), but I’ll get through the last 65% of it, somehow.
Decumulation continues. On Wednesday, we drove to south central Kansas and delivered to Lynda’s brother all the Cheney photos we don’t plan on keeping. That included six large framed photos and a large painting of the Cheney homestead ranch in Meade County. Her brother can now decide what to do with them. Good riddance to one burden. It frees us up to work on photos from the other side of her family and finish those, hopefully within a month.
Today I edited a chapter in my Bible study. Only two chapters to go. Then, I think one more read-through at a normal pace to check for duplication or incomplete sections, with hopefully only minor final edits, and it will be on to publishing.
Last night we walked to the municipal fireworks display. We don’t live far from where they shoot them off, but a ridge, a valley, and lots of tall trees prevent us from seeing them from our house. Driving there and getting involved in that mass of traffic is a pain. So for the first time we walked to the top of the ridge, a little over 1/3 mile, and joined a hundred or so people who had done the same thing. I don’t really care about fireworks all that much, but Lynda enjoyed it.
So as you can see, I’m staying busy. Wouldn’t have it any other way.
The typing is tedious, especially reading 83-year-old pencil scratching…
It’s hot out. Not as hot here at the north end of the southern states as it is in the Northeast, but our heat is definitely up. But of course, that’s to be expected for late June, almost July.
So I’ve changed my schedule. After rising, weighing, and checking my blood sugar, instead of going down to The Dungeon to begin various projects or work on my books, I go out and walk in the cool of the morning. I walked Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday this week, going 1.07, 1.28, 1.37 miles respectively. Thursday and Friday were slightly longer distances. And, as evidence of my healing from the many maladies of the last sixteen months, I’ve been able to walk without taking a walking stick to serve as a cane.
…but I’ll get through it, one letter a day for now….
Now, I wasn’t regularly walking before Monday. My excuse? First, the rain. Then the heat. Then tiredness. By the time I come upstairs from The Dungeon and eat breakfast, it’s already a little too hot to walk comfortably. Then evening, when you can walk in the twilight shadows, I’m either busy with TV watching or just too tired after the labors of the day. In fact, it had been well over a week, maybe closer to two, since I’d walked for exercise.
I made the decision last Saturday that I would shift to a summer work schedule on Monday, and so far, I’ve been faithful to it. My target is to be out the front door by 6:00 A.M. The first three days I was right on the money. That’s a little earlier than my normal rising time, so a longer midday nap time is part of the new schedule.
…but I have to admit I’m glad it’s not a bigger bin.
I see very little activity at that hour. A car or two with people heading to work. One time a jogger. One time a neighbor on his front deck drinking coffee and reading something. I’m back home in around 30 minutes. At that point I head to The Dungeon for my normal routine: devotional reading, prayer, check e-mail and Facebook and book sales (actually non-sales. Then, rather than editing, I do my two special projects.
One of those is digitizing my father-in-law’s letters, limiting myself to one a day, either scanning or transcribing as the case may be. At one letter a day, that project will take a couple of years. The other special project is cleaning up old scan files. All the genealogy research papers and letters I scanned had been saved to a proper filing system still resided on my computer and cloud drive as scan files. Perhaps them being in two (really three) places doesn’t hurt anything, but it’s not “clean”. So I’m going through those scan files, verifying that I saved them to the right folder and gave them the right name, then deleting them from the scan folder.
My goal is to clear away 50 scan files a day, six days a week, so 300 a week. I started with 3400 scan files to deal with. As of Thursday morning, I have 1,700 left. Thus, I have around six weeks more on this project. I’ll check back in with you around the end of July or sometime in August to give a report on this as to how the project is going.
After that, I do my morning stock work, eat breakfast, and maybe work outside awhile in the blackberry patch. I come back inside and go to The Dungeon to cool down and do a little editing. Midday is still reading in the sunroom, though that is now getting so hot I’ll need to move outside to a shaded area on our woodlot.
So what’s the new project, and how am I going to fit it in a busy schedule? Well, the new project is transcribing the wartime correspondence of my father-in-law, Wayne Cheney. These have been sitting in a plastic bin in our house for close to 30 years, waiting on someone to get them out and read them, do something with them. I decided that time had come, and that these letters from 1942-1945 were of greater importance than the newer letters I had been digitizing. Thus, I have suspended working on the newer letters in favor or the older ones.
I’ll work on them at the rate of one letter a day until I finish the scanned files project, then will accelerate the letters until I finish. I have no idea how many of these letters there are. Having now put together four letter collections, I have a system established and have learned to do this fairly efficiently. But I really have no idea how long this will take me because I don’t know the letter count. By the beginning of August, I hope to have 50 or so letters transcribed. At that point maybe I’ll count the rest and figure how long the whole project will take me, and make a report.
Sounds like I’ll be busy a while. Busy is good: stimulating to the brain and enforcing discipline. Hopefully, while letter transcribing is going on, I’ll be able to finish the old family photos project and get my next Bible study edited and published.
Editing the 5th volume of this series helped me through a difficult day.
So this week just passed I completed editing Vol 5 of A Walk Through Holy Week. That is, I completed the first editorial pass through the book. At least one, and possibly two more editorial passes are needed.
Although this is Vol. 5, I think it was the first one written. I put it on the shelf about three years ago as I tried to decide if I would write the whole series, and if I did, what shape would it take. I eventually decided I would write the whole series, changed it from six volumes to eight with a better organization, and finished Vol 8 last year. At that point I started editing and publishing the series beginning with Vol 1. I’ve completed publishing tasks through Vol. 4, putting that one up for sale on Amazon last month.
In Vol. 5, I found a lot of stuff wrong in the first few chapters, which is why I think two more editorial passes can be expected. But the last several chapters were better. And, as I read them in the first pass, three years after I first wrote them and last read them, I found some things to help with a number of concerns I have today. Here it is.
What About The Game Plan?
Remember the Game Plan we were working on? That list of encouragements, cautions, and commands? I haven’t mentioned it for a few chapters. I left it when it was beginning to burgeon into an unwieldy list. Too many things to think about, to constantly read over and implement.
Afterall, the Christian walk ought to be a kind of automatic thing. If Jesus is in us, and if we have walked with him for a while, we ought to naturally do the things that result in our being stronger Christians who are building the kingdom of God. We ought not have to think about every action and wonder if we are doing the right thing, the devout Christian thing.
So how do we do this? Do we even need a game plan? For me, I still like a list of things—I won’t call them rules—that I should review from time to time to help me live a more productive Christian life, fully devoted to my Savior. Not something to obsess over, but something to give me help when I need help.
The game plan from a few chapters ago doesn’t quite do this. I don’t mean to say it’s bad. It’s just…it’s just…too unwieldy. Sorry, but I can’t think of a better word to describe it. So I want something simpler.
A few things have come to mind. One is that this section of the Bible, John 14-17, is worth reading over every year. I’m not one who reads the entire Bible yearly, so without some kind of intentionality, I might not read this for several years. That’s not good enough. Henceforth, I’ll read this every year, perhaps a couple of times. I want to dwell on it, not rush through. I want to think about what it says about Christian living. What have I forgotten over the last year? What do I need to think a little more about as I go about daily tasks? That’s something I must add to the game plan.
What else? Obviously, something more about prayer needs to go in, but what? In the last two chapters, I can see at least a dozen statements of Jesus that would form encouragements, commands, or cautions concerning prayer. Alas, that’s too many to add to the Game Plan.
So I’ve been thinking as I wrote the last two chapters that I need some simple items to add to the lists, perhaps as a preface—a few things I can say every morning, or a couple of times a day if needed, as reminders of what my Christian walk ought to look like.
I was reminded of the three simple rules John Wesley wrote about finances that would serve as overarching guidance for his parishioners.
Earn all you can.
Save all you can.
Give all you can.
Surely I can come up with something like that—except I need four “rules”, not three. Here they are.
Love all you can.
Pray all you can.
Learn all you can.
Serve all you can.
I like that. I can say those every morning, and at other times during the day, as reminders of how I should live.
I wrote those words, then life got in the way and I forgot about them. Reading then again gave me new inspiration to re-establish some of those priorities.
Last month I resumed setting goals for the month. I had suspended this practice, which used to include progress, as my injuries and medical issues piled up in 2024 and continued in early 2025. But I decided to resume setting goals but not taking time to report progress on the prior month’s goals. So here are goals for June.
Begin editing Vol. 5 of the A Walk Through Holy Week Bible study series. Based on how the last couple of volumes went, it’s likely I’ll finish it this month.
Continue with work on computer files. This, for now, will mainly be checking scanned files to see if I’ve properly saved them and then get rid of the duplicate file.
Having done a good job on genealogy research this month, I’d like to continue it in June. This may be mainly organizing computer files, getting rid of duplicate material and superseded files, rather than new research.
Work some more on going through family photos. It would be nice to finish one of our four main families and send those photos off to the next family member who needs to deal with them.
Continue going through my father-in-law’s letter files. They are in approximate chronological order. I’m going through them one a day, from newest working backwards. At this rate it will take me a couple of years to get through them all.
Consolidate a few ideas I’ve had lately for future writing in the Documenting America series.
I have other things I’d like to accomplish, but these seem like enough to set for the month. Especially in consideration of the outdoor work I have to do in the blackberry patch.
The first four volumes are now published—or will be as of tomorrow.
Over the last five or six days, I have published Volume 4 of my Bible study series, A Walk Through Holy Week. Titled A Difficult Meal, it covers the Last Supper as told in all four gospels. Although the fourth of eight volumes in the series, it was actually one of the earlier ones written, possibly the first. It has been patiently waiting in its folder for me to finish its brethren in order before it. Here’s the link to it at Amazon.
I set the publishing up to go live tomorrow, May 6. The e-book will be published that date, though it is ready for pre-order now. The print book was supposed to be ready the same day, but I’ve had some issues getting the print cover to meet Amazon’s requirements. I corrected it this morning and uploaded a replacement cover. If Amazon approves it, the print book should be available today or tomorrow.
I will now take a short break (a month or two) from publishing this series to do a few other key tasks. I’m not sure when I’ll do the publishing on Vols. 5 through 8, but it should be before the end of the year.
Yes, even while I’m trying to edit the remaining volumes of A Walk Through Holy Week, and planning to then shift to book 3 in The Forest Throne series, and plan out a larger Documenting America series, and have two other books on the back burner waiting for a chance, a new idea/opportunity has come to mind. Actually, even more than one new work-in-progress may be on the near horizon.
The book I’m reading right now is titled Great Essays. As a result, I’ve been itching to write a couple of essays. I have them fairly firmly in mind. One is outlined in my head; the other isn’t that far along. I’m not quite sure of the timing of this. Possibly this week I will at least get the outline on paper.
Meanwhile, AWTHW is screaming at me “No! Don’t do it.”
The other w-i-p will almost certainly happen. It is a new Bible study that I’m planning for our adult Sunday school class (a.k.a. life group, a.k.a. community group). I prepared the outline/proposal for it tonight and am about to send it to my co-teacher for his approval, after which we will submit it to the pastoral staff for approval. If approved, I will start teaching it May 4, meaning I’ll have to begin the writing at least by April 28.
I won’t announce the title and subject matter just yet, not until I have approval and get a little way into the writing.
Why do I do this? Get started on new things before the old ones are done, or at least at a stopping point. My writing is like the water contained in an elevated tank that someone busts a hole in. The water rushes out, seeking a place to pool up. That’s how my writing is. And I suppose it always will be.
The simple cover for the e-book. I will change out this cover after a while.
Volume 3 of my Bible study series, A Walk Through Holy Week, is published as both an e-book and paperback. Titled Coming Troubles, it covers what is known as the Olivet Discourse, when Jesus talked with his disciples. In the temple in Jerusalem, Jesus said that it was going to be torn down. After going to the Mount of Olives, the disciples asked him two questions:
When will these things happen, and what will be the sign they are about to take place? What will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?
Jesus goes on to give his famous discourse, a mix of prophecy and warning.
In some ways I feared to tread here, as a layman. So many sources are available for the study of end-times prophecy, I wonder if another small volume is needed. Probably not, but it’s part of the Holy Week story, so I decided to include it in my eight-volume series. I’ve already had a sale, which has propelled it into the top 100 of the category Religious Studies – Education.
The remaining five volumes in the series are written. I’m in the process of editing Vol. 4, and hope to have it published either late April or early May. I’m not sure if I’ll continue on editing the other volumes or take a break and work on something else.
