A Traveler’s Guide thr Suffering & Joy

I remember teaching certain principles of writing to my community college students in essay writing classes thirty years ago. Here are three of them:

1. Writing is a recursive process.
2. Good writing requires re-writing.
3. Stop and submit.                                                                                                                                                                             Of course, a number of  points belong between the first and third above. As obvious as these three principles are, they can be difficult and frustrating to follow. With my book I’m currently finalizing for publication yet this year, I’m having trouble getting to the third because I’m in the muck with numbers one and two!

Life is like the recursive nature of writing. (Maybe it’s like all three principles.) Let me explain the three points, my experience, and my current situation.

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My dear readers, I want to invite you to peek into my book, A Traveler’s Guide through Suffering and Joy, which is being published later this year. The entire book which is a Bible study and all the appendices are complete as a first submission draft. I’ve revised them multiple times.  I’d like to share with you one page.

“What page?”

My latest version of my table of contents.

“Table of contents!” you say. “What’s so exciting about a T of C?”

I’ll try not to be offended. I find tables of content to be highly interesting. They are one of the key ways of exploring a book to get acquainted with it before reading it.

I drafted my T of C several years ago. It has been settled.  Until this morning. I realized there was something I could do to make this do more than show the logical organization and flow of ideas. It did that job, but it was not interesting.

“What did you do to draw in the reader?” you ask.  Good question. Let me show you.

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