Good Friday. High Holy Day. The Passion of Christ. Via Dolorosa. Crucifixion. Utter sorrow. Fasting. Veneration of the Cross. Empty tabernacles. Hungry, tired, hard, sad.
Really, horror.
Nikolaï Gay (1831-1894)
Unfathomable. An unspeakable, truly, tough day. Good, yes, but the hardest most unspeakable kind of good.
A mystery of good.
Painting by Tissot, "What Christ saw from the Cross"
But yes, glorious good; if unseen as such then, and sometimes now. We wait. *Reposted from several years ago*
It is Holy Thursday. The first day of the Triduum. It's also known as Maundy Thursday But, no matter the term used, it's a high holy day, and it's one of the ones that is rich and complex and beautiful and difficult all at the same time.
(And, as an aside, everyone I know is kind of suffering all sorts of larger and smaller slings and arrows this week, escalating today. Right. Exactly. I guess that's how we know it's Holy Week and we get to participate in our own mini-wimpy-passion....because "we can't handle the truth" {to paraphrase Jack} of the real experience. Just saying.....)
Sadao Watanabe print
Tonight the Mass remembers that special Passover supper, the last supper. This is the supper of the institution of the Eucharist. The disciples didn't even really realize what was going on...how typical, then, and now. But, oh the beauty of it all.
So too, this night, Christ washed their feet, showing them how to be the servant of servants that they would be called to be...that we are called to be. How often do I forget that one? Daily, how many times a day is the better question.
Sigh. This is such a complex layered night. I can't begin to do it justice. The emotions range all over the map: from the quiet humbling of the washing of the feet, to the beauty of the institution of the eucharist, to the stripping of the altar and processing out that brings me to blinking away the tears.....It's a rigorous beautiful piercing night. For me, this night does begin the vigil...the vigil that doesn't end until the close of Saturday night's vigil Mass (finishing Sunday).
"Why is this night different from any other night?" This is one of the Passover questions. So too, it is our question, mine. And these three days ahead, I get to ponder it and pray over it and grow my heart bigger to answer it well, or try.
There is also a long tradition of a late Holy Thursday night service, called Tenebrea that means, literally, "shadows" or "darkness." This service is one of the hardest and most beautiful. It starts in light and over the course of the service moves to darkness....because these are the three days of darkness and the greatest of suffering. It ends with a cacophony of clapping wood. It jangles and disturbs me deep inside, as it should, as it's meant to. The Sisters of Carmel explain it well, go read the whole thing here, but below is a snip from it:
There is placed in the sanctuary, near the altar, a large triangular candlestick holding fifteen candles. At the end of each psalm or canticle, one of these fifteen candles is extinguished, but the one which is placed at the top of the triangle is left lighted. During the singing of the Benedictus (the Canticle of Zachary at the end of Lauds), six other candles on the altar are also put out. Then the master of ceremonies takes the lighted candle from the triangle and holds it upon the altar while the choir repeats the antiphon after the canticle, after which she hides it behind the altar during the recitation of the Christus antiphon and final prayer. As soon as this prayer is finished, a noise is made with the seats of the stalls in the choir, which continues until the candle is brought from behind the altar, and shows, by its light, that the Office of Tenebrae is over.
If you're a writer, editor, agent, publisher, book designer, bookseller, book distributor, etc., and not completely out of touch with reality, you've been thinking and reading a lot about ebooks lately. And if you are anything like me, you're still trying to sort out the whole thing, figure out what the hell it all means to you now and what it's going to mean to you in the future. I've been reading pretty much everything I can get my hands on about this brave, scary, fascinating, disruptive, opportunity-laden (take your pick) new world.
eBooks are the future whether you like it or not. Sales of paper and ink books are going to continue to decline in the future - though probably never entirely go away. And eBooks are going to become the dominant form of book publishing.
A friend of mine who is a designer and marketing person who has recently been laid off from a long time job in the music industry asked me for some information on e-publishing. She is more interested in the technical side of things than the author's point of view. I sent her a long email filled with links to articles and websites that I hoped might be useful to her. If you've been keeping up with developments like I have, most of what follows will probably be familiar to you. If not, maybe some of it will be useful to you, too.
Editing & Proofreading - This should go without saying. Don't edit yourself. You're bad at it. I don't care who you are. Get someone else to edit your book. Then get another someone else who is a grammar nerd to copyedit your book. Then you, and hopefully at least one other - two would be better - people need to proofread the book before it gets turned into a file for uploading.
Book Formatting (as opposed to file formatting for upload) - A lot goes into making a book readable: font style and sizes, title page, copyright, edition and ISBN information page, table of contents, acknowledgments, chapter headings and styles, paragraph styles, page numbers, etc. Traditionally, your publisher does all that for you. If you are e-publishing a book yourself, you have to do all that for yourself, or find someone who knows what they're doing to do it for you. Sure, you can e-pub a Word or PDF manuscript file, and just as surely it isn't going to look very good if you do. I don't have any links for you here, you'll have to do some research to find people or companies who will do this for you if you can't do it for yourself.
Covers - Chances are, you're going to need new, attractive, attention-grabbing covers. If you've gotten the rights back to your backlist - like I have - most likely you don't have the right to use the same covers the books were originally published with. If you're publishing a new book, it needs a good cover. Again, no links here, find someone who is good to do them for you.
Paper & Ink - No matter what you do, some people are going to want traditional copies of your books. If you're e-publishing yourself, there are ways to have small print runs, or print-on-demand books printed and distributed. One of those is with Amazon's Create Space service.
Another is by finding an Espresso machine that you can use. In Los Angeles, Flintridge Books has an Espresso machine and you can contract book printing through them. (Go to the store and take a look at books printed on the machine first, though. While the quality is good, I don't think that it is yet quite up to the quality available from traditional printing methods.)
TECHNICAL ISSUES
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Lulu and Smashwords all have software on their sites to help you publish and upload your ebooks to their sales sites. There is more that can go wrong in the process than they would like you to think there is. If you aren't completely sure of what you are doing in the way of formatting the files for upload, you should probably get someone to do it for you. That's what I did.
If you do want to do it yourself, or if you have someone else format the files for you and then you need to upload them, here are a variety of links that will come in handy: Amazon's Digital Publishing Site.
Apple's support page for creating ePub files from Pages. (A word of warning, Apple not only pays lousier royalties (than the others) for books sold on its iBook site, but it is also the most finicky when it comes to formatting files for uploading to its site.)
That pretty much sums up what I have come across that seems of use to me so far. If you've come across anything else please let me know in the comments. This is certainly the biggest business issue for authors today and is going to continue to be for quite some time. The more we all know about it, the more likely we are going to be able to take advantage of opportunities and the less likely we will fall into traps.
Detail of painting, Tissot
Nikolaï Gay (1831-1894)
Nikolaï Gay (1831-1894)
Painting by Tissot, "What Christ saw from the Cross"
