A finished project!

Many of my longtime readers know I have a project that keeps me busy every spring. It doesn't have to, of course -- I could work on this writing project throughout the year and not end up in such a crunch time each spring. But I always seem to do so anyway...

My project is a devotional book for the kids involved with our kids' ministry at church to use during the summer months. Our church uses the Patch the Pirate program (and what a great one it is!) but the Sailor's Logs they use only cover the months of the school year. Believing that the sailors needed to have devotions year round, the leaders of the club at our church asked me years ago to consider writing a summer devotional book for them to use.

I have written, I think, nine of these at this point. My husband has been encouraging me for years to "recycle" some of the earlier manuscripts rather than starting from scratch with a new one. (The problem with this has been that I keep coming up with new themes I want to try!) This year, however, I took his advice and went back to the book I'd written for 2002. I needed to completely retype it, and some pages needed updating, so it did take quite awhile, though not as long as a new book would have.

I finished organizing the pages on Monday and got it to the print shop the same day. By Wednesday -- voila! -- we had a box of books!

Here is what this year's cover looks like.

This book is an almanac type of book, with a page for each day of the summer months. The pages deal with fun or interesting things that happened on that day in history, or special themes that have been assigned to that day -- like National Banana Split Day, etc.

Here's a peek at the book's pages.

And another.

Some previous books

I'm thrilled to have this project completed for another year! Maybe now I can blog more often...