The Manuscript 2.0

Dear friends and family,

At long last, I have completed my a new manuscript entitled Courage in Poverty. It's about the people whom I met as a volunteer in the U.S. Peace Corps in Ukraine and as a staff member at Raphael House, a shelter for homeless families in San Francisco.

This manuscript is 239 pages long in Microsoft Word, totaling about 72,000 words. I would love to have your comments on it. However, I'd like you to tell me that you actually want to read it. I had thought about sending a copy to everyone I know, but reading a manuscript is no small commitment, and I didn't want to foist it upon you.

So here's the deal: if you want it, I will send it to you as an MS-Word attachment. You can make all sorts of corrections and comments in the file if you like, just save it under a different name, for example, sticking your name at the end of the file name. You can enable tracked changes if you like that, use the "insert comment" feature, or simply use different-colored text for your comments. Or, you could use Word's highlighter feature if you just want to draw attention to a paragraph that makes no sense. Any comments you could make would be very appreciated -- even if you don't get through the whole thing.

Paper copies are available by request for free, but those require greater commitment. If you want a paper copy, you have to agree to actually read the thing within a month and mail it back to me. The paper and toner involved in printing a copy of a manuscript adds up to $5-$7, which I can deal with, but I need to know who really wants one. I like paper better myself because computer monitors tire my eyes out and I read faster on paper. Writing all over the margins with pen or pencil is fine.

Dr. Nordquist -- you get a paper one just because you made lectures so enjoyable without ever resorting to videos or Powerpoint presentations, the true thought-suckers of the classroom.

For those of you familiar with the first version of this manuscript, No Earthly Victory, this new one retains some of the stories and characters from that journey, but it takes a different tack, focusing on the stories of the people whom I met, and on the importance of finding a manner of service in which you feel you're really giving your heart rather than having it taken through guilt. It also describes the people whom I met in San Francisco at the homeless shelter, which the old manuscript had not done.

It's a less religious manuscript. The old one had focused a great deal on my spiritual journey and the enigmatic state of the church in Ukraine, which I still think would make a good book, but there are about six Orthodox publishing houses that publish things in English. Five of them rejected it and the sixth one just plain forgot. Still, I take the opportunity to describe the really cool monasteries and cathedrals I got to visit in Ukraine.

The curse of the author is the inner critic, nagging at him about problems in the cohesion of the story or whether it's even interesting. The inner critic tells him to quit and do something more productive. So, here are some of the questions I've been having through it.

• It doesn't really have a plot. It's non-fiction, which usually doesn't, but the glue that holds the chapter together is simply that I met these people where I was serving in Ukraine or San Francisco, and I really admired them. Is that enough?
• Is it too long? Are there parts that drag? I remember the middle 300 pages of the final Harry Potter book made me want to shout "Get on with it and stop freezing to death in that @$&% tent!" but I knew I'd miss vital plot nuances if I skipped forward. There's no explanation of Snape's true motivations at the end of this manuscript.
• Can anyone think of a better title? I'm not exactly crazy about Courage in Poverty -- it sounds too much like the titles of Barack Obama's and John McCain's books about their "vision for America" and stuff like that.
  

So, if you want the manuscript, let me know. If, by some chance, you have lost my e-mail address, you can click here to get it back. erut...@yahoo.com You have to solve one of those annoying warped-word things to get it, sorry.

In Christ,
Thomas Eric Ruthford