Catholic Ragemonkey

I made the callback!

As most of you reader type people know, I have written a book aimed at filling the gap in the adult formation market. Namely, it is a book in which you study a solid source of theological information (the Catechism of the Catholic Church) with other people in the parish over an extended period of time (one year or 40 weeks if you want to be really, really specific) so that you can begin to connect the "dots" of your knowledge and experience of the Faith. It's a little project what I named, "The Borromeo Project."

Also, as most readers know, I have been shopping this book around for about a year or two now, with very little interest. I can summarize every conversation I had with publishers thusly:
Them: "Hey, we really like this."
Me: "Thanks."
Them: "No, clearly you put a lot of thought and original work into this."
Me: "I tried to give it my best."
Them: "We're not interested in publishing it."

As you can imagine, there were lots of times I stood there with the phone in my hand at a complete loss as to what to say. Granted, publishing is always dicey and I can see it their way too. It just didn't make the experience any more pleasant.

Well, recently, I spoke with St. Catherine of Siena Press out of Indianapolis, and they are interested in going forward with the project. I don't think it means that we are go and I definitely will be published. It's more like in high school when I would audition for a show. The audition went well and I got a call back. It was such a good interview that I have been assigned the job of tracking down all the copyrights and asking for permission to re-print things in the book. Either way, it is further along than I have gotten with anyone else, so that's got to be encouraging, right? I know what Mark Shea would say the problem is: not enough foreign language footnotes. (Sorry, a little inside joke to catch his attention.)

I'll keep you up to date as much as possible. And keep praying. The really relevant question is: "Will the Archdiocese want to serve as a pilot program?" Actually, that's an interesting question. If you, average blog reader (although we know all Ragemonkey readers are above average), were to see and to hear about a group like this was forming in your parish, would you want to take part? Is ten weeks too much of a commitment, especially if it were effective?