Too Many Cooks for Visits With Angels:11/8/2010

Journal entries about clairvoyance, meditation, spirituality, and mystical experiences

Moderator: figaro

Post Reply
figaro
Posts: 535
Joined: Sun Mar 27, 2005 12:45 am
Location: Ithaca, NY
Contact:

Too Many Cooks for Visits With Angels:11/8/2010

Post by figaro »

Too Many Cooks for Visits With Angels: A Mystic’s Journal Entries: November 8-15, 2010

Image: The new title angel from Diana.


Image

Monday, November 8

Diana’s last night in Ithaca, before returning to Dallas. We went to get something to eat; she brought her computer and showed me her new graphics for the back cover and spine of the book. I found them exquisite.

I am so very, very pleased. I will miss her and our work together. Her plan is to return to Ithaca this June and to stay for a few months, so that we can finish up We Meet in Dreams. We are both exhausted and in need of a rest from the books - but she pledged to keep in touch about her communications with the publisher.

And soon enough the galley for Visits With Angels will arrive for me to proof ...

Wednesday, November 10

Diana left Ithaca yesterday morning; a quick e-mail, she arrived safely. The next steps for me: investigate arranging e book versions of all my books for my figarobooks website, and Kindle versions of all my books for amazon.com.

Friday, November 12

Diana has been in touch with the publisher re formatting for e-versions of the books. She also tried creating a Kindle version, without success. Investigated more answers for both and Serge is now in touch with Diana re e-book versions for my website. I wrote back that neither of these formats is terribly important at the moment; if there are problems with Kindle, at some point they will be resolved - it is still a new technology and most likely Amazon has already received many complaints.

Sometimes it is best to forge ahead - and sometimes it is better to wait.

Most importantly, Diana plans to submit Visits With Angels to the publisher this weekend.

Saturday, November 13

An e-mail from Diana:

Tonight I took some time to have my friend Pam-ela look thru our page layouts for Visits with Angels...... she's an eagle eye and if there was anything irregular, I figured she would spot it. In the process of going thru the file, I ended up being the one to notice something highly irregular: I have repeated one angel twice... unintentionally... and unfortunately these repetitions are consecutive angels. They are the title pages for:

pg 95 - More Visits from Angels, Interviews - "Visits with Divine Beings"
pg 125 - Excerpts from a Mystic's Journal, section III

I know what to do, though, to fix this. I'm going to go ahead and use the praying angel from the Ithaca cemetery - which we talked about using for the Prayers section - and I will shift the current
Prayer angel (which is the cherub reading the book) - to "Excerpts from a Mystic's Journal" - this should fit nicely since the topic of that section implies reading a book ...a journal. I hadn't given the files to our publisher yet, so I'm very glad I took time to double-check our files for the millionth time.

Pam-ela said I need to enter this book design into a book design competition. She didn't know WHICH book design competition nor did she know if such a competition exists.... but in any case, I took this as a compliment. Her questions to me were focused on only two parts of the book: the asymmetrically designed Table of Contents (she favors lining the first line of text up with each other at least at the tops of pages). And, she did not like the telephone pole left on the cover of the book - because she said that it is the darkest element in the cover design and thus attracts the eye too much. She said if I insist on having an
element related to the ground on that corner of the cover, why not use a tree, which is more lyrical than a telephone pole? I certainly understand what she's saying but I'm not sure how I feel about it. Usually I don't like the intrusion of telephone poles in artistic compositions either, but the reason this one seemed to fit - as I first conceived it - was because it *IS* so ordinary that it makes the idea of an angel visiting us in our everyday lives more ......real. To make the cover entirely poetic (like with a pretty tree) almost seems too over the top. I felt the "pedestrian" - i.e., ordinary - element of the telephone pole sort of "grounds" the angel into daily life. Opinion? I don't want to do any experiments at this stage – I just want to give the files to Authorhouse on Monday. So I can either change the pole - or not.?

I *WILL* certainly change the repeated angel, though!!
To remind you which angel I intend to use, I will attach it to my e-mail.

Love,
Diana


It seems as though Diana’s work continues. Wrote her back quickly. Said that I wanted the telephone pole to stay in. The whole point of her cover was to say that the angels and other Divine Beings are here to help us, whether we are aware of them or not; the telephone pole grabbing our attention on her front cover very nicely shows how real this conventional, day-to-day reality seems to us, how all-encompassing it can be - whereas we should be putting our attention on God and the soul ... And how difficult that can be ...

Frankly, even though I am grateful to Diana’s graphic illustrator friend and colleague for her help: too many cooks can spoil the broth ...



Sunday, November 14

Went to Windgarth House with M. Worked a bit in the gardens; planted more bulbs. Hurt my back somehow, asked for healing. M., Jamee and Luke brought the canoe and kayak in for the winter, the picnic table, the benches etc. I asked that they leave a path in the garage and shed so I could get to my garden tools. M. and I took a walk to the Point and then followed the road past the bridge, along the lake; it was very windy at Windgarth, but calm at the Point. It is always either windy at the Point or in our cove. Windgarth means “garden of wind’, and we named it one very windy day many years ago, not long after we bought it. One thing we learned early on at Windgarth: if a table or chair or any other thing turns up on our pebbled beach - put it aside in a safe place because eventually the owner will come by to retrieve it. The canoe and kayak are kept on the back lawn, tied to a sturdy tree with a heavy rope when not in use on the lake; not because someone will steal them, anyone could easily untie the rope - but because otherwise we will be stopping at houses all along the lake trying to find our boats. On a windy day, the wind takes everything that is not tied down ...

An e-mail from Diana:

Thank you for expressing so succinctly why "our beloved telephone pole" should be left on the cover. You sum it up perfectly: "mundane life takes our full attention when we should be looking somewhere else." AMEN. It stays. In fact, I might put the wires back into the left-hand corner where I Photoshopped them out before it dawned on me how good a symbol the telephone pole was!!

Diana


Told her that I liked the TOC the way it was, and very much liked the ideas of the telephone wires being put back in - if it wasn’t too much trouble . Also said I would be delighted to meet our new angel.

I’ll see what she decides about the telephone wires.


Monday, November 15

Unusually warm day for Ithaca in mid-November, sunny; just a beautiful autumn day. Still a few leaves in the trees, here and there; some splashes of color, brilliant reds, oranges, yellows. But mainly bare branches, like thin pencil drawings ... Raked a bit; covered the roses with fluffy, crispy, yellow leaves. Later they will turn brown and mat down - but for now there are tall mounds of color surrounding all the rose bushes, bright winter blankets. Still some roses blooming, pinks, reds ... The air warm yet still autumn ... Every season has its own rhythms and fragrances ...

Priscilla did a million tasks for me today around the house; carried upstairs and downstairs, out to the studio; boxes of canvasses, laundry baskets; took the floor fans into the basement, brought the trash cans in from the curb; raced around like a squirrel ... Astounding what she can get done in an hour and a half. After she left I took a stroll downtown and prayed as I walked; met a beautiful white dog, fenced in and alone; told the dog about Our Lady and Christ and Saint Francis; the dog put its paws up on the fence as though to hug me, Light pouring everywhere. A very special dog. Decided to walk back the same way and the dog was waiting for me; will walk that way again. No yellow jackets out today for some reason, at any rate I did not see any. At one point I was thinking about my friend Kurt, kind beautiful Kurt who sent me presents and knitted me a winter scarf one year. He died suddenly a few months ago, from a sudden illness, and as I thought of him an angel appeared a bit ahead of me, to my right. I asked the angel to tell Kurt that I loved him, and the angel was gone in a flash. We humans cannot imagine that sort of speed ...

Checked my e-mail inbox for healing requests; asked that they all be healed. Some e-mails thanking me for healings, some updates on past healees. It is not always easy to look in my inbox: so many people and animals are suffering and need healing, undoubtedly countless numbers. As I strolled into town today I asked for miracles for those who come to me for healing - and, as usual, many were granted. Just a simply put request: ‘please heal all those on my healing list, please give me miracles for them’. Not all were granted, but many were ... And then a grateful and simple ‘thank you’ as I continued walking into town.

We should all be asking for miracles as we walk into town ...


A new e-mail from Diana:

Laurie,

Whew! Despite the extra work this has caused me, our new Praying Angel seems so utterly perfect for the "Prayers to Angels" title page that I am at peace with having to spend hours getting this anguished little angel to look compatible in style with our other etched angels. After many attempts, I believe she's ready. See for yourself.

(( attached ))

Diana


The new angel is beautiful: deep in prayer with a serene expression, in a graceful pose. I think Diana managed to match the etching style of the other title page angels very well - and I know how difficult a task that can be ...

Another e-mail from Diana this evening, this time concerning the Table of Contents:

Laurie,

I think when I did the first Table Of Contents, I was ready to be done and did it too late at night. Now that I have taken a closer look at it, I can see that there is a cleaner way to arrange those layouts that is more in harmony with the rest of the book's very formally aligned compositions. I'm happier with it now and think that it's far more in sync with the rest of the book. The changes are subtle.


(( attached ))

And now... the book really *IS* done. I'm sending a note to Authorhouse tonight with the web address for finding my files.

Put it in your journal: the date of the book's submission to the publisher:: Nov. 15, 2010.


Love,
Diana

November 15, 2010 it is. A good day.
Post Reply