A September of New Beginnings

September 2007! As I flipped the pages on the three calendars scattered throughout the house and gazed with longing at blazing yellow trees that resemble a forest on fire, I realize how much I love this month. When I was a kid we never started school until the day after Labor Day so September heralded a new year in school – something I was invariably excited about. I married in September and Bob and I will celebrate our 44th anniversary this month. Neil Diamond's song, "September Morn - we danced until the night became a brand new day" always reminds me of our wedding. Even the Jewish New Year is in September as Yom Kippur falls this year on my anniversary.

While September will never be a month in which I step out on my back porch in sub-tropical Florida and smell the crisp rich tang of fall, I am as full of anticipation as though I woke up in my beloved Blue Ridge Mountains to scarlet oaks, red dogwoods and orange neon maples. There’s an increase in my heart rate and a little extra skip in my step. The book is finished and has gone to final print!

When WinePress emailed us a copy of the cover last week, both Fran and I cried. It wasn’t so much seeing our names on the front of the book – although we would be fibbing if we said that wasn’t an emotionally packed moment. It was the cover itself.

Let me share how it came to be. Just as Thresholds and Passages is all about the journey of life and how to capture the adventure, the evolution of the photo on the cover was quite an undertaking. All through the process of writing the book, Fran and I talked about what we wanted the cover to evoke. It had to be intriguing with a bit of mysticism thrown in, and by all means it could not depict some safe, easily visible path through a happy garden gate.

Over the course of the past two years we have taken dozens of photos of gates, passageways, windows, doors, paths, corridors and portals. We’ve always been looking for the perfect image. “We’ll know it when we see it,” we said more than once. As two committed bibliophiles, we know more than the average person about book covers. For instance, did you know that most readers take about 20 seconds to choose when purchasing a new book? It’s often simply the cover that seals the deal.

Once the manuscript was completed in June, we then turned our attention to cover design. We knew we would be asked for suggestions, but cover design is usually left to the marketing and publicity people who know what kinds of covers sell books. So when we were invited to give our input, we sent a few of the pictures we’d taken over the last few months.

In the meantime, Sue Riger – who is a close friend and a graphic artist – began to play around with some of the shots we had taken. She began to send designs she reconstructed from two or three different photos and asking if this was what we were looking for. We had settled on one particular image and had even sent it to the publisher and they accepted it, when late one night, she sent an email that said, “Take a look at this last one before you decide.”

It was love at first sight! “That’s it!” I emailed back at 11 PM. That’s the cover. I could hardly wait until the next morning when Fran could see it hoping she would have the same reaction. The rest is history, as they say. She called me in tears, her words spilling out like a small waterfall.

We love the scary, tangled vines, the partially hidden steps ascending to some unknown point, and the very greenness of it all. We hope you like it to. Thank you, Sue, for the hours of time you put into this project. While each of us always carry the reward with us because we have Christ, we nevertheless pray your reward for this will be doubled.

Most of all, we hope you, our friends and relations and those who have attended our conferences and retreats, will buy the book. Not only because we wrote it, but because we know it has a message crafted from God’s own heart. It’s fitting that this goes out on Labor Day as we have certainly labored for several years to arrive at this place.

The book will be on shelves in early December. Right in time for Christmas gifts. In our next update, we’ll relay some tips on how you can help us get the books in certain stores. The price of the book has not been set as of this blog, but we expect to have that information very soon. We will be scheduling book signings in several cities and hosting several events here in Naples this winter.

Will you join with us in asking that God will open wide doors for this book to find entrance into the hearts of women who are aching for more? And favor with the booksellers? You have invested in this book, many of your stories are in it. We can hardly wait to see what God has planned for this little volume.

Almost there,

Cathee & Fran