Revealed: My Late Night Obsession

I’m including a screenshot of the project that has had me up at nights, working at odd hours, oftentimes with a few cursewords held poised, like small nuclear missiles, on the tip of my tongue, ready to inflict scathing shock and awe at the Mac, at Pages, at the fact that an hour ago at ten-thirty, I had told my wife I would be home in ten minutes.   For the better, Steve Jobs has yet to invent a computer whose feelings can be bruised.  For now, there’s no app for iEgo.

Really, it was a love hate relationship.

For every one of those moments of impending and private techno-cold-war, there were three moments where something clicked into place, or the computer surprised me with its cleverness and foresite (thank you again, Mr. Jobs) and I raised my arms in exultation.  I even made several wordless ululating cries.  In the night, in the pool of lamplight that kept my eyes from burning out of their sockets. 

I guess what I’m saying is, I had a blast writing Journey Magazine.

So though it will be revealed in person (or, in paper) on Sunday, I have to just give you a quick glance at the table of contents.  Not the cover, because it’s too cool to really show off yet before it’s in people’s hands.  But the table of contents, yes.  It’s like the magazine’s profile on eHarmony.  Hopefully it will make you want to see the rest.

As a point of interest, that red line at the top of the page is a cut mark.  It’s how the printer knows where to cut the page to the appropriate size.  You won’t see that in the final copy.

You know, it’s funny–in this edition I wrote articles about cafes and theologiants (that was misspelled, originally, but then I realized it was appropriate for A.B. Simpson), and then realized that they would represent the first material I’ve ever written that would be read by more than a handful of people.  That’s strange to me, kind of a like a hitchcock twist.  That’s how my dreams become realized, in increments, and never as I imagined them.  When I thought of my future self as a writer, in my teens, it was always as the kid who would write the great American novel.  And my first step towards the world of being a published writer is as a magazine editor, working at my local church.  Maybe easy to dismiss, but guess what… I get paid to do this.

I’m going to sit back and enjoy the moment. 

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Journey Magazine, Spring 2010, Contents

Journey Mag: A.B. Simpson Piece

Working on a magazine from scratch is a little bit like watching Bob Ross paint.  At first, you have a blank canvas.  Then you have vague shapes.  At some point, these shapes become happy blotches.  Then you have a mountain.

When I originally sat down to determine what content would be in Journey Mag, it seemed obvious to me that we needed to present A.B. Simpson to the SVA readership.  The man was truly extraordinary.  I just put the finishing touches on the layout for each page today, and after I dropped the text in, it dawned on me that I had a magazine. 

Here’s an excerpt from the mag, which is due out in April.

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Bart, Homer, Marge, and Albert Benjamin.

All Simpsons.

We’re probably more familiar with the first three.  They’ve been on TV since 1989, while poor Albert Benjamin was born before California was a state.  A.B. is older than the New York Times.  He predates the tin can.  Far more recent is the yellow-skinned cartoon kid whose slogan “Eat My Shorts” spawned a billion dollars in T-shirt sales.  Albert who?

When you get right down to it, even those of us who consider the Christian Missionary Alliance our home denomination are a little sketchy on the details when it comes to its founder.  After all, what does a New York preacher from the nineteenth century really have to offer us modern West-coast sophisticates?  Well, for starters: Snoqualmie Valley Alliance is still, down to its very DNA, a successor to the man’s remarkable vision.  Simpson’s passionate desire to introduce men and women to Jesus Christ is still echoing today, in the efforts of thousands of churches and missionaries across America, Hong Kong, India, Nigeria, Brazil–more countries than there are donuts in Homer’s lunch box.  Yet most of us could hardly identify him as responsible for the C&MA.  “D’oh!”