Book Progress

I have just completed rebuilding the book and sent it off to get a proof copy printed. This is such a relief as I was at this stage almost a year ago when the Word file I was working with broke. There will still be quite a lot of proof reading to do - and because of the plethora of scripts this is no mean feat. So far we have: Siddhaṃ, Lantsa/Ranjana, dbu-can, dbu-med, Devanāgarī, Kanji/Hanzi, and Sinhala. Also minor use of Kharoṣṭhī and Brahmī. In addition there are the fun mantras in Klingon and Elvish. In terms of languages there are words in English, Sanskrit, Pāli, Japanese, Chinese, and Tibetan. And to think the Triratna in-house publisher Windhorse Publications turned down this book! Fortunately I have a friend who can read all of the above and I think I can induce him to check everything for me.

Still. Progress is steady now and I expect to see the book through to completion by early 2011.

My while waiting for the proof of Visible Mantra to arrive I plan to put the finishing touches on another little book called 'Nāmapada: a guide to names in the Triratna Buddhist Order' which is a glossary of terms used in our names, with etymologies and cognates from other European languages, and a brief guide to constructing Sanskrit compounds. This is aimed at the Triratna movement obviously.

I finished my Pilgrimage Diary some time back. So Visible Mantra Press is now airworthy and getting ready to fly. If you have a book length project related to mantra and would like to get it published I would be interested to take on such work in the future - I'd like to build up a catalogue of niche publications on mantra, utilising print-on-demand to get around the problem of the smallness of the market.