First off, if anyone hasn’t seen it, By Common Consent very kindly ran a guest post I wrote the other day. If I may say so, I quite liked the post – it talks about the vision behind MTP in more detail than I have anywhere else. The attention was very helpful; in addition to a nice spike in traffic here, a number of BCC readers have volunteered to help out with proofing–we’re excited to have them. My thanks to BCC.

At this point we have five interns signed up for this summer: Mariah Averett, Max Cook, Jared Ure, Katie Duckworth, and Heidi Billy. Jared is already getting a head start on working on History of the Church, vol. 1, and everyone else will start at the end of April. We’re excited for all the progress they’re going to help us make – they’re going to do an average of something like 100 hours of work each, which with luck ought to mean a couple of books each. Check out their bios in our people section. We’re also still recruiting.

Not much else to report. Expect a release this Saturday!

So, it’s been an eventful week or two for MTP. We’ve welcomed Nichole Eck aboard as Supervising Editor. Her bio:

Nichole Eck, Supervising Editor of the MTP, graduated with degrees in English and Linguistics and a minor in Editing from Brigham Young University. She has worked as a grammar and writing tutor at BYU, a proofreader on the 2013 edition of the LDS scriptures, and a writer and editor for the New Era and Liahona magazines. She writes speculative short fiction and occasionally blogs when not hanging out at home with her husband and 3-month-old daughter.

She brings a skill set and perspective that will be very helpful to the BYU editing interns we’re recruiting for this next summer. In related news, the BYU Editing Minor has officially approved our internship for class credit, and we’re advertising it at the BYU Publisher’s Fair in the Wilkinson Center today (Wednesday). We’re getting some interest in the history internship as well and have recruited our first intern, Mariah Averett.

We now have .zip files in the Available Texts section that contain all of the books in said section. This should make it a bit easier to get the whole collection without PG worrying about whether or not you’re a robot for how much you’re downloading.

In other news, we’re adopting a posting schedule. Release announcements will be posted on weekends. (There will not be a new release every weekend in the long run, but for a month or so here it may be close.) On weekends without new releases, we’ll typically post some commentary, quotes, etc. from a prior release. There should pretty reliably be weekend posts.

It’s not currently the weekend, which brings us to the other half of the posting schedule — when I have updates about the state of the MTP, announcements, or other meta-level material, I’ll typically post it on Wednesdays. There will only be Wednesday posts when I feel like there’s something worth posting about. On a related note, there are now blog categories for Project updates (typically Wednesday stuff), Book Commentary (typically weekend stuff), and Release Announcements (typically weekend stuff).

Good news: first-round proofing of History of the Prophet Joseph by His Mother is now complete. Second-round won’t happen until Mormon Doctrine of Deity is done, so it might be a while yet, but progress is occurring.

Also, if you’ve read this far, I have a confession. Project Gutenberg posted “General Smith’s Views on the Powers and Policy of the Government of the United States,” a new work we’ve done, a while ago. They’ve also just posted William Clayton’s Journal, My First Mission by George Q. Cannon, and Essentials in Church History by Joseph Fielding Smith, which were previously available on the old MTP site but never got posted to PG before. All of these are now linked in the Available Texts section, and each will get its own full release announcement-style post on a coming Saturday, in an effort to spread the publicity out a bit. Going forward, I expect to continue this pattern; I will only formally announce multiple releases per week if we’re many weeks ahead, but I will try to keep Available Texts up-to-date even if the announcements are dragging a bit.

I’ve just submitted two more pamphlets to Project Gutenberg – Orson Pratt’s “Absurdities of Immaterialism” and “General Smith’s Views of the Powers and Policy of the Government of the United States” by Joseph Smith. With luck, the releases will go through smoothly and within a week or two, so keep an eye out for the release announcements. 

B. H. Roberts’ Mormon Doctrine of Deity (~300 pages) is about 20% done final proofreading; with luck it’ll be available within a month. History of the Prophet Joseph by His Mother (also ~300 pages) is 40% done first-pass proofing and will be the next major work we focus on after Mormon Doctrine of Deity. With luck it’ll be finished within a couple of months. We’ve also got clearance from Project Gutenberg to do the “Lectures on Faith,” so that’s third on the to-do list. We also expect to release some previously non-Project Gutenberg MTP books on Project Gutenberg in the near future.

Finally, the BYU history program is officially offering academic credit for our summer internship program, and they’ve started publicizing it. We’re optimistic that interns will help us release several major works on an aggressive schedule towards the end of the summer. 

We’re now on Google+ here and on Twitter @mormontexts. Both accounts will announce new book releases and blog posts and probably not much else.

Here it is! This is expected to be a long-term home for MTP, which will hold:

• A list, with links and descriptions, of all of our currently available books.
• Information related to our internship program.
• Some historical information about the project.
• General updates.