Five Days Away

In response to yesterday’s post, reader Dave Kelly wrote, in part, “You’ve been off for 5 days. Figured Savas had you electricity cut off and your house surrounded so he could go to press without another stop.” While Dave was obviously jesting when he wrote that, the point actually was well-taken, and I thought I would offer an explanation for the uncharacteristically long spell of silence.

Last week, I posted about the horrific nightmare that we faced in trying to fix bollixed-up notes for one of the chapters that happened when our researcher waited until the last possible second to get us new material, and we had to plug it into our manuscript when it was already in the page galley stage. Quite a bit of the especially useful new material went into the third chapter, which deals with Corbit’s Charge in Westminster, MD. It really fleshed out the chapter. Ted did his best to shoehorn the stuff in, but his efforts to do so meant that the notes to that chapter–85 of them–were completely and totally FUBAR’ed (for those not familiar with the acronym FUBAR, I suggest you look here for the definition). I had to spend the major part of day re-working those, and JD took another seven hours fixing this stuff, too.

In short, I spent most of those five days getting the bugs ironed out of the Stuart’s Ride manuscript, and also with work-related stuff. As a result of the intense frustration toward our researcher for putting us into that situation, being tired from concentrating, and the normal things of every day life that interfere with my hobbies, I simply didn’t have the motivation, time, or wherewithal to blog.

Thanks to Susan, I got to sleep in yesterday for the first time since the puppy came home, and I finally started feeling less sleep deprived and more alert yesterday for the first time in ages. We’ll see how long that lasts.

In the meantime, the Stuart’s Ride manuscript is now complete, and Ted’s proofreader is finishing up his work on it. Then, it goes to the History Book Club for consideration for a selection of the month. More on that as the process goes along.

Finally, Ted told me today that the copies of my Monroe’s Crossroads book had hit the warehouse, so it will be available for purchase in a day or two. Yahoo!!!!