When you have a dog, a house, a full-time job and you live with people, there is only so much time in life to go around. All this to say that this poor, neglected blog that I really like got thrown aside when the Wisconsin Historical Society Press liked the first three chapters of the book I was writing about my friend Peter enough to want to publish a finished version. That was sometime in 2021. So, here we are two years later. It has, and continues to be, an incredible education. Here’s what’s going on at the moment. Future posts will delve into how we got to this point, and what’s going to happen next. (Some of which I know, and some of which remains an exciting mystery.)
Book news:
1. This week my book was transmitted to the production editor. This is (evidently) a big deal. Here’s a quote from the email we got from our developmental editor, Liz: ” …you should both do a little happy dance. This was a big accomplishment in the life of the book!”
2. For the first time, Liz shared two drafts of the cover-design-in-progress. When it’s fully cooked, I’ll be out here loud and proud (probably with a temporary profile picture on my social media feeds (🤣), but for now I will just say that Peter and I are very happy with it.
3. RE: Down the line. You will hear (or read) about me calling it “my book” and “our book.” Peter will do the same thing. Because both things are true. Without Peter, this book wouldn’t exist. He’s the person who did all the incredible things in it. I’m the one who made his story into something with a plot and a narrative arc that people will be able to follow. The book was also his idea. (Mine was to build a virtual version of his music club and give him an income stream during the early days of the pandemic. He came back with “do you want to write a book?” My friend was having a bad pandemic. If he wanted a book, I would give – or at least try – to give him a book.)
It’s slated for publication next spring (read: May/June). I’m working on getting comfortable in my author skin, and also starting to think about getting back into the book-like object I put aside to do this project. Writing a book was hard, but the most satisfying kind of hard. And there was nothing like the feeling of turning in a completed manuscript last November. I buried a lot of negative messages under those 56,812 words.
the sentence factory 