Storm coming in over Lake Tahoe. Taken this morning from my office window.

I’ve closed the comments on the last post.  A hundred plus questions is probably enough.

I know the readers of this blog are a clever lot, so I suspect that a number of you will continue to post questions through this post.  Go for it.  I’ll put them up, but unless they are of outstanding merit, they probably won’t get answered.

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MD and I are finally back from a seemingly never-ending bout of travel.  Revolutionizing the world is a lot tougher job than I had been led to expect.  Due to my duties, I’ve been dilatory about this blog while we’ve been gone hither and there.  I’ll be back at my desk tomorrow slaving over another brilliant post.  If your comment has been languishing in ‘awaiting moderation’ purgatory, I’ll get to it tomorrow as well.  Thanks for continuing to check in.

Fresh salmon at the market about 100 feet from our hotel

MD and I are in Seattle right now working on a project that may revolutionize the world.  I’m not kidding.  Can’t talk about it yet, but that’s what we’re up here doing.  We’ve been working from early morning until late at night since we’ve been here, so I apologize for the lack of attention to this blog.  I simply haven’t had the time to deal with it.

There are a number of comments languishing in the purgatory of comments awaiting moderation.  I’ll get to them as quickly as I can.  At the latest, we’ll be back on home ground tomorrow, and I’ll deal with them then.  Hope to be able to do so before, however.

As you can probably surmise from the above photo of me looking full of myself with printed manuscript in one hand (sans the recipe section) and a tasty libation in the other, we are finished with the book. At least the first phase. Next will come all the editorial discussions and consequent minor (we hope) changes. Then the copy editing (a real drag) followed by galleys (requiring yet another read), and then the actual printed hardback. All that aside, we are through for now, and our lives can get back to some semblance of normalcy (or at least as normal as our lives ever get).

We got the manuscript finished on time only to learn that our editor is backed up on another book project and won’t be able to get to ours for another week. So, says she, take another week. But we’re already finished. So, we’ll spend this week reading the manuscript from the beginning, a luxury we’ve never had before.

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Just a quick post to let everyone know that I’m still alive and kicking. MD and I are closing in on the deadline for our book so I have been consumed in a frenzy of writing. Writing the last parts of a book are like losing the last five pounds – the most difficult part of the whole process. All the stuff you don’t want to dig in and write you keep putting off until you’re at the end of the project, and then there it is, still there and staring you in the face.

MD is much more industrious on a daily basis than I. She plugs along writing a little every day whereas I jump in and write in large chunks. Since she has plugged along for a long time and gotten her sections written, she is living large right now. I, on the other hand, am binge writing for all I’m worth.

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