We make plans and God laughs. Did we have a calm few weeks since my last newsletter? As if. But we’re still dancing.
(Bill here: Before we dig into the news, here’s this month’s recommended YouTube link. I’ve been following Hats Off Entertainment, makers of fine mini-documentaries about comedians, funny movies, failed television shows, and highlights in pop culture. They caught my attention with this great episode on Gene Wilder: How to React Naturally and I’ve gone on to relive greats like W.C. Fields, the Three Stooges, “Funny Farm,” and Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. Each episode runs about 15-20 minutes. They’re bingeable! And now, back to our news!)
The second half of June began smoothly. We’ve been working steadily on our copyright travails. It may take months to get it all resolved but Amazon and Agatha Christie Ltd. are giving us the time we need. IngramSpark is more of a challenge, but eventually, necessary fixes will be made there too. We also remembered that I have a cousin in Germany. Andreas graciously agreed to accept our European Union purchases (required to empty out the stock so the bad book pages on Amazon can be shut down) meaning we aren’t paying exorbitant shipping costs across the Atlantic. For those couple of weeks, it was like we were running around shouting:
My parents are hanging in there. In addition to the fabulous new hand rails, some of the bathroom accessibility issues are finally being addressed. Their renovated bathroom will eventually be safer and more functional. We might even see — if my sister-in-law is able to persuade my mother — a stack washer/dryer so my mother doesn’t have to descend into the deathtrap basement to wash laundry.
So far, so good.
Then, at the beginning of July, Dear Daughter had a dramatic night-time panic attack. She’s had a few minor ones in her life but not like this. They are not nightmares. This is an adult form of night terrors, something she suffered from as a toddler. She has anxiety issues anyway and this did not help. One of the problems with night panics is that if you are subject to panic attacks connected to say, driving through tunnels, you can arrange your life to avoid tunnels. Similarly, you can arrange your life to avoid getting on airplanes or heights without too much bother.
You cannot avoid sleep.
It’s a necessity, so evolutionarily important that every creature bigger than a few cells stuck together has some kind of torpor period. Even jellyfish, which do not have brainstems, have rest periods.
Then it happened again. And the next night. And the next. Over the extended 4th of July holiday weekend when everything is closed. That led to night-time emergency room visits. Luckily, Hershey Medical Center doesn’t suffer too much from round-the-clock visitations from members of the Knife and Gun Club. The Med Center gets everything else, including spectacular farm accidents, so it can be shockingly busy. But we got lucky and got seen without waiting twelve hours.
During our medical sojourn, we discovered that a side-effect of valium can cause severe hallucinations. We also discovered that if you’re sensitive to Benadryl, any form of will cause problems, including the medication the ER doctor prescribed.
But gradually, things got under control, doctors were seen, and we’re all doing much better.
It was a dreadful week all around. Did writing and editing books get done? As if. It took days just to recover from the severe sleep deprivation.
So when I wrote in the June newsletter that we had a good shot at publishing The Cases of Blue Ploermell in July? Well, that’s not going to happen. August, maybe. Everything got pushed back because life happens and must be dealt with.
Life makes its own demands. Life does not care about publishing schedules. The bigger the publishing firm, the easier it is to work around the staff’s messy personal lives. A firm like us, essentially two people (me and Bill), doesn’t have the luxury of farming the work out to someone else. But we persevere.
We’ve been slowly getting back on track.
When Bill isn’t working on Blue Ploermell or The Man in the Brown Suit, he’s been reading The Vanished Pearls of Orlov. Once finished, he’ll slash it to ribbons make editing suggestions, most of which I’ll accept because he really will make it a better book.
Escape to HighTower is with my beta-readers, Anne and Angel. When they’re finished, I’ll do the rewriting they suggest and then Bill will take over. In the meantime, we got the most fabulous cover for it from Jake Caleb, the most fabulous of cover artists. He’s provided all four covers for the Steppes of Mars series and I pray he’ll do many more. They’re really wonderful; complex, fascinating, and appropriate for the genre-spanning novels I write.
As for my writing, I’ve been keeping up with my twice-weekly Agatha Christie movie schedule, watching and then reviewing. Lately, we’ve been watching the four Margaret Rutherford movies, starting with “Murder, She Said,” based on “The 4.50 from Paddington.”
Bill has been editing as we go along and doing the page layouts so there’s a decent chance that when the project is finished, the book won’t take another year. It will only take a few weeks to press [publish]. In the meantime, it’s two movies a week, with a report of one of them, “Cheeseplate with Agatha,” appearing on the Agatha Christie Fan Club page on Facebook.
I’ve also been writing about Dimitri Orlov and what happens to him next. I wanted to and he demanded it. If you’ve been following along on Wattpad or AO3, you know that Dimitri has suffered too. It won’t be a novel. I’ve finished one short story (short for me, about 9,000 words) and am in the throes of another (12,000 words and counting). I’m not sure how we’ll publish them. When I’m done with Dimitri’s story, I’ll dive into The War Dogs of Barsoom. I’ve been thinking about it but I’m not ready yet.
I also reopened my NotQuilts folders and began rereading what I wrote back in 2016. It’s going to need substantial rewriting and editing to turn a pile of blog posts into a coherent how-to manual on quilt construction and design. The design aspect matters as much to me as the unconventional construction. Sewing a NotQuilt is designing on the fly, a highwire act where you don’t know what you’ll end up with until you see the finished product. The finished bedding can be handsome or it can be … serviceable, even ugly. Whatever happens, it will be warm and functional. Ugly NotQuilts can be layered under more attractive ones so no one will ever know your design didn’t work out.
Finally, we did have yet another disruption in our life. This was a positive disruption but it is still eating up time that could be spent writing. We’ve been a pet-less household for over a year. We were waiting for the universe to deliver a deserving kitten. I told the right person and last week on Saturday, Judy came by with 10-week-old Dimitri. Ever since Boris and Natasha, we give our cats Russian names and yes, he’s named after Dimitri Orlov. He’s a charming tuxedo kitten, sweet-natured, healthy, rambunctious, and so much fun. Based on his behavior and health, he was dumped off. He’s a lucky kitten: Judy found him under a dumpster and remembered we wanted a kitten.
He’s currently an intern at Peschel Press but we have every expectation that he’ll move into management as soon as he’s able to leap onto the desk and bat at the keyboard. Like all our other cats, he enjoys supervising our work from a safe, comfortable, lazy perch nearby.
So that’s where we’re at now: treading water and hanging on. I hope you are all doing well and thanks again for reading our monthly newsletter. We appreciate each and every one of you.