Laaaaate. Here's why.

Just in case you have wondered about the late blog posts recently - it's not that I have lost my interest in blogging, or that I have un-learned how to read a clock. It's more or less directly due to the joys of working together with someone on the other side of the planet, and my changed daily schedule.

There's this book project, you see (and I actually don't know how much I have already told about it in this blog, though I think it's not much).  It's a joint project with Gillian, who has instigated it and brought heaps and heaps of words (the bulk of all the book, in fact). Gillian is a historian who happens to live in Australia... and that means our working together has to be timed carefully. That usually ends up being my morning to noon, sometimes early afternoon, and her arvo (the Aussie afternoon) to evening and night. There's only so much you can do in these sessions, and recently, we've had some more and some longer ones, as we're working towards meeting our deadline for publication.

Since this project is going to eat up some more of my premium morning hours, and I suspect things will go more crazy in the next two to three weeks instead of less crazy, you will know just what is up when the blogpost goes up later than usual. (Including, like today, much later than usual.)

And just in case you are interested in the process: at the moment, we're taking one last joint read through the manuscript to get rid of the last bits that need checking, editing, or otherwise modifying. Gillian has started doing the final detailed proofing on the printout, and I will join her very soon in that. A few people have a draft of the manuscript to have a look at it and will hopefully give us some feedback; meanwhile, we're also sourcing good illustrations to go with the text, because sometime a picture is better than words. Getting a book finished is pure craziness... but a weirdly nice, good kind of total craziness.