The Author Speaks: on the rapidly approaching deadline

June 26. That’s my deadline.

As I write this I am in the process of doing the final touches on the editing. I have received some useful feedback from people that have read the manuscript and am now implementing the final changes. Apart from spelling and grammar checks there is not much left to do at this point to the text. This is good news.

I have set myself the deadline of June 26 as I want to announce the book properly on the 140th anniversary of the events that this book is about. I feel that it’s important to commemorate the occasion in such a way. Once I have a manuscript ready to go we can begin collecting pre-orders. If the gods smile upon us this means that we will have a book ready to go very, very soon.

The fact that this book is so close to being a reality is both exhilarating and terrifying. Once it’s written the hardest part is done. As a man I feel like this is probably the closest to pregnancy and birth I will experience first hand. After two years of gestation I hope that bringing it out into the world will be relatively painless, but either way it will be rewarding.

At this stage the initial run will be a paperback, with a special edition potentially being released later with extra content if the paperback is successful. After that we can do an eBook and if we’re really lucky we can get an audiobook version made. One step at a time, of course. I will make sure that I come up with something special to thank early adopters.

Until the announcement, I had better get back to work. Books don’t edit themselves.