Hi all:<\/p>\n
A couple of weeks ago a good friend told us, “Thank God it’s Friday.” To which Michael replied, “Glad you can enjoy it. For us it’s always Monday.” You see that’s the thing about having 3 full-time careers and not life. Well, no life for the most part. What we do is research, write, and promote our novels. We struggle to keep up with the paperwork involved in running the buffalo ranch and remain active in the industry. Third, we are, after all, paper-trained anthropologists and historians. The professional literature just keeps unfolding. Things would be easier if we just had one specialty, but the entire world expects us to be conversant in every archaeology and all the history in North America for the last 15,000 years! Think about it. That’s a lot of territory.<\/p>\n
Last week we were both making progress on drafting different novels. Mike is busting his buns trying to get our first de Soto contact novel drafted, while Kathy is working on the next People book set in New York among early Iroquois. That’s when Mike discovered the page proofs sent earlier in the month for the paperback of PEOPLE OF THE WEEPING EYE. Of course they were due that Friday! Yeah, well, remember the 3 careers mentioned above? They tend to get in the way of each other. The other thing is that the most precious time we have is when we’re “into” a story. Like the baseball players say, “You don’t mess with a streak” and we were both in the middle of them, our respective stories rolling out like toiletpaper under a happy kitten’s claws.<\/p>\n
As we always do in such circumstances, we gave each other that panicked look that says “But my story is really rolling, so why don’t you<\/em> read the page proofs?” The second thing we always do is that paper-scissors-rock thing. Michael needs to figure out one of these days that scissors always cut paper.<\/p>\n The page proofs were read with due circumspection over the weekend and only a couple of errors were spotted. All of you who have been waiting should receive fair value for your money. It’s a solid 584 page read! The good news for readers is that PEOPLE OF THE WEEPING EYE is scheduled for a December release, which really means it should be on store shelves just after Thanksgiving. The other good news is that PEOPLE OF THE THUNDER will be out immediately afterward in January of 2009. The good folks at Forge Books were even kind enough to include the first chapter of THUNDER at the end of the WEEPING EYE paperback. We, of course, find it a little ironic that the massmarket (Publisher speak for paperback) will be out for the winter solstice. In the story, the characters celebrate by means of chunkey and stickball games. We’d call this Christmas. You see back in pagan days, the Romans celebrated something called Saturnalia, a big wonderful party with feasts, dancing, singing and drinking at the winter solstice. Early Christians, needing to compete, moved Jesus’s birthday to winter solstice and sort of merged the celebration. So think kindly of winter holidays as you read the book.<\/p>\n Oh, and Christmas? Yeah, we actually do take that one off. It’s one of the few days of the year that isn’t just another Monday for us. Until next time, take care. And those of you who actually get weekends? Please enjoy it, and think kindly of us. We’re here at the ranch. Making pages. <\/p>\n May the story roll!<\/p>\n Mike and Kathy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hi all: A couple of weeks ago a good friend told us, “Thank God it’s Friday.” To which Michael replied, “Glad you can enjoy it. For us it’s always Monday.” You see that’s the thing about having 3 full-time careers and not life. Well, no life for the most part. What we do is research, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31,"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions\/31"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gear-gear.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}