It’s Wednesday which means its time to do the blog.  The problem is, the blog is a labor of love.  My day job—my real job—is, as you all know, writing books.  And today the day job is demanding my full attention.

It’s not writing today—it’s editing.  More specifically, copy-editing. Imagine your worst nightmare high school English teacher, arming herself with a red pen and going through your paper word for word, marking it up like crazy as she goes.  That’s what’s happening here, only in this case the paper is more than four-hundred pages long.  

Because the editing is all being done in an electronic file, every time I make a change, I have to sit there and wait for the windmill-of-death to go round and round for an undetermined period of time. In other words this is maddeningly slow. Excruciatingly slow. But it has to be done, because editing is important. Professional editors are important.

The book I’m working on, Man Overboard, is a complex story that has characters operating in several different time zones. As the copy-editor in New York was working away with his corrections, he kept changing the time zone references on me. I finally figured out that he had no idea Arizona doesn’t acknowledge daylight savings time. That misunderstanding added a whole other layer of complexity to the job, and meant that I had to stop on page 244 and go back to the beginning.

So that’s what I’m doing. Christmas shopping? Nope. Christmas decorating? Nope.Christmas cards? Nope. I’m still getting my steps, barely, but I’m doing them inside the house because right now it’s too damned cold outside.

Such is a writer’s life.