The cruise was great.  We came home with wonderful memories butt sick as dogs, bringing with us a case of the walking crud—coughing, sore throats, etc—that was severe enough to send us both seeking help from our doctor.  That’s not something that happens very often.  We’re on the mend now but still not completely over it.

While on our three week cruise, I completed and e-mailed the manuscript to the next Joanna book—Field of Bones.  Before the end of the cruise, the line editing came back, and I did that, too.  Line editing means going through the manuscript word by word and making the changes suggested in the editor’s edits along with some changes of my own.

We arrived home a week ago today, late on Thursday night, not only jet-lagged but under the weather as well and spent a mostly brain-dead weekend. Monday evening the copy-editing arrived.  Copy-editing is best described as encountering your strictest ever English teacher who has used a red pencil to mark up and grade your three page essay on, say, The Evils of Huck Finn.  Oh, wait, that never happened to me.  I’m old school—very—and when I was in high school the world had not yet declared Huck Finn to be evil.

Nonetheless, you get the idea about copy-editors, except a four-hundred page manuscript is not a three-page essay.  As my mother, Evie, would say, “It’s a white horse of a different color.”  Copy-editing means hundreds or maybe even thousands of corrections that must be reviewed and marked as approved (or not).  Since this is done on an electronic file, the dreaded red pencil marks no longer exist, but with several editors weighing in with their comments, there are any number of colors marking up every page.

The copy-editing request came in late on Monday evening along with an e-mail pronouncement saying that it needed to be back in New York by today—Thursday.  I tried to work on it on Tuesday and made some slow progress—85 pages or so—but I kept nodding off over the iPad, and copy-editing is something that requires razor-sharp attention.

On Wednesday morning we had our long-scheduled appointments with our doctor for our annual physicals.  He told us that we’re gradually recovering from the crud, and that it isn’t going to kill us.  However, the appointments and accompanying blood work took up most of the morning, and Bill took me to lunch on the way home.  We were back by around 12:30 PM, and that’s when I went to work.  For the rest of the day.  And on into the night—from 12:30 PM to 12:30 AM before I was finally able to press send.

Some of you are probably thinking, “So what does she want, some kind of medal?” Believe me, I am well aware that there are lots of people out there in the world who routinely put in twelve-hour shifts at jobs far more physically challenging than sitting in a chair and dealing with … well … GRAMMAR, of all things!

But here’s the deal.  I’m incredibly grateful that, at age 74, I can still marshal the little gray cells and put them into action in a focused fashion in the face of a killer deadline.  And if my mother’s ability to work cross word puzzles well into her nineties is any indication, I should be able to keep on working for a very long time.

Yesterday, my doctor asked me, “Do mystery writers EVER retire?”  The indomitable Mary Higgins Clark immediately came to mind.

“Nope,” I told him.  “I don’t think we ever do.”