Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 31 March 2005
Spent the early morning hours getting the house ready for the walk-through by our realtor. It goes on the market next Monday, and we really had it looking spectacular today, so we're feeling good about our price in a very tight market on the island.
After we were done with that, I expected to find Chapter 4 waiting for me from Mark, but a twist in the case unfolded: it was not in my email in-box. Turns out Mark was indisposed more than normal as his trial culminated and he was sucked into the deliberation process. He surfaces tonight with a guilty verdict, feeling a bit drained by it all. Me, I spent the afternoon helping the painter get his last room ready for primer, and then I organized the garage like nobody's business.
So I guess we got through the day with both verdicts coming in favorably in the sense that we're both free now to go into overdrive in finishing up the book. Mark's basically edited all the text. We just need to interact over the remaining call-outs he's inserted for me to change things, plus I need to write the intros to 4 and 5. But I do know this: we're turning in 75k well edited words tomorrow, and that's what the contract called for! The other 65k are very close—by Wednesday of next week at the latest, I would estimate. If Neil Nyren likes what we turn in tomorrow (he read it all in over that very same weekend last time, so I expect the same treatment this time), we'll probably get a significant chunk of time to nail down all our final edits before the text gets shipped off to the review-copy (with errors) printing. Given the tight schedule just like last time, there will be—I imagine—only one pre-pub version, meaning the reviewers won't be reading the final version. Last time that created a few weird bits, where I was taken to task in reviews for stuff I later changed in the final edit, but that's the price of keeping to the ambitious schedule.
