As of last Thursday or Friday, I finished the bulk of the text on my non-fiction book, The Candy Store Generation. I still have three chapters to tweak a little, where I’ve thought of something to add but haven’t done it yet. I started on one of those places yesterday. These will be enhancements or completion of thoughts I left hanging. After that, it’s print and re-read. My main fear is I have repeated myself extensively, and a 40,500 word book only needs to be 35,000. It will take several nights reading almost continuously to know that.

At that point I hope to improve some of the graphics. Several are copied from Congressional Budget Office reports available on-line. Most of them turned out well, but a couple are blurry because they are of poor quality in the original. I contacted CBO last week about getting some clearer copies. Six days later and no word yet. If I don’t get better graphs, I can go with those I have. And, I can always contact my congressman. His local office is only three or four miles from my office.

Yesterday I sent the manuscript for TCSG to a book designer, to let him assess whether the graphics will give problems for an e-book, as well as to give me a cost for the internal design/formatting. I formatted the four items myself that I currently have listed, but don’t think I want to tackle this one. I have the e-book cover in-hand, but not the print book cover yet.

In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People is done, and is with an editor right now. Today is day fourteen of the wait. Although this micro-press is considering it, I’m assuming I’ll end up self-publishing it (my inner pessimist being what he is). If so, I’ll do one more read-through, then all I’ll need is the covers for e-book and print book. I’ll wait until about July 1 for the editor, then forge ahead.

My regular column for Buildipedia.com is being cut from twice a month to once a month beginning in July. Bummer. I’ve been enjoying the money from it. I’m actually thinking of pulling some of those thoughts together and writing a construction administration book, maybe in 2013 or 2014. The columns I did are considered work-for-hire, so I can’t use them verbatim.

And, I prepared and uploaded my first article for Decoded Science, a re-work of an article I did for Suite101.com. But the DecSci policy has changed since I was approved to write there, and they no longer accept previously published articles. So, back to the drawing board—or the writing board I should say. I have an idea for a short series of articles there. I wasn’t planning on doing the research and writing quite so soon as this, but will think about it.

With my two main projects coming to an end, I’ll soon be moving on to the next one. More on that in the next post.