Book update

Nearing the finish line

I’m pretty sure that the authoritarian takeover of the American government by forces hostile to the principles of representative democracy exacerbated a six-week bout with bronchitis that I’m still getting over. For awhile I felt inside like an electric motor that’s jammed, captured by the buzz that an electric train makes when it’s stuck behind a shoe that your brother put on the tracks to annoy you. Grit your teeth and make that noise. I could smell it. Coughing made sleeping hard and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t keep the orange one away.

3:00 A.M.: ’Heed my warning citizens! A train!’

Judy and I discussed that perhaps I might learn to play the piano and I found that Robert Frost’s North of Boston poems helped calm me down. “The Black Cottage” became my go to.

In need of more distraction, things turned a corner two weeks ago when I received from Wise Ink Media of Minneapolis the results of their first proofread of When Once Destroyed. That’s my book, the one about an irretrievable loss made manifest by the forces of ignorance, ego, greed, and corruption, that I’m expecting you to have in your hands this spring. Progress reports on the book are the whole point of this newsletter, remember, and yes, I’m getting there.

At some point in this four year endeavor I spent three weeks creating citations for the over 300 references I need to account for to prove that I’m not making shit up. I organized them into a recognizable, if not appropriate, form some time after that, knowing that I’d eventually have to put them into what you’d expect to find in a reputable book.

When the first proofread from Wise Ink project manager Lindsay Bohls came two weeks ago, it was clear that the time had come. Gotta fix that.

There were two things to do. The first was make sure that I could find all the sources I’d used again. My notes are in newspaper articles, most of them online, and in photographs of articles, letters, and documents that Judy and I took two-to-three years ago at the Indiana State Library in Indianapolis; at the same Herman B Wells Library where I stacked books for pay 50 years ago at IU; and at the Wabash County Museum. There were times when finding what I had used took 45 minutes and it made me wonder how on earth we found that to begin with. Hand-written notes are the hardest to find because a key word search turns up nothing.

One of those hand-written notes was really important to my press complicity angle, a private note from the man who ran the state flood commission to the editor of a newspaper, telling him what the Army Corps of Engineers had instructed him to report to make the project look good. If I can’t find it, I can’t use that information. I did. That’s what’s in the picture.

The second thing to do for each of the reference citations was to put them in the form preferred by Wise Ink, following the guidelines of the Chicago Manual of Style, and to place them in the text appropriately.

That took ten days, my face in the screen for hours at a time. I’m thinking about charging more for the book.

In addition, because no more changes are possible once I turn all this back in, I had to check everything one more time, revise the table of contents, and write a page of acknowledgments. Some of you are in that. I also added a note at the end because I wanted to say something about what I had done that belongs at the end.

Yesterday I hit a send button. There are a few loose ends, but that’s pretty much it. I don’t know how long the printing will take but you’ll be the first to know.

Thanks for the support.