Late to start, late to finish

It’s been a crazy week ’round here and things that should be getting done either aren’t, or are, but late. Like this post.

The good news is that one important task, finishing my last edits, including deleting an entire chapter, got done today. So, all that’ s let to do is write the Acknowledgements and front matter (at least in rough draft form) and the manuscript of The Eternity Plague will be ready to head off to my copy editor. And just in time, as other tasks await.

Meanwhile, in virus news, the latest strain of avian (bird) flu in Asia, an H7N9 strain, is once again killing a large percentage of the people it infects–while infecting very few people. A detail that is not keeping the press from being all a-twitter (pun fully intended) over the latest potential pandemic–subtext: how excited they are at the prospect of covering yet another disaster, which they’ll hype before and during, and have theme music and special graphics for.

Oh, sorry. Got a little carried away there. But that press hype was one of the behaviors motivating the original idea for the book, even though it never really came out in the completed story. Well, that’s not entirely true. One of the secondary characters, Antonio Corolli, is a self-aggrandizing, self-promoting reporter, but for the most part in today’s media environment, it’s not the reporters who do they hyping, its their networks, and that just wasn’t going to fit in the story.

That’s all for this late-started, late-finished installment. Other tasks await.