January 2, 2024
Happy New Year, everyone! I enjoyed a couple of lovely holiday celebrations with family and friends, but my biggest Christmas present in 2023 was finally being assigned an editor by Sunbury Press for my grief memoir, That Day, And What Came After: Finding and Losing the Love of My Life in Six Short Years. The frustrating part is that the work itself will not start in earnest until late January because Sarah first has to finish work on the other projects she’s got in process before we can get going. But the fact that I now have a real person to look forward to working with is a great way to begin the new year!
The process was delayed in 2023 for a variety of reasons. First, there was a downturn in book sales at the end of 2022 that caused Sunbury to back off their previously-announced and rather aggressive publishing schedule for 2023, a schedule that had originally put me on the editing list for the second quarter of the year. Then, following the schedule slowdown, there was a big change in personnel in the editing staff (the long-time chief editor was given an offer she couldn’t refuse from a larger company) that slowed things down further. Finally, there was a mistake in the administrative coding that was used for the revised editing schedule that put my title in the wrong queue for several months. All that got sorted out late last spring, things got back on track, albeit slowly, and I spent the last three months inching up the editing queue, finally getting to the top just before Christmas. I’m very much looking forward to getting started on the book and cover design work and the editing process, but because of the unexpected delays, I haven’t looked at the manuscript itself in nine months. So that’s the reading I’ll be doing in early January in preparation for working with my editor. Though it will be a bittersweet endeavor to read about and re-live the loss of my wonderful husband yet again, I can’t wait to get this story in front of the public!
In the meantime, the suspense continues for Weaving Penelope, the play Richard and I wrote together and workshopped in the fall of 2022. The script is under consideration in three different theatrical situations in Oregon and Washington for 2024 or 2025. Not enough confirmed detail to share just yet, but it’s all pretty exciting to think about, even if only one of the possibilities comes through. Hopefully, I’ll have more news to share on that front in my spring newsletter.
Winter in western Massachusetts this year feels more like the Pacific Northwest than New England: cool, overcast, and rainy. It was warm enough on New Year’s Eve for my neighbors to have a pleasant fire outside in their patio fire pit and for us to sit out there comfortably for a couple of hours. According to our local weather guy, we might see more seasonal weather and even our first snowstorm in the next couple of weeks, though I won’t believe it until I see it on the ground in my yard.
Feline follies continue to keep me entertained on a daily basis, as Smokey and Katniss continue to get to know each other and negotiate their places in the household. It often feels like one step forward, two steps back, but it’s never boring.
The next time I write in the early spring, I hope to have some cover art possibilities to share with you and to be well into, and perhaps even close to finished, with the editing process for the grief memoir, which I hope will be released in the summer or early fall. And we should have more information we can share about those various possibilities for Weaving Penelope. So, 2024 could bring lots of action and lots of excitement. Hope the new year is good to all of you as well.
Rebecca Daniels 