Okay okay! I should’ve done this years ago, but at my doctor’s suggestion I am now leaving my phone downstairs at bedtime. I do the NYTimes crossword sitting in the living room instead of propped up by pillows. But more importantly, there will be no more grabbing the device and reading in the wee hours (sometimes for many sleepless hours).

It is good to minimize exposure to blue light and to shun extraordinarily upsetting information when I should be resting. What a shitshow the news is! Watching the collapse of the press is another and secondary shitshow to the campaigns, but one that informs all other shitshows and is really, really upsetting. (Of course you will have noticed that I still subscribe to the NYTimes).

I’ll save my thoughts about the Biden question for another post (or for no post at all), but let me just say I flip from one side of the resignation idea to the other at least ten times a day.

My PCP also suggested no books in bed, but there I push back. It feels really good to go back to my old custom of reading a novel for 30 minutes or so before turning out the light.

(How else am I gonna get through Lonesome Dove? Have you seen the size of that book?)

The proof from Amazon arrived and there is, I confess, some magic in holding my book even if the cover was screwed up (see that white band along the bottom?)

Naturally I found a mistake. Not a typo so much as an out and out mistake. Referring to a character’s horse as male and then three paragraphs later, as female. Oops!

Ken is very patient and good thing because I’ve found other words that I want deleted or changed and at this point that means fixing three versions of the manuscript.

Mostly though I’m re-reading and making the historical notes that in my Author’s Note I promised would be published on my blog. I’ll probably post it before it’s done and revise as I go. There will be tons of disclaimers — I am not a historian, my research was idiosyncratic (i.e. the opposite of thorough), etc.

But there is a lot that I can confidently assert — that the name of the family’s property on Antigua was in fact Cabbage Tree Plantation, that Eliza, contrary to my telling, got her small pox variolation in England and not in South Carolina, that her mother was reported to have malaria.

The Notes are very much at odds with the standard disclaimer THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION, but I think readers might like to know what I based on the historic record. I’m especially committed to this idea when it comes to a couple of the most egregious and sadistic torments inflicted on the enslaved (I didn’t make it up!)

You get the idea.

Have a great Sunday!