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News This page contains news about progress on the book. I'll update it as things develop. News items appear most-recent-first. The list below is a table of contents for the page. Check here often.
Notes added 2-11-04 I've begun the process of organizing my chapter notes (and other notes) on the site. So far, I have chapter notes through Chapter 9, plus a first entry under Other Notes (on birds known in Roman Italy). More to come. See Notes. Meanwhile, I've completed Chapters 2 - 7 and the Prelude in their final form. I'm holding onto Chapter 1 for a while--as the first chapter, it's special and deserves extra care. Work on finalizing chapters proceeds. (Note: The chapters available under Samples are not in final form--in fact, there have been significant changes to them. Still, the samples give a good taste of what the book is like.) Slowed down 1-11-04 Although I have indeed completed the second draft, I've met with problems and distractions from November until now. First, I had pneumonia, lasting more than two months (I'm still on oxygen at night)That slowed me considerably as I wasn't strong enough to work more than a couple of hours a day. I've also been gearing up for a slight detour. I need to make some money (and first novels don't typically make much, even ones that are actually finished), so I've been working on plans to do another computer book. I've published two books on computer programming, in 1991 and 1999. Computer books often do make money, sometimes lots of it. So I spent considerable time during November and December working up a proposal for a book on scripting your computer with the VBScript programming language. Meanwhile, my computer book agent has come up with another possibility, a book for beginning programmers using Visual Basic. Those potential projects have eaten considerably into what time my illness gave me. Nevertheless, I do continue to make progress on the final draft of the novel--just slow. I have five chapters in the "done-done-done" category, with some 12 to go. I will continue to work away at it. Completion date is still a big unknown, since if I do get a contract to write a computer book, that will necessarily put the novel on the back burner for several months. But I will continue to work on it even if on the back burner. What does this mean for the second, follow-on book, which takes Scipio to Spain and beyond? I'm still working on that in my head (though I already have several chapters on paper) and will proceed with it as soon as I possibly can. Please hang on. And by the way, the final draft of the early chapters is much better than what you've seen on this site. I'll try to get some of that on the site soon. I completed the "first draft" of the novel a couple of months ago. I've been working on the "second draft" since then--clean-up, improving structure and characters, etc.--and as of now have only three chapters to go in the second pass. Once that's done, I'll do a final draft--really final--in which I have one last chance to make changes. That will be a fairly quick pass, so I expect to have it done by the end of this year. At that point, I'll start seeking a publisher with all my attention. (But see First Sales Effort below.) For the computer books I've written, I work with a wonderful agent named Claudette Moore. While she doesn't handle fiction, she may have a connection or two in that area. I recently sent her a couple of chapters and a synopsis of the book to try shopping around. That could take some time, and it could come to nothing (very easily), but the publication effort has at least begun. Stay tuned. Back to Top
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