Hi There
Well, the raccoon is still in the wall. The bad smell and music obviously haven't bothered her enough to convince her to leave. Worst case scenario is that I have to start trapping them when the babies are old enough to go outside with her at night. I don't know how I'm supposed to figure out when that is happening. They leave at night when I'm asleep.
Also, let me give you a hint. Don't ever dump an entire box of mothballs down the shell of your chimney. Half my house now smells of mothballs. It's a faint odor, but then again my nose isn't very sensitive. The four women I live with ALL have a very acute sense of smell. They are less than pleased with me right now. How long does it take before mothballs go away? I know they get smaller and smaller, but I'm thinking months.
This whole raccoon thing has been a hilarious fiasco. I began by saying I was determined to prevail in this epic struggle. I am officially tipping over my King. Raccoon has won. Don't get me wrong, she ain't having fun either. The mothball smell must be horrific in that chimney. And there's the Jesus music, of course.
But let's be honest. She won.
Book News
I probably won't post any essays here for a week or so. I might drop by and say hello or something, but I need to finish up the manuscript. Whatever creative energy and time I have need to go into that.
In case you're interested, I got back all 48 essays from my editor. This includes the nine new ones that were never on the blog. I was pleased that the edits were light. Mostly a grammatical thing here and there. There are a few places where there are references that don't make sense outside of the blog context. Stuff needs tweaking. Some of the essays need a light explanatory introduction. That kind of thing.
I put them all in a folder and wrote "manuscript" on it. I don't know why. It felt good for some reason.
I've gone over almost all of it. I need to finish it up this week and start working on the introduction and that stuff. If I get this done quickly, the book should be in the stores sometime in August. It will be a trade paperback. About 15 bucks, I've been told.
There will be a link here to a place where you can buy the book. Not Amazon.com. I think I'll link to a local bookstore that I love. Back before we had our own church building, I used to do a lot of writing there in the store. I still write there from time to time. The woman who runs this store is a old friend, and she says she will stock a lot of copies and ship them. I like the idea of letting an independent bookstore get the business. That seems right and good to me.
She promises she will be able to ship them every bit as quickly as Amazon.com does.
Anyway, it will all be over soon, and I'll be able to get back into the groove of writing seriously and posting here. It's weird, all this book business has made it hard to post essays at Real Live Preacher. I'm not putting out material at the pace I was a year ago. There's just too much going on.
rlp
8:21:20 AM 
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