I’m sitting in a pizzeria located on the first floor of my office building, drinking a beer (Atom Bomb IPA or something like that), trying to unwind from a 12-hour workday. I’m exhausted not because I don’t like my job, but because I love it. It’s a blessing to be doing what you enjoy and getting paid for it.
Still, I have a hard time shutting down. I’m in this eatery with this IPA because I’m not done with work, but the shared office space I use is hosting a meeting of a political party. People mingling about my cube is not conducive to reviewing a SOC report (not that a pizzeria is much better, but at least I can order a beer here). For those uninitiated to the wonderful intricacies of information security, a Service and Organization Controls (SOC) report is a summary of an audit on controls of a business to protect information. It is also documented as an effective cure for insomnia.
About 14 pages into this 75 page SOC report (and about halfway into my IPA) I lose what final thread of interest I had in the SOC report. My report on the report to my client can wait a bit longer when I have fresher eyes and a reinvigorated spirit tomorrow. Besides, I have writing on my mind.
The manuscript for Leaving Darkness 
is in the copy edit phase. That means that I am paying to fix errors caused by all of the times my attention wandered in seventh grade English. I’m fine with that because working with a competent editor helps to sharpen the writing skills I have and introduce others I missed along the line.
But a manuscript is a deeply personal creation, and the thought of someone else changing it in any way is unsettling as well. I have all the confidence in the word that the result will be fantastic, nearly ready for the publisher. Then I will feel relief. This project began over a year and a half ago, and I’m ready for it to be over.
I don’t mean that in a negative way, though I am a bit burned out from the process of countless revisions. Isn’t it amazing that you can read the same sentence dozens of times and miss a glaring error that you should have caught in seventh grade? Oh, yeah, those times of gazing out the window during Mrs. Klein’s English class coming back to haunt me 40 or so years later.
If you’re waiting for the point of this blog, there is none, really. I just needed to get away from the SOC report and everything else information security that I have been concentrating on for my clients over the past 12-plus hours and muster some measure of a creative outlet (whatever that means). I can’t work on Leaving Darkness while it’s in another’s hands, and I’m not going to start a new project until this one is completed. I do have an idea of the next project – the only hint I’ll give is the working title is Desert Death.
Well, my time writing this lasted long enough to necessitate ordering a second beer. Perhaps that was my true motivation after all.
Note – The cover illustration is a concept, hence the iStock watermark. We may end up using that image, or something else.
Given it’s two days before Christmas, I thought it appropriate to share this excerpt from my upcoming work From the Loft, a collection of light horse-humor themed articles I wrote in the mid-2000s (available December 30, 2016):