The Past Few Weeks....

The last couple weeks of December were kind of hectic, and it continues. I was working on preparing my manuscript about homicides in the Arizona Territory for submission to McFarland & Co. - editing, collecting photos, getting permissions, etc. I wanted to turn it in on December 31st. I was wrapping it up pretty well, when McFarland sent me the page proofs for The Red Lights Districts of Tucson, 1870 - 1918 with instructions to edit the pages and have an index made. I was given a deadline of January 11th. Suddenly, I had to major projects to work on that were do within twelve days of one another. Worse yet, as I began to edit the proofs, and Louisa Emmons, who does my indexes, we began to find numerous errors. Louisa was able to finish the index by January 1st, but I knew there were a number of other errors I had not caught. So, I contacted Jacqui Scherrer, who edited the manuscript for Red Lights before it was ever sent to McFarland, and she is going over it once more. Meanwhile, I had to contact McFarland, and push back the delivery date for my Homicides manuscript until after the due date for Red Lights. Yeah... hectic.

In other news, Janelle Molony, alias The Hottie Historian (and also quite the author), agreed to pen the introduction to The Red Light Districts of Tucson. It would be worth buying the book just to read what she wrote. An amazing talent with the written word. We may be sharing a table at The Tombstone Book Festival on Friday, March 13th. As the year was closing out, I did some work on my biography of the Reverend David Roberts, my great grandfather who came to the Arizona Territory in 1893, and remained here until his death. I do not know if anyone will want to read this, but I wanted to write it. I also penned stories about Maggie Dean, Annie Kane, and Alice Caine, some women of the Arizona Territory who had tragic stories. Of course tragic. As Cormac McCarthy famously said, "The core of literature is the idea of tragedy... You don't really learn much from the good things that happen to you." Lastly, I may have found a subject for my next book. Louis V. Eytinge (pictured here) was a sociopathic con man, who killed a man named John Leicht in the Arizona Territory in the 1907. I thought it was going to be a simple short story of a murder and punishment, until I started reading more about the man. He was quite the character...     You will have to read the book.