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MILEAGE RUN

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MILEAGE RUN

As Herbert Viola tells Tom Cruise in Risky Business, sometimes you just have to say "WTF."

I'm abbreviating, but you know what I mean. So it is that I took my longtime friend Chris Teske up on a mileage run to Honolulu He's trying to add to his already formidable number of lifetime United miles. I had a little Taking Midway research to follow up on before 2nd Pass hits my inbox.

The journey goes something like this: buy the cheapest possible economy ticket from Orange County to Honolulu. Work the upgrade. Fly to Hawaii. Spend eight hours enjoying the sights and smells of a tropical paradise. Watch the sunset. Fly home. Total elapsed time: 27 hours.

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PLAY IT LOUD

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PLAY IT LOUD

Never underestimate the value of loud music.

My stereo system went down a couple years ago. I didn't know where to go to get it fixed. So my turntable and receivers and speakers sat silent in a corner of my office below the framed Bruce Springsteen "Night for the Vietnam Veteran" poster. My vinyl collection on the bottom shelf of the bookcase remained unplayed. I went in and out of my office each day, consumed by one creative writing demand or another, until I slowly forgot I'd ever ended my work day with Side One of something extremely loud with lyrics that touched my soul.

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STARTING OVER

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STARTING OVER

I texted a friend in the middle of the fires last week. Checking in to see if everything was ok. That's something of a courtesy around here. We're all subject to wildfires, with the Santa Ana winds, smoke-filled skies, and the nuisance ash that covers cars and windshields. I live in the shadow of Saddleback Mountain, which was denuded by flames back in September. The vegetation is completely gone. Ever since, all that bare soil gets whipped up when the Santa Anas blow, dropping a fine layer of grit on my backyard. I've power washed it and bought a big industrial broom to sweep it all up, but no sooner do I clean it all up than a new layer of wind deposits more silt. It's maddening.

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POD

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POD

I'm starting a podcast. It's time. Bloomberg is reporting this morning that "the business of history is booming," which is a far cry from a recent comment by a prominent publisher that "non-fiction is dead." It's also been noted that academic history is being replaced by a trend towards popular history, in which I may have played a small role. Now it's time to capitalize. Cool but scary.

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THE GIFT

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THE GIFT

The Queen is back in her castle. All is right in the world.

Thanks for the warm wishes last week. The community that has sprung forth from this blog is notable for its kindness, for which I am grateful. It's also nice to see some familiar names that followed this space as far back as the Tour de France days still checking in. Say what you will about social media and the internet, but I lucked out with this readership.

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Comfort and Joy and Crisis

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Comfort and Joy and Crisis

Got a new book deal last week. It's equal parts running and history, which is all I can say right now. This is the first time in my career I've combined my two passions. I'm very excited. As I've traveled deeper into my career, I'm happy to be taking on projects that really test my creativity and storytelling. This is one of those books. Frankly, I thought Taking Paris was a challenge. Then Berlin and London. Taking Midway was so over-the-top demanding there were days I would sit here at the writing desk and wonder how in the world I was going to pull all the disparate threads together. I'm really excited to share it with all of you when it hits stores in May.

DO-OVERS

DO-OVERS

I'm doing First Pass edits on Taking Midway. I've written about this step in the publishing process before. The pages arrived a week ago in PDF form, typeset and paginated to look the way they will in print. My job is to proof for corrections, not rewrite the book. This massaging is my favorite part of the process because I also use it to correct clunky sentences and word repetitions. "Echo" is the copy editor's term for a word used too many times. With Midway, I used the description "mighty" sixteen times. After a while even a casual reader will get the feeling I've been lazy so those have to be corrected. I'm down to two mighties now. I took utter delight in substituting "Brobdignagian" for one of them. Editing can be fun.

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CHRISTMAS

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CHRISTMAS

The lights are hung. Mantel decorated. Tree standing tall next to the piano, covered in ornaments, listing ever so slightly. Alexa playing Christmas music. Today, I'm going to buy a small tree for the courtyard and decorate it with the ceramic C9 lights I picked up at Lowe's. I couldn't believe they still had Christmas lights for sale after Thanksgiving.

We're not doing a card this year. Actually, we stopped sending cards once the boys grew up. I used to write a Christmas letter, believing that because I'm an author my Christmas letters were somehow less annoying than the rest of the world's. I keep them all in a file. Went back to have a look at them not so long ago. They are a snapshot of what was going on in our lives each of those years.