I've been gone for a couple of days because events suddenly caught up with me.  I felt as if I haven't moved from this keyboard in 36 hours, but nothing I did translated into a blog post.  Sorry. So what have I been doing?

Well, first of all came the launch of Left by the Side of the Road.  Contrary to popular opinion around here, a book does not just magically appear. There were announcements to send out, websites to update, new Tweets to schedule on Twitter, Amazon set-up for the paperback, Smashwords revisions for the e-books, and physical copies of the books to be ordered so that I can take them with me on next month's tour of South Carolina.

Next, in the middle of a scheduled meeting with a hotel that we were considering for our next Mid-South auction, my phone rang. Now, some of you will remember that last year about this time, I was trying to negotiate a connection to the Penn Center on St. Helena Island -- the setting of my book The Road to Frogmore.  At the time, we failed to reach an agreement, and I've been a little spooked ever since.  If they didn't like the book, I thought, maybe there was something wrong with it. (That's a typical author-nightmare reaction, by the way. One rejection gets magnified out of all proportion to the other positive sales figures.)  Anyway, on the phone was the purchasing agent from the Penn Center, telling me that they had decided to carry the book in their very limited bookstore.  She needed pricing information, shipping, etc. -- all information I did not have at my fingertips.  Finalizing those arrangements took several phone calls, but all is well, now, and the books have been ordered and shipped.  The book will be seen by all those who visit the Museum and Visitors' Center there on St. Helena -- and just in time for this year's Heritage Days, which draws some 30,000 visitors. [Sign of relief!]

Next, I had to deal with another looming deadline.  Next April we are hosting the annual Tennessee Lions Convention for around 250 people, and there is already pressure from attendees and high-priced help to get the registration materials ready before the end of this month. I had a skeleton website up, and we were working on the details of meetings, meals, speakers, and entertainment.  Bu registration? Nope, we weren't ready for that.  It involves  paper registration form, but also an on-line registration option -- which in turn required a specialized new PayPal account. After tearing my hair out all day yesterday, the website AND on-line registration form are ready to go.  [Lions who have been waiting for this: Click here.]

You may also remember that a few days ago,  I was optimistically planning to get in some 22 days of writing that I was going to count toward this year's NaNoWriMo extravaganza. All I needed was 1667 words per day for three and a half weeks. The first week, I was actually a bit over quota, But this week? Uh . . .only 4,816 words for the week, just a little over half of what I planned. I'm going to try to catch up over the weekend.

With luck, I'll be back to blogging next week, with a series of posts about all the new programs that are cropping up on the internet. Among them are "Series," "Collections," and "Pre-Orders."  See you then.