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Life in the Mud LaneOctober 28, 2008 Life is what happens when you're busy making a living? Yeow. Who knows where the time goes, but I can practically see it flying by, with me strap-hanging on the side. Let's see. In no particular order . . . HorsesI've been helping my friend Elaine look after her horses (four Friesians, including one suckling filly, and Howie the herd leader, who's a Thoroughbred) while she recovers from knee surgery. This involves a midday break several days a week to feed lunch, do stalls, pick paddocks, and make up grain. Travvy loves it because he gets to play with Tillo the German shepherd. Mostly they're great together, but Saturday they committed the big no-no: chasing horses in the pasture. Tillo was confined to the house and Trav to a stall. I've decided to teach Travvy that he doesn't come into any pasture under any circumstances. Sunday's big adventure involved the water trough, a green muck bucket that's accessible both to Janka and baby Antje in their pasture and to Howie, Manoog, and Rieke in theirs. Usually when I show up for lunch duty the trough is empty or close to it. For two or three days, though, it was full almost to the brim. Hmm, I thought, this is a little strange, but I guessed Michael, Elaine's husband, was topping it off when he fed in the morning. By day two, there was a discernible skim of dust and pollen on the water surface. This was getting stranger. There's an automatic waterer in good working order right next to the trough, so I wasn't worried about the horses getting dehydrated. Sunday I mentioned this to Michael. No, he hadn't been filling the trough, because it was already full when he went out to the barn in the morning. OK, this was beyond strange. I dumped about half the water from the trough and spied at the bottom what looked like a piece of rope. I grabbed hold and lifted; what came up was a very drowned rat. I shut Travvy and Tillo in the barn so they wouldn't see me catapulting the rat into the woods with the help of a pitchfork, then scrubbed the trough and filled it with clean water. By the time I left the horses had drank a full third of it. MudThree cartons of The Mud of the Place arrived from Lightning Source last Tuesday: Mud is on Amazon.com, it's available from Ingram, and the local newspapers have their review copies. What's holding things up is "the Mudsite," www.themudoftheplace.com. The copy is written and uploaded, it looks great, it's almost ready to go live -- but there's a glitch. The glitch is that some of the commas in the copy disappear in the uploading, and the result is sloppily punctuated text that looks as though the proofreader was asleep at the keyboard. There's no apparent pattern to which commas survive and which go AWOL. The universe is probably laughing its head off: the book launch is being delayed because the copyeditor author can't control her commas. Well, for about 10 years now the book has been trying to teach me to "let go and let Mud" and bit by bit it's been prying control from my anxious little hands, so what's another lesson? Here's your book; what's your hurry? The commercial publishing pattern is big whoop-de-do book launch followed by (in most cases) nearly dead silence and imminent remaindering (if not outright pulping). No matter how deeply I loathe this pattern, it's still embedded in my authorial mind as the way things ought to be. The way things really ought to be is "Where there's a Mud, there's a way," and there really is, beyond doubt, a Mud. The Tisbury Printer just called to say that most of my print stuff is ready: cover flats, author and dog photos, and postcards with the book cover on one side and promo info on the other. The "read Mud?" bumper stickers should be in by the end of the week. Progress is being made. Now, Universe -- about those commas . . .
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