Early Christmas

My email brought me big news from Royal Fireworks Press today. My Florence Nightingale biography, The Lady With the Diagrams, is coming out much sooner than I expected. MUCH sooner. End-of-next-month sooner. There had been some rumblings about it a few days ago, when the publicist said they wanted to market it together with The Probability Pen Pals, which came out in September. But I had no idea they were going to accelerate production this much.



But that wasn't all. I also got a contract for the entire Mathematical Lives series, even though I've only written two of the planned six books so far. I'm planning to start the third volume, David Blackwell and the Deadliest Duel, after the Christmas mayhem is over. It's been more than thirty years since I've gotten a contract for something I haven't written yet. Not since my You Can't Do That On Television days.

My writing is in a really good place right now, and it's not a place I ever expected to be. True, at one time I did have notions of creating a James Burke-style documentary series one day, but that idea died an ugly death not long into my marriage. Since then, I'd always considered myself a fiction writer. But what I'm doing now is working, both professionally and creatively. I'm more productive right now than I've ever been while holding down a day job, and I like what I'm doing.

So yeah, this is where I'm going to be for a while. Probably not forever, since life is always full of changes, but I've got to follow this path and see how far it goes.

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