Howdy, folks.

It’s hard to believe it’s been only three months since my last update. Feels like a year. I hope everyone is keeping safe and sane as best they can as we weather this viral storm.

Today, I returned the revised manuscript for BoAT to my editor at Inkshares. I do hope that with two rounds of developmental edits now complete, the end is in sight, but we will see.

Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary, if you can believe it, since I got the word that Inkshares would publish this tome. Whether you work with a publisher large or small, it can routinely take 18-24 months to get a book out the door.

With Inkshares, I had hoped to shorten that cycle to 12-18 months. But thanks to social-distancing measures, it’s hard to say when we might have a launch date for BoAT. Bricks-and-mortar bookstores, in addition to online sales, are an important part of Inkshares’ marketing strategy. The team doesn’t want to launch any title at a disadvantage. Neither do I.

So, stay tuned.

As some of you know, since my last update, I have had a cancer diagnosis – metastatic melanoma.

I have had two surgeries to remove all the lymph nodes under my left arm. In mid-May, I will begin targeted gene therapy – a year of fiendishly expensive meds that have a good chance of completely and permanently eradicating the cancer.

By some morbid twist of fate, a half dozen friends, neighbours, and former colleagues have also had cancer diagnoses in recent months.

This of course puts a whole different flavor on living in the time of a pandemic. It emphasizes how much the small victories matter. How much a positive attitude matters. And how important it is to occupy yourself in productive ways.

Thank you all again for your patience and support. Stay safe and keep reading!

Cheers

Leo

STEVE HERMANOS APRIL BASEBALL UPDATE

GOING, GOING, GONE! The final draft of the time-travel baseball novel has been submitted. We are looking to set a publication schedule by the end of this month.

BASEBALL FANATICS, I would LOVE to have an electronic edition of the novel available as soon as possible, to bring many fun hours of this rollicking baseball story to you. It’s especially timely right now, when there are no new games to watch. 

BASEBALL FANATICS, I urge you to grab a baseball (even a tennis ball) and toss it with a friend, or against a wall. We don’t have to get our kicks from watching other people play the game we love, and then whine about not being able to watch. Even for one minute a day, play it!

CONTACTO! (as we used to encourage our teammates stepping up to bat on the baseball fields of NYC): I’m getting some good baseball traction on Instagram, listed under my name. Feel free to email me at stevehermanos@yahoo.com. I check Facebook every week or so.

THANKS AGAIN to everyone who participated in the successful crowdfunding campaign for GOING, GOING, GONE! Even more than you are, I’m looking forward to holding the book in my hands!

Your baseball-loving friends can pre-order GOING, GOING, GONE! at Inkshares.com

Swing For The Fences!

Steve

Whoa. I don’t really know what to say about everything. Just whoa. This world.

I wanted to let you know I got another letter from my editor. She loved the last draft but there’s still some work to do. I’ll be making a lot of my characters’ direct internal dialogue and making it indirect, and further improving the contemporary story’s setting and relationships. The good news is-- I’m working with the previous manuscript! I’m not rewriting from scratch! This will be an actual new draft, not a total reworking, and that feels AMAZING. We are getting SO CLOSE.

I’ve also been working hard on my WV punk book for WVU Press, which has an official signed contract! Yay!

I hope you are all staying home, staying safe, and staying kind. Please reach out to me if you need some human contact. 
I love you,
Becca

Dear Readers:

Thanks to you and your support for our project over these past years, we are now so close to sharing  A Friend for Otter with you that we can almost taste it! (Stories taste better than you might expect, actually.)

We have very recently completed a painstaking line-by-line edit of the entire manuscript, and although we want to be modest, we love it! Now we have sent the manuscript out to a diverse group of advance readers to get their feedback on every aspect of the story, from the occasional type (although we hope we’ve gotten them all) to the insight and perspective that can be had only from people who have not spent years steeped in these characters and their stories. Now we must eagerly await that feedback, which is the final step before publication. We are very grateful to our advance readers, and we hope their input will help us further refine Otter’s story before we deliver it to you.

Otter is not the only kid in our lives, and a lot has happened in the Medlong-McCarthy family in the years since we began telling this story. All of us are a little older (although we can’t claim to be any wiser), Jesse is still trying to figure out how to make time for projects like this while working and helping to homeschool five kids, and Sylvia now answers to Ván (their middle name). In other words, life has gone on without regard to our progress on this project. And we expect it to keep going on afterward, even as we close this chapter on our work with Otter.

This process has taken us about five years, which is a lot longer than we expected. But you have stood by us and supported us at every step of the way. So once again, from the bottom of our hearts and inkwells, thank you for all of your patience, encouragement, and support as we have worked to make sure Otter’s story is the best we could craft. 

Happy reading!

Jesse and Ván (Sylvia) Medlong