I'm back!

Okay... first, let me apologize to those of you who do follow this blog for my extreme absence these last few months.  I'll give you all a life update, by way of explanation.

As many of you know, I've been going through some troubles with my eyesight for nearly two years now.  In fact, that is one of the major factors that spurred me on to self-publish the Gatehouse books as soon as possible.  My intent was to spend most of 2011 working on revisions to The Door to Justice for a fall 2011 release.  But my eyesight continued to deteriorate, and I spent the last half of 2011 almost completely blind in one eye.  With my normal day job having me looking at computer screens for 8 to 10 hours a day, I started to get ferocious headaches that pretty much kept me from wanting to see a monitor at all in my free time.  Reading became a chore, editing became an even bigger chore, and even updating this blog and my Facebook pages fell to the wayside.  And so, I have been unable to keep the promises I made about getting book 2 released in the fall.

However, there's good news to be had!  Just before the end of the year, I had surgery to replace the natural lens in my left eye with an intra-ocular lens implant.  As of my last appointment, I've recovered around 80% of the vision in that eye!  That's all that I will ever recover, barring some medical breakthrough that allows doctors to regenerate the retina, but even that is more than I could have hoped for!

A second setback was a hard drive failure.  Not only on my previous laptop, but on my backup hard drive as well!  The only version of The Door to Justice that I had available to me was in PDF format.  Reformatting the document for revisions (copy and paste, painstakingly remove extra carriage returns, methodically go through and fix special formatting for things like italics) was a big undertaking, particularly with my vision problems.  That task, however, is now complete, and I have an outline in front of me of revisions that need to be made to the completely reformatted book.

So, none of this is an excuse for my absence or my failure to get all this done in a timely manner, but it's an explanation.  And I can say that now, with the revision plan in hand and a properly formatted document to work with, and better vision than I've had in 2 years, I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!  I'm not going to commit to time frames, but the revisions themselves shouldn't take that long, and then a few rounds of professional editing, and I'll have book 2 out the door.  So, friends and neighbors and Gatehouse fans, bear with me for a while longer, and you'll finally get to see where the story goes next!  I promise!