Nightmares asleep and awake

I’m nearly too stressed-out to function. I’ve got car trouble, money trouble, wife trouble, work trouble, and child trouble. Not necessarily in that order. I’ve been waking up every day at 4am, unable to get back to sleep.

Somewhere in this list of things plaguing my sub-conscious is THE BOOK. Sometime in the next two weeks the Advanced Copies will be in my hands and the wait will be over. My creation will have transformed itself from the DNA of handwritten notes into a living-breathing-three-dimensional creation with weight and volume.

Now, not to sound like a sales pitch, but you need some background to understand the nightmare I had last night. The book is to be hard-cover. It is smallish and will have a “printed case.” That means the cover art is magically and wonderfully entombed into the cover with no need for a dust jacket. The spine is sewn, making it more durable than the glued models and more prone to stay open to the spot you want it open to. The pages are extra-thick coated stock so the book will be as much a pleasure for your fingers as it is for the eye.

All of this made the book heaps more expensive to produce than a paperback printed on nasty newsprint-like paper. But nothing less than the best will do for me. Books are sacred.

So bearing in mind what the book is supposed to look like, I woke up at 3am this morning drenched in sweat, heart pounding. I had just dreamed that the Advance Copies had arrived. I eagerly tore open the Fed Ex package and there it was. Not hard cover. Wrong size. Spiral bound. Leatherette cover. Cheap yellowish paper.

My hands are still shaking.

For reassurance that I had not succumbed to disaster I proceed bleary-eyed to my computer. Still dark outside, I opened up the cover file. And there was the beautiful cover art: red blood cells swimming in a first aid kit-style red cross. And at the bottom, on the cover, plain as day, glaringly clear: a typo.

OhmyGod.

We went through months of proof reading and editing to make sure every word was right. And here, on the cover, a misspelled word. As I write this the book is at the bindery. Misspelled cover and all. OhmyGod.OhmyGod.OhmyGod.OhmyGod.

Excuse me while I go throw up….

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Ok, I’m back.

Now you can argue about whether the introduction of a book by an eminent professional in the field should be called a “Foreword” or a “Forward.” Both are commonly used, but for course “Foreword” is the technically correct choice.

But nowhere in the world is there such a thing as a “Foreward.” Until now. Yep, the eminent Endocrinologist (who will likely kill me in the near future) Dr. Kathleen Colleran has written a Foreward to my book. It says so right on the cover.

Now….where did I leave that rat poison?