First, I would like to proffer an apology for not posting on Friday. My birthday was Thursday and my family surprised me by flying in from England to see me and I needed to properly show them about.

On to business:
I still haven't gotten a response from Transcontinental so far as the hold-up with the first set of volumes. I have a number of outstanding queries with them at the moment that haven't been answered. Transcontinental has been fantastic throughout the process so far, so I can only presume that they're being swamped and that explains why they haven't been able to respond as promptly as normal. They have a national holiday today and tomorrow we're supposed to have a conference call and, rather than make any guarantees, I'll report back on what comes of that.

On positive business news, we were speaking to Windhaven and it seems that the proofing and typesetting department have gotten through the set-up and teething of the process, have ramped production up to about full-speed, and we now have dates for when each set of books will be ready for printing.
The second set of books--volumes 8-23, 16 volumes--will be ready as of the start of September.
The third set of books--volumes 24-35, 12 volumes--will be ready as of the start of December.
The fourth and final set of books--volumes 36-47--will be ready as of the start of March, 2009.

http://heinleinprize.com/rah/thisibelieve.htm
We found a disc with a copy of Heinlein reading "This I Believe" for Edward R. Murrow. It's now hosted on the Heinlein Prize website, just click on the link to hear the master read the piece.

I'm going to try to include one tangential piece at the end of each of these, some interesting aspect of Heinleinia or something interesting that people have done with Heinlein's works. I think it'd be a simple, yet pleasant, addition.

I'm going to do a largish post on Friday--when I believe I'll have a plethora of news-worthy offerings and a few neat pictures to share.

One note I was told about today: The original TC print run got started with the wrong paper used for the tip-in/serialization page and so that may cause a slight delay, however we may be able to circumvent that by shipping the first sets to customers as soon as they're ready rather than waiting for the full run to complete. I'll know one way or another n the next couple days, in any event.

All is going as planned.


I wish I had a cat to stroke while I said that. The following will have to do.

Today has been consumed by accounting.

Also the post office. Friendly advice: Don't go to the post office around April 15th if you don't have to.

Everything is still on track for the May 14th date. I'll try and get together a rough and tentative time table for the rest of the project in the next week or two.

*DRUMROLL*

*ahem*


We have a ship date--the day on which the printer will have the books ready--of May 14th--the day before my birthday, oddly. I will check with Apogee and see what sort of average turnaround time we're looking at from there to get the books into people's hands.

Irony tastes strangely like Velveeta

So I had to go out of town for part of last week and wound up without internet access come Friday. I believe this is at least a little ironic. But I'll steel myself against such ferrous and base assaults on my precious nobility and boron 'til the bitter end.

We've been shifted to a new contact point at Transcontinental--which, I must admit, was not a foreseen event, but we seem to have gotten through the transition hurdles and they have all of our files and corrected files, genotypes, phenotypes, hair and blood samples, and I'm expecting to hear back in the next day as to what the ship date will be on the first set of books. I will post that information here as well as emailing it to everybody in a test of the mailing list.

I was going to make an April Fool's post telling you we'd found the Nehemiah Scudder stories, but I realized I'd be mailbomb angry after having something like that pulled. So consider yourselves almost fooled.

I'm going to move substantive posts to Fridays 'til I miss another day. EIther way, I'm not expecting terribly event-heavy posts most weeks for a while.