I prepare to buckle down and finish up a book.

After a nice, relaxing weekend at Howard Mesa, I’m back home looking at a calendar that has a deadline on it. It’s not a “drop-dead” deadline, but it is one tied in with additional financial reward. In other words, if I meet it, I’ll see more money than if I don’t. Since I’m on the downhill slide of a less-than-perfect writing year, having a few extra bucks between royalty statements would be very nice.

What makes this deadline extra important is the stuff scheduled right after it: a bunch of extremely lucrative flights for Flying M Air. In fact, I have every single weekend in October booked for an event. I also have three photo flights in northern Arizona — one of which will last 6 days.

So if I don’t finish the book on time, I won’t have much time to work on it after the deadline.

Why am I telling you this? Just so that you understand when the number of new posts drops significantly over the next two weeks. Although I’m hoping to continue to post at least one short entry a day, I might not have time to. I work best in the morning and may have to give up my coffee/blogging time to work on the book.

And, if you haven’t figured it out yet, the book in question is my Mac OS X book revision, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide. I’m about 1/3 finished with the 744-page book. I’m extremely pleased with what I’ve done so far, but I’ll be even more pleased when it’s done.

Wish me luck!