All right, I am officially Too Sick To Write. That's annoying to me, because I'm finally really and truly done with Trang and ready to start on Trust, so it's the perfect time to get so sick it took me a solid two minutes to put the cap back on my pen.
But I don't want to just sit around, coughing and fouling handkerchiefs, so I think I'm going to update my proposal for the historical biography. I know I'm all, "Yay self-publishing!" these days, but the thing is about my historical biography is that it's a Serious Book. Like, a really, truly, Serious, Important-Type Book. It's not like Trang, which aspires only to be entertainment. If Trang appears to have been written by a crackpot (which you know it was), who cares? It's about aliens and space Marines, and anyone who thinks that they are actually an expert on those two topics is by definition insane. But a Serious Book about a Serious Topic I think deserves a Serious Publisher, if only so that people don't assume it's the rantings of a crackpot (which in that case, it isn't, because I'm actually quite careful to keep my nonfiction, you know, not fictional).
Since that Serious Publisher won't be a commercial house, that means an academic press. So, I need to do two things: 1. read through anything new that's been published on the topic since I gave that proposal to that agent two years ago, and 2. revise the proposal. The proposal especially needs to be revised because in it, I disparage the books produced by academic presses on this topic as totally dull and lacking appeal to most readers (which they are, but I obviously need to rephrase that sentiment so that it's less insulting to people who work for such presses). That's good order to move in as I (hopefully) recover from this stupid illness--first I read, which is not so taxing, and after a few days of that, presumably I'll feel well enough to revise.
I've had this in my head ever since I drew up the schedule on my Web site and realized that my due date on this is 2015. Given that it apparently takes two years for people to reject things these days, they'll bounce it back to me with a letter saying that it's totally awesome, they loved it to pieces, they're looking forward to reading it, and they can't publish it in early 2014, which will give me plenty of time to make that deadline publishing it on my own. In fact, I should probably quote the rejection letters on the back cover, except that I don't remember who wrote what.