Where Have I Been? Well, preparing to publish, and more...

My goodness how time flies! This interlude is disgraceful for a blogger -- more than three weeks. But I have lots of excuses and reasons:

• I have been singing my heart out -- I am a member of A Cappella Pops, an ensemble of about 35 adults, or at least 35 people who are supposed to act like adults. But this is our big season - Christmas. We recently packed them in at Longwood Gardens, the magnificent horticultural gardens outside of Philadelphia. But, like Toastmastering, good singing requires practice, and we would not have packed them in if we had not polished our sound. That requires many nights of practice.
• Toastmasters -- My club in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, had a Christmas meeting that had a great concept, which was a celebrity roast of Santa Claus. A police officer who tagged Santa for breaking and entering, a union representative for disgruntled elves, and Mrs. Claus all lambasted the jolly old elf. Oh, guess who played Santa? That was fun. A fellow member lent me a really great suit, and it gave me a chance to improvise. I did not hear the speeches in advance, so my rebuttal was off the cuff. As I wrote in my article for Toastmaster magazine, extemporaneous speaking is a great skill for most occasions, but you need to practice.
• But mostly I was preparing my book -- I found a great editor named Karen McConlogue who tuned into what I was trying to accomplish. I now have a printing company who will turn the book out once I give them the pdf's. Now all I need is a designer to create those said pdf's, and I met a lot of terrific ones. I should make a choice any day now. The next step is creating my speaking/book-selling website, my cyberstream storefront. Today I met with my photographer. Next is my web designer.

So no wonder I can't find the time to blog. As it is, I'm doing this at the end of a long day at the office (yes, I have a full time job as director of marketing communications for a Fortune 1000 company). And I must still buy my wife's Christmas gift (shh, don't tell her), and she is preparing a traditional Italian seven-fish dinner for Christmas eve, tomorrow night. See my daughter's blog for an update on that!
So this blogging stuff is a lot harder than it looks. The time commitment is tough, but that's not excuse, as I really owe it to you to get it done in a somewhat timely manner. So forgive me for now, and I hope that all will be forgiven when you buy my book in early 2009 (E.T.A: early- to mid-Feburary).