And Now Back to Our Regular Programming ...

An apricot contains just sixteen calories. If you can find them fresh off a tree, they make a wonderful snack.

I have had to take a short break--my first in four years of blogging--from the daily and weekly business of writing for Robin Chapman News, in order to finish my fourth book--my first fully researched, indexed and annotated book of regional history. The manuscript for California Apricots: The Lost Orchards of Silicon Valley goes to the publisher next week. After that, I will be able to begin posting again.

Apricots from the July 2012 harvest in California's Central Valley.

The book, a forty thousand word project with a central insert of thirty color images, is scheduled to be published in late May. I discovered, in working on it, that it was next to impossible to talk about, think about, and write about anything else during the creative process. It turns out that doing a good job about a project like this--at least for me--requires one to become somewhat obsessed by it. 

So it made writing general interest articles almost impossible. Also, I wanted to save the "good stuff" of the book, for the book itself.

I realize I will have to captivate anew my general interest readers. And I hope to work on that next. In the meantime, those of you who are on Facebook, please check out the Facebook page for my book, which can be found at:

California Apricots: The Lost Orchards of Silicon Valley Facebook Page

I would be delighted if you would "Like" the page and "Friend" it! In the coming weeks I may be able to create a podcast of small segments of the book, which I hope will interest you until the book becomes available. When it is, there will be a link on this page to the History Press website that will allow you to order it and have it sent directly to you.

Thanks for tolerating the "blogging gap." I hope you will find the upcoming book as much fun to read as it was for me to write. (Well, it was an awful lot of work--but that is "fun" to me.)

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