Revolutions - What Happened

Episode Date: December 25, 2020

Wherein I explain what the heck happened to me.

Happy Saturnalia to you all. I'm back. I'm not dead. I'm alive and well. In fact, so alive and well that this is the update where I explain what happened to me. But just to cut to the chase, episode 10.40 is going to drop on January the 3rd, January the 3rd, 2021. I've gotten a lot of emails and messages wondering what the heck happened to me. So this is the update where I explain what the heck. happened to me. So revolutions should have been back up and running by now. I was scheduled to come back on November 4th. Unfortunately, the last couple of months have been a rolling series of disasters. When I left you all back in April, everything was going fine and I had a nice brave face on, but the last eight months, particularly the last four months, have been kind of hellish and grueling for me. So the thing is, I took a nose dive off a cliff. Going into the home stretch of finishing the Lafayette book in September, I got leveled by severe kidney stone issues that necessitated trips to the ER, then consultations and lab screens and scans and COVID tests and medication,

and on top of the physical issues, the pain and the not sleeping well and the discomfort, navigating doctors and hospitals in a foreign language is exhausting and stressful. It just is, as I came to discover. My conversational French is, I quit for navigating like daily routines, but not for serious and very detailed medical conversations while I also happened to be in a lot of pain. So this made it really hard to get any work done. I missed my first deadline to turn in the book, which was pretty depressing. So eventually they said I needed to have a surgical procedure on October 27. And when I woke up from that procedure, they told me it was unsuccessful and I would have to come back for a second procedure two weeks

later, which this was a known possibility, but still, it was an incredibly demoralizing thing to be told because I thought on October 27th that was going to be the end of it. So then I had the second procedure on November 12th. That required a whole other round of consultations and labs and scans and more COVID tests. You know, I got the needle up the nose. I had three of those in the span of four weeks because, oh, by the way, everything I'm telling you is also happening right when France went into its second lockdown. So I always tested next. negative for COVID, but this was all very taxing mentally and physically. And by that point, I was pretty well broken. The book was not written. I missed my renegotiated second deadline. I started

getting very depressed. I wasn't sleeping very well. It sucked. It was miserable. That's the truth. The second procedure was successful. But the catheter, they had to stick in me, was still in there. And unfortunately, it never sat well in my body. And I had to wait another two. two weeks of being uncomfortable before that was removed and like the less said about that procedure, the better. That happened on November 26th. That was just before Thanksgiving. It's all done medical issues. It had been two months, but I finally felt right. There was no pain. There was no discomfort. All done. But the fact remained. I have now missed two deadlines to turn in the book and the book is still not finished. So we push the publication date back from June to the end of August. That's a

thing that happened. The book will now come out in August of 2021. But the final final deadline to get the manuscript turned in was end of day, December 22nd, or it was going to be a disaster. So I had to get the book done because the third renegotiated deadline was the final deadline, the final final deadline. And if you happen to follow me on Twitter, you will notice this is when I just abruptly disappeared. Sorry about going away with no explanation. but the fact is I unplugged from everything, no social media, no nothing. I pretty much worked around the clock, but the book is done. The book is now done.

I wrote it. I finished it. I turned it in. End of day, December 22nd. I literally turned it in at the deadline. So that's what my life was. That was three days ago. That was just three days ago.

But the manuscript is finished. It has been accepted into production. All of that is behind me now. The medical stuff is behind me. The book stuff is behind me. A huge weight has been lifted off. shoulders. I feel better than I have felt in like four months. But there is still stuff in front of me, right? Like the fact that I'm a podcaster who's two months late restarting his podcast. But that too

is now coming to an end because the new episode, like I said, will drop on January 3rd. That episode is going to be a recap of part one. That will both be for any of you out there who would like to have a recap of part one because it's been a really long time just to kind of get caught up to speed. But it's also for me to get my own revolution's engine back up and running to remember what it means to make a podcast episode. My head has been in 18th and 19th century France, and it's been about writing a book, not 19th and 20th century Russia about producing weekly audio content. But it's still going to be a little herky jerky getting this thing off the ground because I'm going to do four episodes to get us moving from 1905 towards 1917. But I'm, I'm going to

I am going to have to immediately duck back out for two weeks when I get the copy edited version of the book back. And that's going to be on January 21st because that will trigger a really intense two-week final edit that will require all of my attention so the book can be as good as it possibly can. But then in mid-February, I will come back again. And this time, it'll be for good and everything will be all good. And just so you know, I'm not going to be in any rush to finish the Russian Revolution. revolutions will continue on at least through the end of 2021 and probably frankly even beyond that. So I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. That's your silver lining to all of this if you're looking for a silver lining.

The other thing, you will notice that I have been calling the book, the book, or the Lafayette book, because we changed the title. We changed the title of the book. So please use one of those men in black memory wiping gizmos to wipe the old tithe. title from your memory. I'm not even going to say the title that it used to be because it's not the title anymore. It was Citizen Lafayette. The title is now Hero of Two Worlds, the Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution. That's the title of the book, the book that is done, the book that had a manuscript that just got turned in three days ago. I am super excited for you guys to read it. I'm really, really happy

with how it turned out. But we're worried about all that later because Russia is still coming up. And that is restarting in a week and a half. That's the big happy news of the day. So I apologize for keeping everybody in the dark longer than I really should have. I hope you're all doing better than I have been doing. But since I'm doing so much better now, now I hope that you're doing as well as I'm doing right now because I'm feeling great. I just turned a book in and buried a bunch of crap that I was sick of dealing with. So anyway, I'll see you next week.