Grand Sable Dunes,deer, and book update

Last weekend I took time out from working on the new book to hike in the Grand Sable Dunes. It was very windy with sustained winds 25 mph and gusts up to 40 mph. Yes, I got sand blasted. But temperatures were in the 40s and it was sunny, so I headed out. There is enough snow melt now and the road commission has done some road plowing, so I was able to drive all the way to Sable Lake. I wanted to get an hour of hiking in, so I wondered around the ridges and south facing slopes where the snow has melted. In the dune valleys the snow was still deep in places, so I stayed away from these areas since I was just wearing my hiking boots.

Sable Lake still was covered with ice. Given how warm it has been all week, I will have to check now to see if the ice has melted and dropped.

Looking north toward Lake Superior.....

This double dune is where my kids began developing their ski jumping skills.

The deer are back in my front yard.

Adobe now has monthly subscription plans for InDesign, so I decided to use this software to lay the book out for publishing/printing. The previous books I used a shareware software, Scribus, which worked fine. However, my printer prefers InDesign files, so I decided to get up the learning curve. I have received review copies back from several, but not all of my reviewers. Yesterday I met with my main editor/proofreader. We went through the manuscript page by page, which took almost three hours. Over the last few days I have been editing the review draft (the Word version) incorporating the changes from one of my two geology editors. He did a very thorough job reviewing the geology information and photographs. It took me two 12 hour days to incorporate his changes. Today I will add the edits from my proofreader. To get up the Adobe learning curve, I have successfully transferred the beginning pages, introduction, and chapter 1 into InDesign. I will wait to transfer the remaining chapters until after I have received all the review drafts back, which will probably take another couple of weeks. I am hoping to send the files to the printer by the end of April. If I meet that goal, the shipment of printed books will happen by June. So far the feedback from the reviewers has exceeded my expectations. Whew! This has been a project!