{"id":207,"date":"2006-08-22T02:20:55","date_gmt":"2006-08-22T09:20:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/?p=207"},"modified":"2006-08-22T02:23:24","modified_gmt":"2006-08-22T09:23:24","slug":"fighting-through-the-dog-days-of-summer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/fighting-through-the-dog-days-of-summer\/","title":{"rendered":"Fighting through the dog days of summer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image206\" alt=\"dog_days.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/08\/dog_days.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Nature demands compensation,&#8221; Robert E. Howard told H. P. Lovecraft in December of 1932, and his sentiment rings just as true now as then. This centennial year has been a blast for me so far, with two Howard-themed trips to Texas, a weird fiction one to San Francisco, and at least two more to make before I&#8217;m through. Howard Days seriously rocked, lots of new Howard publications are appearing, this blog has finally turned into a going concern, <em>The Cimmerian<\/em> website is being revamped, and most importantly the monthly schedule of <em>The Cimmerian<\/em> has been, against all odds, largely a success.<\/p>\n<p>But even so, nature demands compensation, and my bill came due in July. Throughout June I was feeling the onset of centennial exhaustion, with the telling moment occurring in Cross Plains when I stepped into the gift shop and pulled out the June <em>Cimmerians<\/em> I had feverishly worked on getting ready in time for the weekend &#8212; only to discover that I had put <em>green<\/em> covers on all of the Limiteds instead of the usual gold! In careless moments I have made such mistakes before, but usually they are caught and corrected forthwith. Never have I slept-walked through the construction of a hundred issues with incorrect covers without ever gleaning my colossal blunder! I had to destroy all of the June Limiteds I brought down to Cross Plains and remake them again when I returned to LA. That should have been a hint that the summer was going to be a rough one, but there was no time for worrying &#8212; before I knew it, July was upon me.<\/p>\n<p>In that month, I had the pleasure of hosting <em>TC<\/em> reader Al Lane while he visited Los Angeles, as well as finally finishing up and releasing a project for REHupa that I had been working on for five years: a complete digital archive of the a.p.a., all 30,000+ pages of its thirty-four-year output, scanned, cleaned, and assembled into hyperlinked PDFs for the membership. I was glad to finally get that done with, but combined with my day job and other assorted duties (not to mention the record-breaking heat that had Los Angeles in a stupor), that left precious little time for anything else. With August closing in, I realized that the July issue wasn&#8217;t going to get out by the end of the month.<\/p>\n<p>So, rather than skip an issue and break the monthly cycle, I decided to finish the July ish as soon as I could, hold onto it while doing the August ish, then send them both out together. This would save on shipping for subscribers &#8212; and more importantly, it would save the extra few days it would have taken to pack and ship out two separate batches of parcels. With a monthly schedule I find myself increasingly forced to save minutes wherever I can; it&#8217;s a primal fight that offers no mercy.<\/p>\n<p>Therefore, for all the readers wondering what the hell happened to their summer <em>Cimmerian<\/em> reading, know that the usual hermetically sealed packages are just about ready to rocket towards your respective abodes. Sometime next week I expect you to have <em>two<\/em> mighty issues of <em>The Cimmerian<\/em> in your grubby little hands, and we&#8217;ll be well positioned to make it through the rest of the year and complete the 2006 centennial series. I always thought it would be a miracle if I didn&#8217;t have to skip a few issues along the way, but although I&#8217;m still wary of burnout settling in, I do believe there is a light at the end of this particular tunnel.<\/p>\n<p>Stay tuned to this blog for breakdowns and excerpts from the July and August issues, which are both jam-packed with things you are bound to find interesting. And thanks for being so patient and supportive throughout the summer.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image202\" alt=\"cimmerian_deluxe_spread.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/08\/cimmerian_deluxe_spread.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Nature demands compensation,&#8221; Robert E. Howard told H. P. Lovecraft in December of 1932, and his sentiment rings just as true now as then. This centennial year has been a blast for me so far, with two Howard-themed trips to Texas, a weird fiction one to San Francisco, and at least two more to make [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-cimmerian-print-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/leogrin.com\/CimmerianBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}