I’m trying to get into better shape, not Olympian, but athletic. To that end I worked out with Natalie yesterday morning in Central Park. Natalie is a professional trainer and is in phenomenal shape. I am a professional editor and writer and in ok shape. So yeah, she kicked my butt. It was wonderful. I can challenge my intellect all day long at work, but the opportunity to see what my body can accomplish just doesn’t come up that much while talking on the phone or writing emails. An added benefit is that pushing myself physically helps me connect with some of the characters in my novel.

In other news the ARCs for The Border: Exploring the US-Mexican Divide by David J. Danelo have gone out. The book pubs in August and should, I hope, get a fair amount of attention in the run up to the election. I also received the video trailer for Red, White or Yellow: The Media and the Military at War in Iraq by Charles Jones. I am very impressed with its production quality. Once we have it set up I’ll provide a link. This should be another book that gets a lot of attention as it pubs in September. And I’m happy to announce that Band of Sisters by Kirsten Holmstedt is now available as a digital download from Daily Lit. Daily Lit offers books digitally in installments, sending you a chapter a day, so in a sense they offer a serialized way to read a book. I bumped into the president of Daily Lit, Susan Danziger, at the London Book Fair last month and had a chance to talk at length about her approach and I am definitely impressed with what she’s doing. On the other hand, we had dinner one night and discovered that neither of us should ever be allowed to navigate. We walked the same section of London for probably half an hour trying to figure out where we were. The really sad part is, we were both sober.