Publisher:
Hayden BooksWhen I'd written the first edition, though, I had no idea that a second edition would be called for, and since it was my first book ever, I hadn't thought about how to make it easy to update. Bad move, and the update took a lot of work, much more than than it could have if I'd designed the book with updates in mind.
For some reason, I didn't turn in any of the chapters while I was working, instead holding on to them so I could run some Nisus Writer macros over the entire book at the last minute, before I had to convert to Word format for submission to Hayden. This had the unfortunate effect of making my deadline, shall we say, a bit tight. Tonya and I were married on June 15th, 1991, and I remember the deadline well when thinking back on the process of writing the second edition. It was June 14th, and I was cranking all day. The day turned to night, and gradually, the night turned back to day, just as I was finishing. I sent all the files to my editor via email at 5 AM, fell into bed, and woke up at 10 AM to spend our anniversary day relaxing with Tonya.
Unfortunately, it wasn't over. Several weeks later, when Peter Lewis, author of numerous Macintosh Internet programs, was visiting, my editor woke me up one morning with a phone call (easy to do since Indianapolis, where Hayden is located, is either two or three hours ahead of where we are on the west coast, depending on Daylight Savings Time, which Indianapolis doesn't honor). He asked, "Are you sitting down?" I replied, somewhat crossly, "No, I'm lying down, because I haven't even gotten out of bed yet." He said, "Good, that's even better, because we have to cut 150 pages from the book right now because it's too large to be bound the way we can afford to bind it."
I gasped. I knew the book was long, but I thought Hayden wanted it long, so I hadn't attempted to mince words. But 150 pages! Through the course of the morning and several phone calls, my editor and I gradually worked out a plan for deleting one appendix and shortening several others to save our 150 pages. Lists of Internet providers, Usenet newsgroups, and Internet resources had bulked up the first edition, and they'd only increased in size for the second edition. It worked out well in the end, but if I'd been prone to heart attacks...
Needless to say, Peter thought it was tremendously amusing.