Are the Words It’s about time appropriate….. On May 8 the book was finally placed on several sites. (AMAZON, BARNES and NOBLE, BOOKS A MILLION, ARCHWAY (My publisher) and even Waterston’s (A British book dealer) and SAXO (Danish)

It comes in hardcover and paperback and will soon have an E-Book (Kindle) edition.  (More on that later)

My advice should you want to land a copy is to go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble.   (You can click on either name and get right to the site) This book is a print on demand book - and that is the simplest way to get it.  When I ordered my first copy it took about a day to get it to me from Amazon.  As I test I ordered from Archway and the book has yet to arrive.

The E-book issue is a bit odd.  They say it takes a couple of weeks to get the file formatted to an E-book or Kindle or iPad version.  Who’d a thunk it.

If you indeed to order it, I would appreciate a review on the site - that helps build traffic - I would love to rise above current rankings.

AMAZON Best Sellers Rank: #845,679 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

• #2,498 in Job Hunting & Career Guides
• #22,621 in Philosophy (Books)
• #32,235 in Parenting & Relationships (Books)

How in the hell I got included in Parenting and Relationships or in Job Hunting, I have no idea.  

One final comment - a good friend in Costa Rica is in the process of translating the book into Spanish.  I have worked with him over the last couple of weeks on this process.   Let me offer one example of the intricacies of translating a book.   My namesake, Jonathan Archer, came to California in 1849 by sailing “around the horn” (alrededor del cuerno) but as we talked about it and I asked some friends in Mexico - the term is not common.  One Mexican friend commented that Mexicans, when wanting to go from East to West, don’t think about sailing to the tip of South America.  So we added a description of the term (Navegando del Atlántico al Pacífico).   I am not sure when the Spanish version is coming and I am pretty sure I am not getting it translated into Danish

 At Last the Story Can Be Told - Today, I got the third set of blue lines from my publisher to review.   A blue line is a complete copy of a manuscript which the author (ME) gets to mark up.   I mention that this is the third one because even though I have probably read this manuscript a couple of hundred times,  these last three required me to nit-pick and to read what has already become very familiar with a great deal of care.  I had the constant notion in the back of my head of two images.   First, in one of the big pieces of legislation that I worked on - the actual enrolled version included the following lines in statute "Senator Moynihan, please call XXX-XXX-XXXX" (When that bill went to the printer some stray paper got scooped up and became momentarily part of the Internal Revenue Code.   But then I had a second image of two tombstones I found in an old cemetery which had typos.  I hope my images were merely author's caution and not forecasts.

There are fourth additional announcements and one clarification.   First, if the publisher keeps to the schedule all three versions (Hard Bound, Paperback and E-Book) will be on every possible book outlet (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple, Kobo) - in about a month.  I will send an email when I have been notified of the publication date.

Second, if you would like a copy of the last Blue line sent to you please send me an email and I will send you one.   I hope that if you accept this version that a) you will offer comments - either directly to me or to a site when the book comes up - and b) that you will consider buying one of the editions.  Unfortunately I do not have any control over the price.

Third, I am considering having a friend translate the book into Spanish.   There are some complications in doing that but I have had a good friend offer to do the translation.   And I know his Spanish is great because he is my tutor.

Fourth, I am moving this blog and my main website from the current one to a new one titled FIVECENTTHINKING (which is in the process of being built in Mexico).  That transition may happen by summer.  I may keep the old domain or simply supplant it.

A Clarification - one of the key issues for this book has been whether I should include pictures.   I had one good friend who is a successful author argue persuasively that I should cut the pictures to speed the process.  While I understood the advice, I chose to ignore it and include 70+ pictures and illustrations (all in B/W because color photos are a pain to print).  The picture above is one which did not make the cut.  It is from 1964 - the gent with the Ode Banjo(Left) and shades you may recognize is me - the gent in the middle is the Reverend Gary Davis - it was taken for the Sat. Evening Post but never used.  Davis was a superb blind guitar player and as a group of us were jamming on a plaza at UCLA's folk festival he came up and asked "Do you boys mind if I join in?"  You'll notice that my arms are folded over my banjo -while we had done a couple of tunes together at that time we were all listening in awe as he riffed off the chimes on campus and then improvised.

Before the book gets in final print I want to thank each of you who read this blog and chapters over the last couple of years - I have been amazed by both the comments and the patience from each of you.

Godot has arrived....In late September I did the last post for this blog.  You may have thought I had abandoned the book.   Not so.  A friend who worked in publishing suggested to me that once the manuscript is accepted there is a lag time if you are using a large publishing house.  The warning was correct.   I've spent the last few months using my skills and my patience in working through the path that my publisher (Archway - an imprint of Simon and Schuster) has established.

But this morning my concierge sent me what in the legislative business were called mark up copies. So it looks like we are near the end of getting this in print.   I will need to take some time to mark up the copy and submit my edits.   I think I am going to print the manuscript out because in this case I think I can work with it more efficiently than on a screen.   After those edits are completed I will send them in, Archway will then do their "magic" and Of Course It's True, Except for a Couple of Lies will be in print on all major platforms. (Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, etc.).  It will come in three flavors Hardbound, Soft Cover and Ebook.  But here are five things I can tell you now.

#1 Pricing of the Hardcover is beyond my control - the publisher sets the price based on page count and a couple of other factors.  Assuming that the book comes out close to the size it is now (375 pages) - the price will be $39.95.

#2 - The Soft Cover Edition - the softcover version will be $22.95.

#3 - The Ebook Edition - This is where I get to set the price.   The default price is $3.99 but it can go from $2.99 to $9.99.  I am inclined to set the price in the $5.99 range.  

#4 - Spanish Language Edition - In December I gave a speech in Mexico City at a conference on Integral Formation in the Digital World - I was able to reconnect with a college from a University where I taught and he expressed interest in me going there some time in the fall and presenting the book to a convocation.  My Spanish tutor has volunteered to translate the manuscript.    That will be published under another imprint (not sure which one) but because of my work in Mexico "Of Course It's True Except for a Couple of Lies will become Por Supuesto es Verdad, Excepto por un par de Mentiras."  I think that will be primarily released as an Ebook or Soft Cover.

#5 - Release Date and publicity - Based on my schedule and some other factors I think the book will be available on all platforms by sometime in June.  I have spoken with a couple of knowledgable people about how to increase visibility of the book which will include some unique things like the convocations at Universities where I have taught or worked.  I have also thought about some very specific events with groups where I have been involved which would offer the proceeds from all sales to that group.

The Sequel - I am mulling doing a sequel to the book which would be a historical novel, tentatively called "In Pursuit of Happiness" which would be a story about one of the inspirations of the book (my namesake Jonathan Archer - who came to California in 1849 but died soon after arriving) and his younger brother Oliver Hazard Perry Archer who stayed in New York and became a very successful entrepreneur who among other things was a part of the group which dumped Jay Gould from the Erie Railroad board in 1872.   As I was researching this book I found a lot of evidence that Jonathan and OHP were good buddies and wondered what might have happened had Jonathan lived and thrived in California.  It would be based on that set of assumptions and would be considerably shorter that OCITEFACOL.   I am convinced that despite family lore about Jonathan's motives for coming to Sacramento during the Gold Rush - his real motive was Brannonesque (Sam Brannon was a merchant who quipped the way to make money in the gold was was not to pan for gold but to sell supplies to the miners.

Thanks for your patience on this project and for (those of you who still are!) your continued interest.

 The Tragedy of the Commons, revisited

When I was in graduate school Garrett Hardin’s article called  the “Tragedy of the Commons” was required reading.  Although   the idea came originally from an article by a British     scholar   named William Forster Lloyd in 1833; Hardin     reintroduced the   idea to a modern audience.   Hardin, who   was  at the University   of Washington, had originally proposed   his revision as the   “Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons”. He   clearly was a fan of   the rule of experts.  The article can be  reduced to a single   phrase  “if you allow a common resource to   be unmanaged it  will degrade.”    

Lloyd’s article argued - "If a person puts more cattle into his own field, the amount of the subsistence which they consume is all deducted from that which was at the command, of his original stock; and if, before, there was no more than a sufficiency of pasture, he reaps no benefit from the additional cattle, what is gained in one way being lost in another. But if he puts more cattle on a common, the food which they consume forms a deduction which is shared between all the cattle, as well that of others as his own, in proportion to their number, and only a small part of it is taken from his own cattle. In an inclosed pasture, there is a point of saturation, if I may so call it, (by which, I mean a barrier depending on considerations of interest,) beyond which no prudent man will add to his stock. In a common, also, there is in like manner a point of saturation. But the position of the point in the two cases is obviously different. Were a number of adjoining pastures, already fully stocked, to be at once thrown open, and converted into one vast common, the position of the point of saturation would immediately be changed”.^[. 

Hardin was more concise - “Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.” Both authors are making a comment about an economic concept called diminishing marginal utility - if you overuse something it becomes less useful.  But there is a second unspoken assumption here - that is people are unable or unwilling to think about the common good.   Hardin was a devotee of apocalyptic environmentalism.   He was a modern Malthusian and like the founder of the movement believed that overpopulation was caused in part by welfare policies.  His ideas ignored the effects of pricing and of regulation.  Both authors also ignored the human tendency for humans to adapt.  Hardin was not an economist but boy was his outlook dour. 

For me another contributor to this discussion was Elinor Ostrom, a University of Indiana economist, who thought a little more carefully about the issues on the commons and came to a very different conclusion - She  argued that there are plenty of ways to adjust behaviors without top down regulation.  She made that argument in a book called Governing the Commons, where she took Hardin’s paper and blew it out of the water with examples of alternative, less intrusive, regimes to reduce the problems of misallocation of resources.  For that, she won the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in Economics (the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences) in 2009.   

There is a good footnote on Ostrom who had to struggle to achieve her status.  When she applied to UCLAs Economics program they rejected her because she lacked Trig.   She eventually got on track, completed a doctorate  and ultimately married one of her doctoral professors. She and husband Vincent had a marvelous career challenging traditional notions of organization and centralization.  Both in her writing and in a couple of chances where I had the opportunity to hear her speak she had a special skill of consistently challenging established interpretations.

As I have thought about the Commons issues I think there is a reciprocal (basically the inverse of the original argument).   Hardin had no understanding of the possibility of spontaneous organization - as an “environmentalist” one would expect he had seen many examples of those things happening in nature - but he seems to have missed them all.  But if you step out of the apocalyptic bubble you realize that there is a strong case to be made for some inverse logic on Hardin’s argument.  Too much regulation can be even worse that too little.

My home state is ground zero for Apocalypticists.  California currently spends a quarter of a billion dollars in licensing more than 200 professions; many of those licenses are designed to protect us from imagined ill effects that are supposedly eliminated with state regulation.  The Mercatus Center at George Mason University recently ranked California 49th in terms of economic freedom and 50th in regulatory freedom, finding that “California not only taxes and regulates its economy more than most other states, but also aggressively interferes in the personal lives of its citizens.”  In addition to its vigilance on all sorts of professions California has lived with the Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) which simultaneously slows down the process of development and adds costs to almost every land decision.  Any wonder why the state’s housing is so expensive?   Is it a surprise that the state is a center for homelessness?   

Then there  is Prop 65, the annoying proposition authored by Tom Hayden, that requires disclosures about supposed cancer risks on a wide variety of real and imagined dangers.  There are some real perils with dangerous substances but the standards in Prop 65 are absurd.  For example, Disneyland has a Prop 65 warning which intones that they use substances that are cancer causing - one of those warnings is near a place to buy coffee.   The problem with the Prop 65 warnings is that this additional annoying disclosure may indeed reduce concern for really toxic substances.  If we know that some of those disclosures are downright silly, how likely are we to have trust in the real risks?  Was Hardin a new example of the boy who cried wolf?   Certainly Tom Hayden made a career on wolf calls.

Opponents of the Apocalyticists are often characterized as “deniers”.   If we want to be fair we should probably shoot back that the Apocalyticists are overly pessimistic about the human propensity to adapt.  Does that mean that I do not accept any form of regulation? That is an absurd question - but it suggests that my thinking says we should be equally skeptical of the efficacy of regulation as some are about the human ability to manage their own affairs.

THE BOOK.   I have had a couple of friends who have wondered whether Of Course It’s True, Except for a Couple of Lies, is part of the continuing Lucy and the football story.   For the past couple of years I have argued that it is about to get published.   Well, in the last few weeks, things have started, finally, to change.  First, I got solicited b one of the imprints of Simon and Schuster to have them publish the book.  I spent a couple of months talking to them but did not like the original proposal they offered me.   Then about 2 weeks ago, because of a note on Linked In, I got an inquiry from Forbes.   They have a division for first authors.  Early in the week, I had a discussion with their rep.   The Forbes imprint is not something that fit my needs, they seem to expect that first time authors need a ghost writer.  So I restarted the discussion with the S&S people and early in this week signed an agreement for them to publish the book.   That imprint makes has distribution through all the normal channels - Apple Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and a host of others in hard copy, paperback and E-Books.  The good news is that I think I can see the end of this line.  The bad news is that the process will take about 25 weeks from the time that the final manuscript is submitted.

 Where is "ceteris paribus" NOW that we need it?

Every discipline has a couple of key phrases, those secret passwords that practitioners invoke..  In economics there is "ceteris paribus".  It is a way to analyze a situation by looking at one variable and holding all other variables constant.  It is a great way to simplify a complex question.   But increasingly, those kinds of common courtesies are ignored.   Two (related) cases in point come to mind.   

The Attorney General approved a search warrant to obtain classified documents from the estate of our former president.   Whether or not that was an efficacious strategy to reduce the chance that Trump would protect classified documents appropriately, or even whether the former president should have such documents, is not at issue.   I personally thought the raid was a bit overly dramatic.   There is a law which stipulates the treatment of presidential records  (although interestingly it does not seem to have any sanctions for bad behavior) but after the raid Trump released personal information about the agents who executed the warrant.   I think that was bad behavior but there does not seem to be a specific federal statute which prevents someone from publicizing the names. In my mind that really does not matter.  As my dad used to say "just because you can, doesn't mean you should."   

The parallel story comes from a group called Ruth Sent Me, who thought it was their duty,when they did not agree with the recent decision on abortion (Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health) it was their duty to publicize the home addresses of several Supreme Court justices.   In this case, there is a federal statute that prohibits disclosure of the Justice's address and also in picketing in front of their residences.   But the Ruth Sent Me people thought it was ok because they really disagreed with the decision.    

In both cases, Trump's and Ruth Sent Me's, the actions were inappropriate, whether or not there is a specific law against such behavior.   But neither cared about holding other variables constant.   In both cases because they held strong beliefs about the search warrant and the draft decision, they could move everything all in.   Basic standards of decency in society will not work very well with that kind of idiocy.

We clearly live in times when reasonable social restraints are ignored by a significant fraction of society.  Andrew Mir, writing in the Summer Issue of City Journal, argues that as newspapers moved from an advertising model (where adds supported Journalism) to a subscriber model - the propensity to pander to the subscriber's whims increased significantly.   That may be part of the problem we face in the quest to have reasoned discussions - we have created echo chambers.

I had so many conversations over the last couple of weeks with friends who are genuinely grumpy about how strident their friends on the left or right are.   I have the great good fortune to have friends who believe Trump is the devil incarnate and others who believe that Trump had the election stolen from him.  I don't believe either meme; but those polarizations diminish our ability to try to figure out what is happening in a particular area.  And ultimately what is the right thing to do for the largest fraction of our fellow citizens.

UPDATE ON OCITEFACL   This week confirmed two new things.  First, my design editor has come up with a dandy cover for the book.   Victoria Vinton (www.coyotepressgraphics.com) sent me what I think is called a pre-print of the book.   That means all the text has been converted into a file which can be sent to my publisher.   My job this week was to go through the manuscript for the 1100th time and look for things which did not look right.  Yesterday I sent her back the PDF so she could make the edits.   At the same time she sent me proposals for the "wrap" the front cover and the side backing.   Victoria proposed using a brown highlight for the author's name.   Our daughter suggested that when people are asking for the book in a bookstore they could simply ask for the brown one.

Second, I found out yesterday that KDP (Kindle Direct Printing) rejects manuscripts with lots of photos.  From the start I have thought - even though the pictures in this book will be in black and white for the print edition  -  the images were an essential part of the project.   Does that mean my book will not be on Amazon - I think the answer is no, but the book may have to be fulfilled from my publisher (Ingram Spark) which prints books on demand.   In my current thinking the book will also be on Apple Books (and there I think we can have color photos).  During this interim I am exploring options to assure distribution through the channels.

So what happens next?   Two files have to be created for publication - one is in a format called E-PUB which is used for digital editions.   The second one is basically a PDF which goes to be used for the PRINT edition.   When the final edits are done I will then submit both files to my published, get ISBNs for both editions (that is the tracking number for all books) and then we will be off to the races.   That is an exciting prospect for me.

The ultimate sentence in the book is a quote from Huck Finn - “So there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it, and ain’t a-going to no more.”   But that may not be true.   One of the things which this project captured me with was a second story about my namesake (Jonathan Archer - 1823-1850 - who left New York to go to the gold fields in California.   Jonathan was there for less than a year and after a lot of research I am convinced he embarked on that arduous journey around the horn not just to hunt for gold.   His younger brother, Oliver Hazard Perry Archer (1825-1899) stayed in New York, expanded the family business in dry goods and into deliveries and eventually became a very wealthy person.   It turns out OHPA was part of the group that bounced Jay Gould out of the Erie Railroad in 1872.  There is some evidence that JA and OHPA were close.  But one brother chose to leave the homestead and the other did not; both were pursuing "happiness" in the Jeffersonian sense.   When everything is I am toying with the notion of doing a novel about their individual quests.   But first let's get this one out.

 Crystal Radios and Vin Scully

From about age 10 I was intrigued by technology.   One of the first devices I purchased was a Heathkit Crystal Radio.  It was a very simple device that you put together in about 3 minutes.  It used radio waves to get a signal and required no batteries.  It was underpowered and had no amplifier so it used earphones. I built that in Bakersfield and soon found that clear channels (those stations with a lot of wattage) were the only ones that came in.  I found two stations that were almost always available - one in LA and one in San Francisco.   On summer nights I could listen to the Dodgers and Vin Scully in bed.  That reinforced my interest in baseball.  I started to like the team in the 50s when the Dodgers went to the World Series in '52, '53. They finally won in 1955.   They came back in '56  to lose to the Yankees and then in '59 they did it again. That was the first series with a west coast team.   But I learned the phrase "wait until next year"even though the Dodgers won twice in the decade.

That crystal radio also informed me about the Our Lady of the Angels fire in 1958 in Chicago and the death of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens in 1959.  But the Dodger games were most important.

Scully was a fan of baseball but never was a "homer" announcer.  His call was always balanced and it often involved tons of baseball history that seemed to well up at the drop of a hat.  His call of Kirk Gibson's home run in the 1988 World Series is one that I have replayed many times.

Come forward several decades and I was offered the opportunity to meet Scully in his broadcast booth.  I had a friend who was doing some consulting for the O'Malley family and he invited me for a game and a chance to meet the voice I had first heard on the crystal radio.

As I entered the booth, I noticed a three ring binder with lots of notes.  As I watched his work, he would flip through what looked like unorganized pages and then come up with a classic story or quote.   When they got to a commercial break, I got to say hello and I told him about listening to him since the 50s but said I was a bit disappointed.   He asked why and I said I had always admired his skilled weaving of baseball facts and history into his game coverage.   He joked back - "Look I am over 70 years old, I can't remember everything!"  He was truly gracious.

Fast forward about another decade and I was at a dinner held by an underwriter at a national conference of University Chief Financial Officers.   I was sitting next to the CFO of one of the institutions I represented who had his 10 year old son with him.  We started talking about famous people we had met and when it came to be my turn I listed a bunch of politicians and other famous people and then I said and I had met Vin Scully.   The kid looked at me, ignoring the Presidents, Governors and other celebs and asked "You met Vin Scully?"  That really put the American fascination with celebrities in its proper place.   The book has a chapter "Fleeting Encounters with Fleeting Fame" which discusses my chances to meet some very famous people.

TWO DEVELOPMENTS ON "OF COURSE ITS TRUE EXCEPT FOR A COUPLE OF LIES.." - Last week I was approached by a representative of Archway Publishing, which is a division of Simon and Schuster.  They offered to help publish and distribute the book.   We had a couple of discussions but in the end I did not choose to use them.  I also had the chance to speak with the authors of a wonderful book - Mitka's Secret which is an inspiring story of a child who was forced into slavery by the Nazis - who are friends. The child emigrated to the US and became a successful person in spite of not being able to read and write.   (Buy the book it is an inspiring read!).  I learned a lot about promoting a book. 

Finally, my ACE Design Editor is about ready to have a draft of the completed and designed manuscript. There are a lot of unappreciated details in preparing a manuscript and I seem to have added complexity but adding asides and lots of pictures.  She commented that she has enjoyed the stories in the book - and that has slowed her down a bit.   As we say in Mexico - "Better right than fast."   The final steps are for me to review the manuscript and then to send it to my publisher. (Ingram Spark - which is a major printer and distributor of books on many platforms.)   I assume that the book will now be available on Amazon and Apple Books and through a couple of other sources in October.

 Charles Tiebout's Chickens

When I first started my doctoral work I discovered an economic geographer named Charles Tiebout.  In 1956 he wrote an article called the "Pure Theory of Local Expenditures" which argued for an economic consideration in where people live based on ambience.   If I want good schools for my kids. I will search out an area based on price of housing and how good the schools are.   It was one of those little gems that got me to think about many things differently.   

But this week brought two issues where I rethought about Tiebout's brilliance.   The Internal Revenue Service published data on the migration by AGI (adjusted gross income) of taxpayers among the various states.  It turns out that Tiebout was right.   In the 2017 Tax Act one provision to find revenue and to make the tax system more equitable (so the rich would actually pay more taxes than middle and lower income taxpayers) the State and Local Tax Deduction was limited to $10,000.   That means that a huge subsidy which formerly went from middle and lower income taxpayers in low tax states to very high income taxpayers in high tax states was limited.   It should have been long ago.

SO after the limit was adopted, what happened?  As the chart above clearly shows lots of high income taxpayers migrated from high tax to low tax states.   California alone lost almost $18 billion in AGI.  And as I have discussed before the California revenue system is heavily dependent on having lots of very high income taxpayers.   If those high income taxpayers disappear, there will be less revenue for the state to spend on all the public services a state offers.   

The argument for reinstating the unlimited deduction for state and local taxes is a bit odd.  Some wizards claim that the SLOT prevents "double taxation" (yup they actually make that claim!).   But the distributional effects of the deduction are clear - almost 90% of the value of the deduction (either before it was capped or after) go to very high income taxpayers who live in high tax states.   SLOT is like asking a truck driver in Idaho to help subsidize a venture capitalist in California.

The disappearance of wealthy taxpayers from the California tax roles is explained by Tiebout's hypothesis.  What is a mystery is another disappearance, no less cataclysmic.  We live in the village of Fair Oaks.  It is an odd community - mixes of incomes and backgrounds.   Our honorary mayor attains office by who can raise the most money for some civic activity.   Most importantly, the village is famous for its feral chickens.  Often when I am walking Indiana in the morning, and on a phone call, the chickens will be squawking and one of the people on the call will wonder where I am.   The village has numerous chicken memorabilia on shop walls.   We even have an annual chicken festival (along with the St. Patrick's Dinner in the Community Clubhouse and the Fair Oaks Theater Festival in the summer (where the plays are occasionally interrupted by chicken accompaniment) which helps to define our community.  Those might be called our "Tiebout amenities" and for us that is pretty good.

But about two months ago the chicken population around the square (across from the Stockman's Bar - a classic saloon) our birds began disappearing.  I've asked around and no one seems to know why the chickens  disappeared.  When I walk in the morning some people have argued that they vanished because of a) attacks of coyotes (yes you do occasionally see coyotes and deer, but not in the square); b) the homeless population down by the river, or c) or some rare form of avian influenza.  But no one believes any of that.  The two Guinea Hens, which were interlopers into the brood, still are in the park and seem to be fine.

What has not been discussed to this point is whether their disappearance can be explained by Tiebout.   Were our chickens very high income and did they move to Florida?   Did some other locality offer better amenities than a free place to roam and plenty of chicken feed?

OF COURSE IT's TRUE EXCEPT FOR A COUPLE OF LIES (PROGRESS REPORT)

The book is with one final editor who is called a design editor.  I searched for someone who had good experience in getting the design elements right. Those are things like the cover photo and the internal organization of the book.  A friend, who has published three books, recommended an editor in Arizona and   I spoke to her.  I  also looked at her website and thought it was a good match.   She will produce a final manuscript which will be print ready for both an ebook and a paperback.   There is one unresolved issue - one of my editors suggested that we divide the book into three volumes (each of about 150 pages) - one on family, one on life and one on ideas/beliefs.   In the end my design editor may recommend to put it all in one volume.  That would make marketing simpler and at the same time it could increase the utility of the volume especially for pressing flowers!