If you allow a blog to go dark, as I’ve done over the past year and a bit, people tend to assume the worst. My wife, Kathleen, has been flooded with expressions of sympathy: “Can I have his old Volvo?” “Did he leave anything in a size 38?” “Would he have minded if I asked you out?”

Imagine the puzzled look on people’s faces when she replies, “You’d better ask him. He’s standing right here!”

Yes, my friend, I am very much alive, and so is my book project. Sure, there are days when I think the book will kill me, but that’s probably true of any author who has to climb very tall trees to acquire the eagle quills he or she is using to write the manuscript.

Why did I stop posting? Because, much as I enjoy our time together, I discovered that I can either write a blog or write a book. If you haven’t heard from me in a while, that’s a good thing — it means the book is coming along. And when I do post, like today? Well, you should probably just pat me on the fanny and offer a few words of encouragement, such as “You get back in your cage RIGHT NOW, BUSTER! And don’t come out until you’ve produced a towering, swash-buckling thrill of a book whose fully realized characters leap off the page!”

But as long as I’m off my leash for a second, let me give you a quick update.

The project has morphed quite a bit. For one thing, it’s no longer a story collection. I set out to write short stories for the simple reason that I didn’t feel ready to write a novel. Then I got wise to the fact that you never feel ready to write a novel — any more than you feel ready to drink a big bottle of Pine-Sol. If you’re going to do it, you just have to do it. And so my story collection has become a novel (a comic novel, because of the kind of guy I am). The working title remains His Effing Nibs.

I’m sorry to say I had to fire my two main characters. Lord Timothy Dexter and Jonathan Plummer, real-life eighteenth-century figures who fascinated me, were too obscure to justify the amount of control they insisted on having over the plot. I replaced them with fictional characters who do as I tell them. And here is how their story is unfolding:

In a New England seaport in 1789, Samuel Poore, an itinerant wordsmith, applies for the job of Poet Laureate to the principled but unpopular Lord Benjamin Barley (aka His Effing Nibs). Samuel, much degraded by his years as an indentured servant, hopes the fancy title will launch him into polite society. But the job is not what it seems. His real assignment, he learns, is to teach reading and writing to runaway slaves — dozens of whom have found sanctuary on Barley’s estate. Samuel is torn between his longing for respectability and his students’ (and his employer’s) quest for justice. The resolution comes only after an abduction, a rescue attempt, and a guest appearance by a celebrity slaveholder.

I include, at no extra charge, subplots concerning animal rights, a tug-o-war over the future of America’s enslaved population, and the writing of a sex manual called The Pleasures of the Marital Bed by an author who is entirely lacking in firsthand knowledge.

Now well into the first draft, I’m glad I chose the novel over the short stories, and really glad I held off on the Pine-Sol. Thanks for checking in. The next time you hear from me, I just might have something to show you.