I just put the files away. There’s a folder for each of the challenges that the book brought. I had forgotten so much of the details. Here's the list, and memories of each:

"Audio book" (Paradyme Productions and the ever-smiling Jake. I loved those recording sessions.) 

Europe marketing (The Book Depository was an effort to find a way to sell the book in Europe because Amazon's shipping charges were ridiculous. It failed. ) 

Kennys (meeting Desi was a joy and now I am a member of his infamous Book Club! Will I ever get paid?  Who knows, but it doesn't really matter. He has spread the book to corners of the globe that I will never know about).


Madison Public Library (ah yes, I missed that book reading because of Val's surgery) 
Christine Keleney,
Go Daddy,
E-book (misc),
Bookbaby,
Kindle Direct Publishing,
Weebly,
Maureen Cutajar,
Smashwords,
Create Space,
Irish presses,
Paperback,
Account info,
Shipped.

​I was trying to describe to Tim last night how I felt about the end of 2015. It’s not just the end of a year. It’s also the end of innocence, health innocence, with Val’s cancer. It also brings the end of ‘Abbey Girls’. There’s a certain sadness now that it is completely finished. Writing that sentence, a huge wave of nostalgia floods over me. It was this time of year, seven or eight years ago, that it all began. I wrote a bunch of letters to old friends, a substitute for the December birthdays that we used to celebrate amongst the climbers with a big party in early December at the cabin. Everybody stayed overnight, and so there would be hilarity, bodies everywhere, huge meals, warmth and friendship and love. Missing all of that, I wrote letters to each of those birthday folks. Sitting, composing those letters, I would daydream about letters in my past. I remembered my first mailbox here at the cabin: a post stuck in an old milk churn, that Guy filled with cement and put his initials in it while still wet. It’s still there today, 31 years later. The mailbox is a little rumpled, smashed by school kids on their first evening of freedom. Still, it continues to serve me well.
 
I remember writing to Val about getting letters at boarding school. That was the first ‘Abbey Girls’ letter, and her response had me weeping with laughter as I realized how differently we saw things. We continued to write letters about the Abbey over the next few years. At one point one of us must have suggested putting them together in a book. And we did.
 
As if watching a series of images on a screen, I remember assembling the letters into a semi-coherent narrative, collating and revising, removing redundancy. We chose a title. We scoured old photo albums and boxes at home in Ireland, for images and memorabilia. These were scanned by both of us with greater or lesser success, and images sent by Dropbox or a mailed memory stick. There was a long drive to Columbus Ohio where Val was teaching, to agree on fonts and sizes and lay-out – pages spread over the king sized bed and a check list of things to be accomplished before I drove back. The husbands read a first draft and liked it. Guy suggested an introductory chapter which Val wrote. Amazingly, neither of us changed things that the other wrote, just occasionally suggested that the ‘tome’ could be altered slightly. I loved writing my last letter as much as my first. We agreed on a cover image, a back page, blurb, a photo of us. I spent hours in the Prairie Du Sac Library uploading files to Smashwords. How many programs did I learn? How many places I sought help when my frustration levels maxed out. But suddenly there was an e-book. What a fabulous achievement that was! We were elated. Next came the hassles with Amazon’s Create Space, finding Christine (meetings in coffee shops in Mount Horeb and New Glarus), and finally having a beautiful manuscript that could be sent to a real printing company. We became Laurence Gate Press, with a logo. When the boxes arrived, those beautiful, physical manifestations of our labors were like birthing a baby. I notified everyone for whom I had an e-mail address, and sending out orders was a joy. The letters to Irish publishers was an experience. Best of all, though, I found Desi Kenny. As Val recovered from breaking her foot in Mexico last January, we learned how to work with Weebly and make a website. She created bookmarks. After that there was the pure fun of reading for the audio book at Paradyme in February inbetween snow plow noise. Val came to do her part in June, and we had a completed audio book! But then cancer happened, and the next phase of working with ACX was delayed. Finally I had time to upload the files, but was sent back to the recording studios for two missing words: “The End”. We got the final notification that the audio book was released while I was in Canada with Val last week. I announced it on Facebook, updated the Weebly website, and closed the files.
 
It has been a remarkable personal journey. I have come to know myself better. It has brought me contentment, peace, and a sense of accomplishment that never came with research, teaching, publishing scientific articles, writing grants. I am immensely proud of both of us. As Tim reminds me: unless it is written down, nobody will know or remember.

​You’ll hardly believe it, but I was back at Paradyme Productions yesterday recording the missing bit of our book. And what might that have been?  “The End”. Honestly, those two words were what was missing according to the Amazon ACX folks. Grand. It took me less than a minute to record. Still, it was fun being back in the studio. It reminded me of the days I spent there last February recording my own letters, as well as the days that Val spent in June doing hers. Jake is a great guy as well as a brilliant recording engineer.
 
Val was meant to have joined me in February to record her part. But she broke her foot – at an exercise class at Club Med in Mexico! Winter is not a great time to travel from Montreal to Madison, via Chicago O’Hare, on crutches. So we postponed her part. We had a much more enjoyable time together in June, with sunshine and leisure, especially as she came for a week and the actual recording took only two days.
 
I honestly thought that after I uploaded the 60+ mp3 files in August that we were done. But ACX wouldn’t accept the über high quality mono format. That meant getting a new set of mono files from Jake, and uploading them instead. I waited for 3 weeks before I checked that everything was OK with ACX. Thanksgiving intervened. Then I must have missed their e-mail telling me that I needed those two fateful words.  Hopefully this is the last little piece of the puzzle and we can have an audio book (and the whole ‘Abbey Girls’ project) completed by Christmas, 2015. 

I’ve just been published in the Guardian Weekly!
 
The entry tells it all. Here’s the link:
 
http://www.theguardian.com/global/2015/nov/17/good-to-meet-you-mary-behan
​