I spent the summer of 1976 working the saddle stitchery at The Kingsport Press in Tennessee – a brain-numbing task that required jostling enormous piles of paper into tidy stacks and feeding them into a contraption that bound them and sent them on their way. The first two weeks on the job, I acquired dozens of paper cuts: my hands felt as though they’d been dunked in acid. There was no air conditioning in the bowels of the plant where we worked, only a humongous fan; one afternoon I collapsed from heat prostration and had to limp home early. To the rest of the stitchery crew I was a patsy, a college kid destined for some white-collar job, ineligible to collect the six weeks of unemployment they got each winter when the Press slowed down.

 

The saddle stitchery constituted my only up-close and personal look at book-making. Never once did it occur to me that summer that I might write a book of my own someday — that the person waiting most anxiously on the other side of the presses would be myself.

 

But life has a way of surprising us. Thirty-six years later, my personal copies of Saving Gracie are en route from Wiley’s distribution plant in Virginia and scheduled to arrive sometime Tuesday, courtesy of UPS. The book goes on sale next week. I have to admit, this moment feels awfully sweet.

 

Four years have passed since I began researching puppy mills, and to say the learning curve was daunting is an understatement. But for every person who has said to me: “Puppy mills? I can’t read that” there is someone else who has read a galley of the book and knows that yes, you can. The positive early feedback has been gratifying.

I’ve worked with a wonderful team, from my agent, Jeff Kleinman; to my editors, Pam Mourouzis and Beth Adelman; to Wiley’s marketing and publicity staff, Malati Chavali and Adrienne Fontaine; and Ken Howell at Newman Communications. In Great Falls, Pam Lemelin and Chris Miller put together this boffo website.

 

Now the real work — selling the book – begins. No paper cuts or suffocating heat involved, just working it to get out the word.

 I feel more than up to it.