Yes, I have been slaving away on the new book (ask Carol) and although I spent a couple days (okay, so maybe it was weeks?) "Lost in the Wilderness" as the content and context keep growing like over-yeasted bread rising in an oven (see the iconic Three Stooges beer-brewing clip "WE ALL PUT THE YEAST IN!") but now things have calmed down a bit and I'm riding the horse once again instead of being trampled by it.

Problem is that I keep thinking of things and stories and episodes that should really be in this book, even though they stray quite a ways from the original, Lotus-focused theme. So now the book is more eclectic, and, along with all the Lotus stuff (and there are a lot of great stories from both a historical and personal experience point-of-view), there's now some more Ferrari- and Alfa-centric stuff about how people started giving me cars I could never dream of affording to drive, race and write stories about and also an entire chapter about me and the Reventlow Scarabs. That one means a lot to me as I always thought the original Reventlow Scarabs were the most beautiful and evocative racing cars I ever saw. They won the very first sports car race I ever saw at Meadowdale (see pix below) and achieved stunning success followed by the dismal, draining failure of their day-late-and-dollar-short F1 adventure. I think I'm the only human being outside of the original driving crew (star-crossed Lance Reventlow himself and the noble, hard-working and forever underrated Chuck Daigh) to get to drive both one of the original Scarab sports cars and both the front-engined and the rear-engined Scarab F1 cars.

It's a great story full of memorable cars and characters, and I figured I ought to make room for it. And it's my book project after all...isn't it?

BELOW: The Scarab as it originally appeared, Me in the 003 Scarab at Roebling Road & me in the front-engined F1 Scarab.

OTHER STUFF:

The long-overdue reprint of TOLY'S GHOST should arrive next week (finally, and not the printers fault) and it looks like we're going to have to go back to press AGAIN (for the 13th time!) for THE LAST OPEN ROAD! Good news indeed, even though my hand starts to shake every time I have to write a check these days...).

Last thing as we have to dash to Old Geezer Exercise Way-Too-Early Class in a few minutes: A BICYCLING MILESTONE! As shown on the un-faked images below, the odometer on my bike silently clicked past 9000 miles last week. No shit. Now that's 4-plus years of pumping and pedaling, but I'm still real proud of it. Although I've done most of it on our lovely local bike path, whereas, if I'd really thought and conjured on it, I coulda pedaled from New York to LA and back three times. Or from where the road ends at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska (site of North America's biggest oil fields and not much else) all the way down to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America. No shit. But I kinda like our bike path better, what with all the deers, bucks and does and the river and the trees & wildflowers and all. And it's just a mile from our freakin' house! Nice!