At long last, the first draft of the Ann Dvorak biography is complete! I finished it up over the weekend and submitted it to my publisher, the University Press of Kentucky on Monday.

Despite meeting this major milestone, we still have a ways to go. The manuscript will now go to a “Reader,” who will give input from a content standpoint and hopefully will not recommend too many changes.  In the meantime, I am getting all the photos in order and writing captions for them, along with properly formatting all the citations, compiling a bibliography, and drafting my list of acknowledgements, which after fifteen years of working on this project, includes a hell of a lot of people. In other words, I feel no sense of relief at this point! Plus, I keep finding out new information about her. Just last week, I made one last trip to the LA County Recorder’s office and discovered a bit of info that caused me to go back and alter one of the later chapters. The research really never ends.

The Reader should get their notes back to me by mid-November, and the final draft will go out by the end of the year. From there, it’s roughly nine months until actual publication, so we’re tentatively looking at a fall 2013 release.

It’s hard to believe that this will all be winding down soon, and that Ann’s story is finally on paper. I am tremendously proud I was able to write 100,000 words on Ann Dvorak without resorting to lengthy descriptions of film plots, and am pleased with how it turned out. I sure hope you all will agree!

More to come soon.