Newsletter 2004

Right off the bat, I want to say that things are going very well. We have signed a contract with New Society Publishers and plan to have the book in your hands by the end of next year. Given all the things that could have gone wrong in storing the materials for the book for the last twenty years we’ve had very few losses or disappointments.

It took a little while to get our computer equipment updated and the bugs worked out but we now have a networked office with up to date software that isn’t driving us nuts. The book was successfully converted from its 1983 floppy disks written in an extinct computer operating system, which saved us hundreds of hours of retyping. This was a big relief since it was looking like no one had a way of reading these disks.

After unpacking, culling and refiling the massive archives from our days as the American Homegrown Fuel Company, we have been hard at work pulling in the new information that we need to update the book. I attended two key conferences, one in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and one in California to get up to speed on the major players in developing many aspects of alcohol fuel today and made numerous contacts that are important to updating the book.

PUBLICATION
As you can tell we have really been uncovering great material for the book and its ballooned into a bit larger project that I originally envisioned, but that’s okay. After waiting 20 years to get this book out a few months longer to do it right seems fine. The current schedule with New Society is to get the book to them by March 31st 2004, to start the editing process and then the layout. The book will be in bookstores January 2005. We will be able to start promoting the book and doing a prepublication tour starting in the summer of 2004. The 25-city tour once published will start January 2005. The timing should be great. First of all there is usually a media vacuum following the election and inauguration, which we will step into. Using data from the Energy Information Agency, I have charted a pattern going back a few Republican administrations, that shows the price of fuel goes down just before the election and then ratchets sharply up by the following March. It would seem whatever election payola they make, the oil corporations recover with interest after the election. No matter who is elected, we predict that gas prices will rise after the election, and we will exploit this predictable gouging during the early months of our tour.

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