After a decade of tree planting, the relentless pace of the job instilled in me an ongoing urgency to move immediately to the next item on my to do list, a list I have on my phone notes any time I get inside a bobcat, a small tank-like piece of machinery on rubber treads that is more often referred to as a skidsteer machine. In construction we add pieces like a dirt bucket or a forklift attachment to the front end to move quickly move things around the site.

  A bobcat has two speeds. One is represented by the icon of a turtle and the other by a jackrabbit. I almost exclusively use the jackrabbit setting and prefer isometric controls that look like two computer game joysticks. You can spin the 8000-pound machine around on a dime - quite literally as the tracks counterrotate. As a non-profit organization we must watch our budgets carefully and a bobcat is an expensive piece of equipment to rent. We get it delivered on Friday afternoon and it is picked up again first thing on Monday and usually we only pay one day’s rental on the weekend. I love the weekend work as no one is at the site and I can go full tilt without having to wait for people to get out of my way.

  Working alone can cause its own issues and one rainy day I got too close to a deep ravine in our slippery bentonite mud and the machine began to slide sideways into the chasm. It skidded to a stop on loose rocks at the top of the steep incline, but water was flowing beneath me and was about release the rocks and send both the machine and I tumbling to the bottom of the ravine. I shut down, then eased out my phone to call someone to come to the site and use the loader and pull me to safety. Waiting for him to arrive and watching the mud washing away beneath me must have taken a year or two off my life.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Anther weekend I was excavating an old roman palisade on our set when a pointed log popped out of the loose dirt and shot right through the window of the cab. Safety glass shattered all over the floor, but I manage to avoid getting impaled. That was an expensive fix but it was not to be my last encounter with the safety glass on a bobcat door.

  My second encounter with the glass door was a bit more dangerous. I was moving a full pallet of paving stones down an incline when the load shifted forward, pulling the back of the machine off the ground before the forks dug into the road. The machine immediately stopped dead, but I did not. My forehead hit the front glass but this time it did not break. Instead, I punched the front window of the cab out in one complete piece, breaking it free from its rubber seal. After being told that was enough force to easily have broken my neck, I started to slow down a bit with those heavy loads.

  I’ve had to learn that same lesson with my Cor Series of books. With a full time job eating 60 hours a week and many other responsibilities I simply cannot write as much as I would like. That being said, I don’t give up, so hopefully my readers will understand and stick with me.