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A year ago this week, on July 26, 2021, my book, “Čas proměn” (“Time of Changes”), arrived in bookstores across the Czech Republic and Slovakia. That moment capped a year and a half of furiously collecting notes and photos, reading old letters and diary entries, hitting up old friends for their own recollections, and, finally, organizing and writing the chapters, editing and re-editing the text, and working with my editor and translator to ensure the final Czech edition was faithful to the English draft. For several years – since starting this blog – I’d been dreaming of writing a book about the late-1980s and early-‘90s. I’m grateful that my Czech publisher, Albatros Media, and the pandemic lockdown somehow conspired to make that possible.

It was a labor of love but also an exercise in faith. As I was busy scribbling away, I couldn't possibly foresee what would happen once the book was published. My mind inevitably wandered to all the things, big and small, that could possibly go wrong once the book finally landed in the hands of readers. A year is a decent interval with which to take stock. For this birthday post, I thought it might be fun to revisit some of my early worries and look at how things actually turned out. At the end of this post, I update readers on developments that have happened since the book was published and progress on issuing an English-version of it.