One way to make yourself feel overwhelmed is to take on too many projects; the other is to take on too many responsibilities; the best way is to do the same thing at the same time. We missed our blogpost for yesterday; file it under (a) “you need to work a little bit harder than you want to” and (b) “best laid plans sometimes need to be set aside” again, as I ended up (a) trying to finish a bit of documentation, succeeding, but leaving work an hour late, and (b) having an hour and a half of conversations at the local coffeehouse, with only thirty minutes work time. Add to this a weekend mostly spent trying to solve my wife’s Audible problem and working on small press stuff, and I am so far behind on my writing.
The good news is, I got the first of my puzzles done for my proposed Cinnamon Frost puzzle book. The bad news is, that’s about eight projects deep on the stack of things I should be working on now. Hm, is that an accurate estimate? There’s the revised CLOCKWORK opener, the SPECTRAL IRON revision, the HEX CODE revision, the THIRTY DAYS LATER publishing tasks, edits for the 24HCD Survival Guide, first draft of PHANTOM SILVER, first draft of BOT NET first draft, and the rough draft of FAERY NUMBERS, plus the math groundwork for FAERY NUMBERS, not to mention a whole host of other small writing tasks we’ll lump into one, plus blogging – so I’m working on a pointer to something twelve items deep in my stack.
A proper computer scientist would be appalled, as might my editor for CLOCKWORK (it’s progressing, I promise! but it’s got to be awesome). But the good news is that I got a start on a wholly new project, seizing the inspiration before it evaporated.
And that’s how you catch lightning in a bottle. That and lots of caffeine.
-the Centaur
