It’s been an interesting morning so far. I woke up at 3.30 am to the smell of smoke filling the house. Perth is currently surrounded by raging bushfires lit by some sick idiots, so I knew it was almost certainly just smoke from the distant fires being blown our way. Still, I had to check.
Got up, walked around the outside of the house in my underwear in the dark checking the whole building for any signs of fire or fire hazard. It was all okay, but I couldn’t get back to sleep. Tossed and turned for a couple hours, got up, had breakfast and checked email. Yay. There were a couple of work emails that had to be dealt with, both of which brought deadline awareness crashing back in on me.
Even though we haven’t actually inked the contract, I got an email from my editor at the SFBC asking when he might see the ms. for Best Short Novels. My first thought was GAH! My second was, isn’t this early? We hadn’t agreed on a delivery date. I was sleepy of course, so I checked. The date was “mid-January” and I looked back at last year and saw that I delivered on the 14th. I’ve sheepishly asked if I can send him the ms. on Monday, which will give me a chance to work out a running order for the stories and put the ms. together. I’ve got ten stories – everyone said yes, which is cool – so that should take a little while. Then I’ve just got to finalise contracts, payments and write the intro and story notes. A busy weekend beckons.
I then noticed an email from my agent, so I called him in New York to go over some details. There was contract stuff and the usual, but it also became pretty clear that there’s been stuff going back and forth – email and packages – that haven’t reached their destinations. Very weird. We talked about it, so it should all be fine, but it was odd.
I’ve also had a story sitting around that I need to re-read to get back to the author about for a while. I’m going to go over it at lunchtime, and then I need to fax New York. Yay!