Thursday, July 5, 2012

Lots Happening

I am about to go to bed--it's a shade after 9 pm and there is something immensely reassuring about retiring when the day is still bright. It reminds me of being a kid. As I'm in my childhood room (the bed was long replaced with at least two new ones), the feeling is doubled. So far, I've seen my college friends, travelled home, gone to a conference in Glasgow--which was a feat given that tracks were washed away and my train cancelled, so I got in at 2am rather than 2 pm-and made it back home. The conference was great--I didn't hear a bad paper, I met lovely people and it made it easy to overlook my exhaustion. I was a tad antisocial on Saturday night, though, taking to my room with dinner, strawberries and the Guardian and Mirror, before having an early night. Since then, I've seen old college friends and celebrated my niece's birthday today. I met my high school friends for coffee this morning (hot chocolate and an apricot croissant for me), then went swimming, which exhausted me and I suspect that's one reason why I'm so tired now. So far, I've had some rest. But I received an email two hours ago from my editor. I need to do a few more revisions for my book, this time courtesy of the series editor. The good news is the feedback is really positive. The bad--or somewhat stressful and difficult--is that they want the book to go into production next week so I have to complete them remotely--and I only have my iPad with me. So I'm hoping I can borrow my brother's MacBook and get most of the work done this weekend. I was asked to submit a proposal for another book series this weekend--admittedly a shorter one, a monograph really--so best to keep on a tight schedule, or so I'm telling myself. It will be worth it if I get everything done--three books, a monograph and a few new essays should hold me in good stead if I can do it all over the next year or two. I just hope my tiredness abates soon. There are a lot of thing I have to do in the next 5 months or so before something really big arrives. Apologies if this entry appears as one large paragraph. For some reason blogger doesn't seem to respect the formatting when I try to publish.