Back On My Head
OK, I'm out of excuses. I'm well again, the house is as picked-up as it's going to get until just before Passover, and I have several hard deadlines giving me the stink-eye. Over the next four weeks, I will:
1) Write copy and a bio and generally collect useful information so that Gavin Grant of Big Mouth House can successfully publish and promote my forthcoming late-middle-grade historical novel Freedom Maze so that it gets lots of reviews and readers and earns its considerable keep.
2) Write an introduction to a best of Lucy Sussex collection of short stories, to be called Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies, and published by Ticonderoga Publications later this year. The best part of this will be squeeing (intelligently, I hope) over her series of slightly creepy doll stories, most of which are new to me, and which I love immoderately. There's nobody who does the things with history and fiction and how the past haunts the present and imagination informs fact quite like Lucy, and that's a fact. Huh. I think I can use that.
3) Clean up and post the minutes for the all-day Annual Meeting of the IAF Executive Board earlier this month, which is a perfectly easy task, except for the bits where I was talking and not taking notes and the parts where three people were talking excitedly at once (happily, I assure you) and I couldn't tell what was going on.
4) Pull together a passably professional course description and book list for my course this summer so Hollins can order the books (and I'll be having a question to ask you Children's Lit folk out there about teachable books, so stay tuned)
5) Finish a story I started early last summer, which I should have done by now, but I lost traction on in a big way, and now it's almost due, OMG, and I need time to rewrite it at least twice before sending it in.
Can I do all that? Sure I can. I better. Somebody will be disappointed if I don't. And I'll do just about anything to keep Somebody from being disappointed.
Here I go.
1) Write copy and a bio and generally collect useful information so that Gavin Grant of Big Mouth House can successfully publish and promote my forthcoming late-middle-grade historical novel Freedom Maze so that it gets lots of reviews and readers and earns its considerable keep.
2) Write an introduction to a best of Lucy Sussex collection of short stories, to be called Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies, and published by Ticonderoga Publications later this year. The best part of this will be squeeing (intelligently, I hope) over her series of slightly creepy doll stories, most of which are new to me, and which I love immoderately. There's nobody who does the things with history and fiction and how the past haunts the present and imagination informs fact quite like Lucy, and that's a fact. Huh. I think I can use that.
3) Clean up and post the minutes for the all-day Annual Meeting of the IAF Executive Board earlier this month, which is a perfectly easy task, except for the bits where I was talking and not taking notes and the parts where three people were talking excitedly at once (happily, I assure you) and I couldn't tell what was going on.
4) Pull together a passably professional course description and book list for my course this summer so Hollins can order the books (and I'll be having a question to ask you Children's Lit folk out there about teachable books, so stay tuned)
5) Finish a story I started early last summer, which I should have done by now, but I lost traction on in a big way, and now it's almost due, OMG, and I need time to rewrite it at least twice before sending it in.
Can I do all that? Sure I can. I better. Somebody will be disappointed if I don't. And I'll do just about anything to keep Somebody from being disappointed.
Here I go.