5 Days? Where Does the Time Go?

A Mr. J. Strell of Mineola commented that it’s been five days since I last posted. He’s right and I just have to admit to being a wee bit preoccupied both at home and at work.At DC, I’ve been hip-deep in stats, proofing hundreds of pages of material for some collections that haven’t been announced yet. However, it’s all complicated in that I need to track where each page is. In some cases,, our Archive Services folk no longer have film to access. That means I need to find a vendor to reconstruct story pages or covers, which means each page has to be tracked. All of this atop the normal looking at color proofs, design pages, planning for 2006, writing marketing copy and so on. Fills the hours, let me tell you.Atop all of this, we’ve also crammed in Prelude to Infinite Crisis, a 96-page collection that required a lot of attention as we needed to select panels, pages and whole stories that help the casual reader as well as the diehard fan understand the seeds that have been planted through many titles over the last few years. Our designer, Louis Prandi, came through to make it look wonderful and Ivan Cohen helped me tweak the connective text so it reads pretty well. I did, though, lose a $5 bet that it could be researched, written, assembled, designed, proofread and out the door in two weeks. It took three. But it will look good and I understand we’re receiving respectable orders so it’ll be worthwhile.Meantime, things at home continue to keep me busy as I try and pick up slack from things Deb can’t do as her foot continues to heal. Sunday, which could have been writing wonderful things for the blog or even for a paying publisher, was spent instead visiting my mother as she made a quick northern visit for a bat mitzvah.Monday night was our monthly RTM meeting and we had a light agenda, moving money from pocket A to pocket B to make things balance and then hearing a long awaiting response from the administration to a report from the RTM regarding state reimbursements for school building projects (while it sounds boring, this was a big dollars deal and no one was watching the process which cost us money so the RTM dug into the whys and wherefores). Fortunately, the meeting ended early so I could join my fellow Democrats at the local bar so I could get to know my colleagues a wee bit better.Last night was a fun night at the Gym, running errands and doing stuff around the house.Not getting done are things like the spec non-fiction proposal, the spec fiction proposal, a spec media tie-in proposal that is quickly gelling in my mind, research on a potential book for Rosen, my non-fiction YA publisher and organizing space in my home office. A three day weekend will allow me to tackle some of the above, plus do some shopping for daughter who is learning what it means to live on one’s own for the summer. She’s moved into her sophomore dorm but is entirely alone for the moment and since it has a kitchen, needs supplies so she may cook for herself. A few other odds and ends, it turns out, are missing from her set up (the dorm has no wastebasket for example), so no doubt Ill be shopping and sending a care package.And how have you all been?