Egads! What a fool am I? The past few weeks have been a nightmare because in a moment of deranged lunacy I thought I would be efficient and multitask the release of my next two books. I’d be like an awesome conveyor belt of ruthless perfection. The two would come out one straight after the other and it would be plain sailing. Of course, it hasn’t worked out like that, all that has happened is I have been in a constant state of high anxiety and confusion. I would go to sleep and dream of my typeset proofs and then wake up at 4 am in a blind sweat because a whole section was missing. It took me another three whole hours before I realised that that section was in the other book.
Multi-tasking is all well and good if you are working on lots of clearly separate components. If all your components are nearly identical then it doesn’t take long before it looks like a kitten has been let loose in a bag of wool and has then invited a bunch of puppies to play alongside it.
The other thing that I didn’t take into account is that other people have lives that don’t actually orbit around mine. I’m really proud of this series and wanted it to be as good as I could make it. To that end I have been working with a range of other professionals; a cover designer, a copy editor, a typesetter and a proofreader. They are all incredibly talented and I’m going to write a proper piece about them later but for now, they all have their own deadlines, delays and basically, their own lives. One hiccup anywhere knocks everyone else off their timetable, and so the juggle of multi-tasking gets even trickier. Basically, the kitten and puppies called for reinforcements and a bunch of pygmy goats turned up trailing binder twine behind them.
So I am currently trying to sort out my bag of wool and twine, and promising that I will never EVER again try to release two books in close succession. The Fowey Walks looks like it will be ready to be published within the fortnight, the e-book will be first and then the paperback as soon as it returns from the printers. A fortnight after that the dog walking book will be ready.
A fortnight after that I will be lying on a sun-drenched shore.
And a fortnight after that I will be starting on the Roseland / Truro Walks. 🙂
