Myth, the Universe, and Everything

In my copyediting work, I've been reading a lot of short pieces lately on how to succeed in life, and a lot of them mention having an attitude of thanks and gratitude and appreciation for the good things in life. It can be really easy to get bogged down in the negative -- the amount of work still undone, housework piling up, current events, or historical events that are traditionally celebrated despite our revised understandings of the context. Thanksgiving can be a problematic holiday for that last reason, and I appreciate people like Rob Schmidt over at Newspaper Rock who point out why.

On the other hand, setting aside a day to be thankful, and honoring the day for what it has become, rather than for its revisionist history, is a good thing. I have so much in life to be thankful for that it's nice for a reminder to focus on those things, rather than the daily grind.

...that my current set of deadlines is eating my life.

I still exist. I'm just... busy.

I'll be back one of these days. Definitely after Monday, since that's when the current batch of stuff is due.

It's amazing how deadlines can go zooming by when you, say, have the flu. It's also amazing how, even if you've been feeling discontented and unsettled, something about being well and having your body back to nearly normal makes it quite easy to be cheerful.

Before I got the flu, I admit, I was getting bogged down with the deadlines I've agreed to on various projects. Very luckily, I'd scheduled this week as a buffer week, hoping to get caught up on some projects that had been slipping--mainly the very exciting project I'm working on for Gale, working with prestigious authors on autobiographical essays to be published in the Contemporary Authors and Something about the Author series. The work on my end involves scanning, copyediting, being in contact with the writers--all pretty exciting work! Now that I'm finally feeling myself again, I made up the two deadlines that the flu made impossible and started catching up on the autobiography project by editing a wonderful short essay by Jonathan Baumbach. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy copyediting at this level--it's very subtle, because it's so very important for the authors' words and style to be their own on this project. For the most part, just getting to tinker with well-put-together words is a delight, and I'm definitely enjoying the work.

In part, I think, I'm enjoying things because I'm feeling so much healthier. The stress has lessened because everything had to get pushed back when I was ill. And now that I've accepted that, I'm moving on, doing the work, and moving ahead, getting back to where I need to be. Albone commented on one of my earlier posts that I'm ever the optimist on this blog. It's nice I manage to present myself that way here, because it's not always easy to capture a rosy outlook and apply it to my life. (As banana_pants pointed out, the Onion says they've released a drug to "help" perpetually cheery people. I've never quite needed that!) So I'm full of gratitude right now that for the last few days, things have gone well, I'm feeling healthier, I was able to return to karate for at least one class, and life is, momentarily, as it should be.

What's one good thing that happened in your day?

This is about the time of year when it occurs to me that I actually need to start marking time in 2009. In part, this is because our library has Sunday hours for the school year, so we volunteer to work shifts on Sundays, usually one a month or so, right around now. To do this well, it requires actually having some idea about how the next year is going to work--or at least making sure you mark down in advance what dates it is you've volunteered for.

When I was at MythCon, I just barely missed being able to purchase a Ted Nasmith calendar for 2009. (Nasmith is known for his Tolkien art, which is, in my opinion, fantastic.) They'd sold out on the first day, which is no real surprise, and it is not yet available in stores. Strike out on that one. Yesterday, however, I discovered that Lindsay Archer (whom I've raved about numerous times) has a calendar available at her DeviantArt site. Eureka! Now I can actually plan ahead for those deadlines I hope to have in 2009.

For those of you with writing deadlines: how do you keep track of them? I started with a planner and ended up finding that a wall calendar, where I can see a month at a shot, ended up working better for me. Any ingenious organizational strategies out there I haven't contemplated?

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So, if I could do the fun graphics manipulation, I would do something like this:

( Read more... )

But since I don't have the technology nor the knowledge, I'll leave you with a quote from the immortal Neil Gaiman:

"Big Deadline is still a thing of madness. The other two little deadlines at its feet chivvy and squeak and grunt and bare their sharp little teeth. Several smaller deadlines howl impatiently from the bushes outside."

And a nice slogan from Douglas Adams:

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."