[Previous entry: "Launch party"] [Next entry: "Last night" ]
Post-natal gloom
4 May 2006
For every upside, there is necessarily a down, or we would live in a two-dimensional world and that would be no fun.
Publication-day good; launch-party good; making these things happen as they ought - designing and printing flyers for the launch, posting books to people, glancing at Amazon and going "Ooh, look, a customer review already - and she loved it, five stars, that's fabby - oh, but it says 0 of 1 people found that review useful, and what on earth was that person's problem? Look, it's a five star review and it tells you a lot about the book; how is this not helpful, one way or the other, to buy or not to buy? What did the idiot want...?" - all of this is good.
Writing only three pages in these two days, this is not good. And this, of course, is the engine that drives the whole damn juggernaut that is my career, that is my life; and when the engine splutters, I get nervous. In mid-charge with the deadline looming, I get seriously anxious. And then I get depressed, I lose confidence, I lose concentration, I lose my way.
It's only two days, and the whole month is ahead of me; but I have to go to the dentist tomorrow morning (I'm British, of course my teeth are awful), and the funeral of an old friend on Friday; Saturday/Sunday I'm in Derby for a big SF/F/H event, so it's more like five or six days already where the focus is broken. I can't afford 'em, but I can't evade 'em. Where are those ivory towers, when you want them? Someone go slaughter me some elephants...
While we're waiting, here's a thing: in about forty-five minutes from now, at three seconds past two minutes past one o'clock this morning, it will be 01:02:03, 04/05/06. I intend to be clockwatching at that time. The man on the TV said that it wouldn't come around again for four hundred generations, which was a tediously unspecific number for such a very specific and number-based event - and I'm not entirely clear why it won't happen again in a hundred years' time; what am I missing here? - but whatever, I want to see the figures flick over.
© Chaz Brenchley 2006
Reproduced here by permission of Chaz Brenchley, who asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.