Why This Is Hell

We reach that point of wrong tiredness - alert on going to bed, tired on waking up. The series of late (2 am) nights when insisting on early nights this time honest. The lying in to no real avail. And that followed by real early nights, which just produce a growing sense of even more tiredness.


Ride it out.

One of the albatrosses (albatri?) round my neck from the last two years is a project on Terry Pratchett. After saying yes to this (in the midst if the depression and OCD which peaked a year after moving here), I bought a new computer which wouldn't talk to the new one. And the lack of a discdrive on the new machine and a USB on the old made the old work difficult to transfer, especially as I then moved and it was almost impossible to get work. Exhaustion and a constant stream of unproductive coughs basically meant the Big Project was almost constantly cursed throughout - in the sense of what might go wrong will go wrong rather than the $%^&%&ing book, which was also a factor. I'd work hard on it, and then burn out for a couple of months or feel too ill to work out where I was on it and how to proceed. In the grand tradition of Douglas Adams, deadlines wooshed by.

The good news is An Unofficial Companion to the Novels of Terry Pratchett is now being copy-edited, we are working on illustrations, working on covers, and me learned friends are happy no great copyright has been infringed. We even have the tacit approval, at the very least good will, of a couple of people involved in the oeuvre. And have a title which is both more or less accurate (there's non-novel stuff in there too) and which does seem unduly official.

But now to get back to all the things I've neglected in the meantime.

Another deadline hit - a couple of months ago queries about the small amount of royalities over The Pocket Essential Philip K Dick led to the suggestion of a second edition to be released to mark the 25th anniversary of his death. This puts a quid or so on the price, adds a score or so new pages ... and if you're lucky another three thousand words (no, I can't work it out either).

What with little things like three deadlines to hit at the end of October, a date of November 15th seemed insanely optimistic, especially as I only hit two of them. The one I missed was postponed to, you guessed it, November 15, so the second edition got bumped, although I had at least edited the paper manuscript.

Fortunately, I did at least hear that the publisher likes my 80,000 words for the 31 October deadline for the Big Project, and the degree has been signed off. So we began the week on a relative high, and planned to spend all of Tuesday working on PKD. Monday I got to bed about 12.30, so an early night, but Tuesday I found that, like Sunday, it was all but impossible to get up. I woke about 7.15, the usual alarm time, and got up for a dump, and went back to bed. I snoozed to the radio alarm - not exactly sleeping, not exactly listening to the radio - and it was not until Woman's Hour that I finally properly roused myself ( ... )

Follows on from here

I've been spending much of the last few days, maybe the last few weeks, going in and out of the shade. There's been promise of sun, but not as much as I'd hoped for, and some cloud has always come along unexpectedly. It's not the sun's fault. It's not necessarily the cloud's fault.

I'd been resigned to shade for October, even thinking that this was for the best. I'm treading on delicate ground here - I've been talking too much about the weather, to the wrong people. No, not the wrong people, but I can't really talk to anyone about the weather. I was asked though, and even prevarication is too far.

And now, unexpectedly, the sun is going to come out, in November mind, and I'm not at sure that this is what I will want. I keep on thinking, skin cancer.