So … where we at?

Good question.  We had a baby daughter two months ago, so things are a little chaotic.  Wonderful, but chaotic.  Or just chaotic round the edges.

Am managing to get to the office four days a week (am usually up at the Science Museum on Wednesdays).  But the days can start early (our son tends to get up about 6-ish) and I don’t seem to be watching too many of my Lovefilm dvds in the evenings, as I’m trying to catch up with everything else.  Much like how every other parent of young kids lives their lives.

But, honestly, I’m not complaining.  There’s lots of work around at the moment – most of it as a result of some pitches I did at the start of the year.  The Junior Science stories are about to be broadcast (I’m writing this on 11/11/11) on R4, I’ve just completed a long-ish piece and submitted it to a quarterly magazine, the website is more or less up-to-date and I can get on with the next thing.

The next thing currently consists of – a treatment for the adaptation of one of my novels.  Basically, two producers have just optioned my last novel and we (they) are about to try and raise some development money.  In principle, that will be enough cash to pay a writer (hopefully, me) to write sufficient drafts to make it work.  Then they’d take that script out to try and raise interest in the project proper.

Then it’s back to my novel, which really does need a bit of a push.  As it is, I’ll have to go right back to the start and plough my way through it, if only to remind myself where the hell I am with it.  Which, knowing me, will involve about 3,000 teeny edits.  Which will take me about a week to type up.

I have enough work to keep me busy well into next year.  And the next novel (ie novel number 5) is already researched and developed to some degreee.  But I can’t help but want to spend the odd day on that hare-brained animation project.  Or that peculiar book that my artist-pal, Anne and I keep talking about.  I’m much better than I was at time-management – at least the concept of it.  I tell myself ‘This is what you’re going to be doing for the next four / six/eight weeks … etc’.  I’m pretty good at focussing on what’s in front of me.  The problem is, things always slide.  As in by an extra week.  Or two.  Or the revisions which you thought you’d finished come back, and you’ve got an extra day or two’s work to squeeze in.  So you end up getting to the next thing two weeks late.  Which, I suppose, is kind of the opposite of how Time Management is meant to work.

Anyway, I’ve got to start Tweeting.  1. Because people keep telling me to.  2. Because it’s the obvious way of publicising the residency at the Science Museum.  I’m not much of a Woody Allen fan but there’s a great scene in Bullets over Broadway when John Cussack who plays a writer sticks his head out of the window and shouts, ‘I’m a whore!’ into the night sky.  I have moments like that myself.  But I could just sit here in my office on the south coast and wait for the world to disover my particular genius, or I could cut out all that false modesty and get myself out and about.