Journal post or editing … journal post or editing? Tough call. This is, of course, shamelessly meta as I am writing said journal post, therefore … hmm, as a Tristram Shandy digression, I know I have mentioned Laurent Binet’s remarkable novel of the Heydrich assissination, HHhH. Let me plug it again. Put in mind of it by his very self-aware technique. The novelist is very much in the novel.

This novelist will be only briefly in the journal today, though. Deadlines are real. And A Certain Person in production department advised yesterday that she’s off tomorrow for a long Asian holiday which means, of course, that she can’t possibly enjoy herself unless she knows Your Author is fiercely aware of said deadline before she flies off.

There may be a pattern here … some will recall a marketing director of yesterbook sending me to Winnipeg in dead of winter, to do (among other things) a photo shoot outdoors in way sub-zero, under a snow-laden tree, without my coat, as the photographer thought it would ‘look really out there if you are just in shirtsleeves, eh?’ … marketing person, meanwhile, was on beaches of Costa del Sol, though she did kindly promise to check emails to see if I was alive.

Teasing aside (for the nonce), deadlines at this stage are legit … publishers queue up printers and proofreaders and apparently Penguin and Roc are (for some reason) doing other books this spring. This means that if a manuscript backs up too much, others do, too. I have ‘good soldier’ in my genetic coding, and hate to be the cause of those problems. I also have ‘cynical author’ in me, and I would rather it be me moving fast, than someone else, who might make mistakes. A writer with only his or her book to worry about can focus more. Someone at the publisher has a lot going on across a lot of titles.

I’ve been furnishing proof of progress. Here’s the latest. Yes, I could be faking these, but I ain’t…