My Plate Is Piled High
My plate is piled high.
I'm not complaining. The work I need to do is work I love, work I have chosen, and work that keeps me and mine warm and well-fed in these tough times. If anything, I should be as grateful as anybody else doing honest work for a living.
But there's still an awful lot of this honest work to be done.
The buffer, that crumple-zone that protects me from the sharp edges of happenstance and crappinpants, is only about three weeks deep. I need to add two weeks of strips to that, which means doing two weeks of work in one week. Twice. No problem. I've done that before.
The next book we put into print will be Emperor Pius Dei, and the bonus story promises to be the longest one yet. I have fourteen pages to fill. Dan Willis, who co-wrote "Mad Scientist's Residence" (the bonus story from Resident Mad Scientist) just emailed me a rough outline for "The Man Who Would Not Be King," so we're making progress. But I still need to illustrate 14 pages of book, which is the approximate equivalent of six weeks of strips.
Complicating matters, I just engaged the services of a fellow writer and personal trainer, Sandra Wickham, who has been enthusiastically mucking about with my diet and exercise. She's quite good at what she does, and I really do want to take my health and fitness up a notch, and hey, it's not like I'm ever too busy to eat, am I? Might as well eat right. And exercise. Six days a week.
The last strips of Massively Parallel went live on November 28th, and the next online book, Force Multiplication, launched on the 29th. I'm already three weeks into it, and I've got a great outline for it. I know where it fits in the grand mega-arc of the Schlockiverse, and I'm happy to say that it will be a much, much shorter book than Massively Parallel was. But I have to keep working on it while I crank out this bonus story, so the term "massively parallel" still fits on me (even though I'm just a serial task-swapper, like most mortals.)
Adding it up, it looks like I need to crank out twelve weeks of comics during the next four weeks. That's three weeks per week. That's an awful lot. And somewhere in there I need to celebrate Christmas, eat right, exercise, and love my family lots and lots every day.
My plate is piled high.
And my cup runneth over. I'm not complaining.